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Boosted by andreu@andreubotella.com ("Andreu Botella :verified_enby:"):
marypcbuk@hachyderm.io ("Mary Branscombe") wrote:
A couple of years ago I started writing about evolving web standards and @RickByers suggested I should cover WPT: the web platform tests project most people working with the web have a vague idea about that has evolved into an engine of interoperability. Since then I've been tracking down the right people.
I talked to @robin, Mike Smith, James Graham, Simon Pieters, Philippe Le Hégaret and @boazsender about the history of WPT: why we needed it, who did and didn't think that shared tests were important for the web platform and how they stubbornly got it started from some uncertain beginnings.
I talked to @bkardell & @Meyerweb about the old days, how for half the lifetime of the web there wasn't a comprehensive test suite, why it's so important, as well as how it feeds into projects like Interop; @foolip and Kadir Topal about how it feeds into Baseline and dashboards.
James and Simon talked me through how WPT works, integration challenges and how much work older test suites were; @patrickbrosset reminded me how Microsoft and Google helped jumpstart test262 and Philip explained how WPT changed Chromium culture when Google joined in.
Web standards keep evolving so I talked to @littledan.dev, @technosophos @andreu @joyeecheung about processes: standards written in code > written in words.
I also touch on funding and who contributes to WPT and how. I lived through these developments; it was fun looking back to make more sense of things like ACID tests, Test the Web Forward and the importance of Opera but I learned a LOT. I hadn't realised before how much WPT helped bring the once-fighting WHATWG and W3C communities together.
WPT is a cooperative and collaborative effort that doesn't pit one browser against another but to test interoperability; it's not what it's for but you can use the test results to look at implementation cadence to see which browsers consistently get features sooner and which get them later.
The web is, as Douglas Adams might have said, *really big* and it needs a big test suite. I needed a big article to write about WPT; where it came from, how much work it takes and how much it's delivered. You might not have heard of it but it's hard to imagine the modern web without it
https://thenewstack.io/how-a-shared-test-suite-fixed-the-webs-biggest-problems/
