Web Devout tidings

An IE7 CSS test suite

Chris Wilson, group program manager for the Internet Explorer platform team at Microsoft, recently referred in his blog to an e-mail conversation we had when my standards support resource was fairly new and undeveloped. He wrote in his blog post:

Most unfortunately, there are no more details on many of the problems David encountered, or test cases that my team can test against. When I contacted David a year or so ago, he couldn’t give me any further details, so I’m not even sure how we make progress against that site. Solid test cases we can access and bug reporting would help

Back when he first contacted me, I admit that my tables were quite vague and not nearly as useful as I believe they are today. I have since done a lot of work trying to make my wording in the support descriptions accurate and informative enough to easily fashion test cases from them. But I also recognize that having such test cases readily available would definitely help.

Therefore, I have developed a (non-exhaustive) set of tests for many of the most common IE7 CSS bugs described in my support tables. The mass test case is made to be easy to read and the issues are documented in the source.

Some CSS issues, such as with the cursor property, obviously can’t fit into this format very easily, so I left them out of the tests. But overall, I think this test case covers most of the important issues of immediate concern. Once Internet Explorer supports :before and :after (in some version after IE7), there will be many more features to test.

I will send this test suite to Chris Wilson and continue to participate through the Internet Explorer feedback system.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 20th, 2006 at 05:44 UTC and is filed under Browsers, Web Devout. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “An IE7 CSS test suite”

  1. Jeff Fohl Says:

    August 21st, 2006 at 02:58 UTC

    David -

    This is very interesting. I really like this approach in that it gives a quick visual indicator of whether something is working properly or not. The Acid2 test, which is sort of a binary test – either it works or it doesn’t – doesn’t provide a lot of information in the output of the test as to what is exactly working and what is not. Of course, you are focusing specifically on things that you consider to be bugs in IE7 only – so perhaps I am comparing apples to oranges here.

    This test seems to suggest that you see 30 bugs currently in the rendering engine of IE7b3. How do you define a bug? Does a CSS specification that is not supported count as a bug, or only incorrect implemenations of specifications?

    Posted using Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.6 on Windows.

  2. David Hammond Says:

    August 21st, 2006 at 03:04 UTC

    Most of the issues are incorrect implementations of CSS features, but some are features that are missing altogether, such as outline and :before. I only point out such issues once per feature, and I don’t count features that rely on missing features. For instance, the missing support for :before is indicated, but I don’t bother to test counters and positioning of generated content because at this stage it would be redundant.

    Posted using Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.6 on Linux.