Ben Allfree :: Painless Programming

We’ve been doing some research into using Selenium, which is an acceptance testing tool. It ties into web browsers and simulates keyboard strokes and mouse activity, then it validates that the state of the web page is changes as expected under the conditions.

Writing testable user interfaces requires a slightly different approach to design. Fortunately, sticking with standards-complaint HTML and semantic CSS goes a long way toward making something that is both testable and visually appealing.

Another benefit of testing at the browser level is that you can test for standards-compliant markup. In our own research, we’ve found that standards-complaint markup such as XHTML 1.0 yields maximum cross-browser compatibility. You still have to contend with JavaScript compatibility across all browsers, but generally the pages are rendered correctly in all browsers.