The last few weeks I’ve been doing a lot of CSS writing. While this doesn’t necessarily fall under my job role, on many projects I end up doing it because I’m the “designer”…therefore I am put in charge of implementing style. Whatever. Turns out I kind of like it, so I let it pass, but we need more developers who understand CSS like the back of their hand. We can also use more designers who understand and write CSS as well. If you’re either, send me an email (jevnin at thoughtworks.com)…we’re hiring.
Anyway, what I really came here to say is that the world absolutely, positively needs a tool that is dedicated to CSS testing. I do enough switching between browsers, browser versions, and operating systems to make one sick. In my opinion, this is a giant gaping hole in the process. If our users can’t see our content as we intend, the web-based tools we build will not be useful, if at all usable.
Of course, the browser companies could do their part to follow the standards. Some, for the most part, already do. Others blatantly defy the rules. Nonetheless, since these fellows don’t play well together, we (the builders of the web sites and web apps) are in need of a good testing tool in this area. I’ve Googled for some solutions, but really they all either look crappy or they charge up the wazoo.
There’s obviously a huge need for this tool. Where’s the open source solution?
3 responses to “CSS Testing”
Hello Josh, this magical tool you seek, I see as well. I’ve been fighting the CSS battle daily and am really sick of it.
So if you’ve got some ideas, maybe this can turn into something?
About the only thing I’ve thought to be possible is to have the the mockups that my designers give me and run some sort of image differencing on the mocks vs the browser renderings.
A very simplistic approach indeed plus I lack this graphics programming knowledge needed for such a tool
If I weren’t pretty committed to staying in the Detroit area, I might be tempted.
That being said, there are a few add-ons for FireFox that I’ve found make things a little easier for working with css:
Firebug (lets you view the calculated css for a document, turn rules on/off, and add new styles without having to reload the document — admittedly this one is a little better for debugging css than testing it):
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843
IE Tab (gives you a way to view pages using IE’s rendering engine within a FireFox tab with the click of a button — a much quicker method of testing with IE than swapping back and forth between windows for FireFox and IE):
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1419
i’ve always wondered why we can’t just sit down, identify the places where the standards differ, and write a perl script that translates between them. so basically, you’d code for firefox, run the perl script, and it would write the code that you need to compensate for the things that don’t work in IE and spit out an updated file.
i have never actually begun this process, and i know there are probably more issues than i think off of the top of my head because i don’t do much fancy stuff, but it seems so ridiculously simple a concept that i’m sure i must be missing some huge hitch, and i just haven’t thought of it.
i guess i should just try it so that i can speak with more authority on the matter.
do you think it’s doomed to failure?