Re: call for more ert tests

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen writes:

 > If I decide that shr should render <li> differently than I
 > originally thought it should, I'm very happy that I don't have a
 > slew of unit tests for the HTML rendering.  Because then I'm done
 > after changing the <li> rendering, and I don't have to touch up
 > however many ert tests that this affects.

This is a terrible example, of course, because modern specs for HTML
emphasize that rendering isn't defined by the HTML spec.  Pixel-
perfect rendering isn't an invariant if you're only interested in
ensuring that the semantic content is conveyed, and so shouldn't be
tested.  OTOH, I think it's quite reasonable to ask that in
"reasonably wide" windows, text not be rendered outside of the window
boundaries, and I would be happy to have a test for that.  YMMV.

 > None of us have unlimited time to spend on this stuff, and what
 > doesn't help us doesn't help us, no matter what the current
 > orthodoxies surrounding testing says.

Ah, "orthodoxy".  The current orthodoxies (or some of them, anyway)
are reasonable disciplines for novice developers.  It's unfortunate
that many teachers engrave them in stone, but that's not what Eli is
suggesting.