We currently have a tool called reftest, which compares the rendering of HTML testcases against reference files - usually written in HTML, but they could just be a container document enclosing a PNG.
It would be really cool if reftest were a Tinderbox test, with the tinderbox building Firefox with the particular options reftest needs. We could then enhance it to also run various HTML and CSS testsuites on the web (e.g. Hixie's) and also do Save Page As... on various popular websites and add those files into the mix.
If we could get to a position where our latest rendering engine were being automatically and regularly checked against thousands of testcases and real world pages, we'd be immediately be able to see the effect on the web of any changes we made. We'd be much better placed to catch regressions.
Anyone feel like making this happen?
Something a little different and non-Mozilla-related for the weekend; a short essay examining when you can abort a foetus, and the connection or otherwise with whether it is a person. It comes with a handy diagrammatic representation of the current state of the law in the UK.
Comments welcomed.
The mozilla.feedback newsgroup, which takes the output of Hendrix, now has 23,000 posts in it, and acquires more at the rate of hundreds per day. While we don't have the resources to follow up each one individually, I think we might find some interesting things by doing analysis on the aggregate data. This would give us some idea of trends.
Perl (and, I'm sure, other languages) has appropriate modules for getting the data - Net:NNTP to download them, and News::Archive to persist them to disk. One could then read them in, filter them by product (there's a header for that) and do one word, two word and three word frequency analysis to try and extract some common themes.
Anyone feel like this would be a fun project for an hour or two? :-)
I'm back, and working through the backlog of Mozilla-related stuff. While I was away, I managed to find time to write a few things which I hope to share with you over the coming days.
The neck skin is now basically back to normal, although none of my hair has regrown as yet :-)