QA/Firefox3/TestPlan/Microformats

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Feature Microformats Test Plan

Overview

This feature will make it easier for extension authors to detect and parse microformat data on a web page. It will also allow extension authors and web page authors to create new microformat definitions and register them with Firefox for the duration of that Firefox Session. It will work with the Web Application content handling to change the way htat detected microformats will be acted upon by third party applications. As a result, some of this code will overlap into the the testcases for the Web Application Content Handling

Specifically there are five types of Microformats that will be supported "out of the box":

• adr -- Used to specify addresses
• hCard -- Used to encode digital business cards using VCARD style format
• hCalendar -- Used to encode events using ICALENDAR style format
• geo -- Used to encode location specific data (like coordinates)
• tag -- Used to encode a tag for something, just an attribute-value pair

Since websites and extension authors can create their own Microformat defnitions, they must also test our own customized Microformat definitions.

Scope of planned testing

We plan to test this with a combination of Litmus test cases and automated methods.

Automated Testing

• Use Mochitest to run automated test cases that will query and for and ensure that all elements of each "default" Microformat definitions are correctly parsed and interpretted
• Use Mochitest for limit testing on the "default" Microformat definitions
• Use Mochitest for automating a user-defined Microformat definition

Litmus Testing

• Test default Microformat definitions that are malformed to ensure that proper error messages are displayed
• Test Microformat definitions that are in the wild and are in use on public web sites
  • Quick test on each OS to see that each data type can launch third party applications/web services with meaningful data for the hCard, hCalendar, and Geo types (adr is essentially a part of hCard, and tag has no third party handler).
• Test Microformat preferences in the preference panel
• Test the Microformat UI for ease of use and discoverability

Further Testing

• Create a Microformat handling extension that detects a custom Microformat and registers this Microformat definition with Firefox on startup.
• Since this new API is primarily for extension developers, it would make sense to create a test extension with it to test the usability/completeness of the API as well.
• This testing might get timeboxed.

Platform and Configurations

Many of the Microformats contain data that are best acted upon by third party applications and/or Web Applications. These data types and their popular applications have been folded into the matrix for Web Content Handling and exhaustive testing of data type handling will be tested under that purview. However, a few specific Microformat handling cases for default definition Microformats will be done under our Litmus test section above.

Schedule/milestones

Tests and code functionality are currently scheduled for Beta 1.

References

• Reference Overview Page