it's a ‹body/›building blog

Automatic Visual Testing of Web Applications

July 25 2008

The topic of automatic visual testing returns to me like a boomerang.

There are a lot of tools for automatic testing of the back-end (unit tests, integration tests, etc...) in every programming language you can possibly imagine. They even have the whole methodology of Test Driven Development. For testing the front-end we have Selenium or Ruby based Watir, but still all they test is the functionality of the web application or a website, and not the visual look of it.

I'd like a tool, that will automagically tell me, if my web application still looks how it was intended to look. I need to know if my CSS refactoring didn't break the whole thing somewhere on a page I don't even look at, when I'm manually clicking.

Is it really possible to automate visual testing? And if it is, will it be useful?

my inline-block "O RLY?" moment

May 26 2008

Last week Chris Coyier blogged about those CSS “Ah-ha!” moments, when you realise how cool and powerful stylesheets are. On the same day I had one of my CSS "O RLY?" moments. This one was all about inline-block value of the display property.

Semantic Mark-up of Article Page

May 9 2008

Last time we where discussing semantic mark-up of blog's home page. With all this knowledge we can smoothly move forward and mark up the page with full article contents and visitors' comments.

The process will be very similar to one we used for home page, so if you haven't read previous article, please do it as it will be really helpful. If you already been there don't hesitate and read on :)

Semantic Mark-up of the Home Page

April 28 2008

When you start to build a website and you have a general idea about content it will contain, you very often move on to designing the visual part of it and later this visualisation gets marked up into (X)HTML styled with CSS. It's not a bad way to do it, but in such process in most cases mark-up gets focused much more on the visual part of the design than on semantic meaning of the content.

That's why the process of building a website should be split into clear steps. I'm just testing such iteration approach while creating this blog and I'll document every step in further posts. Marking up the home page is the first one to go.

Arriving at jogger.pl

April 25 2008

General concept of this blog was growing in my mind since months and when I finally decided to start writing it I found it really hard to find a place in the web that will give me everything I wanted...