Where we are with W3C Browser Automation Specification
Mon 05 Nov 2012
Last week there was a very large gathering for the W3C in Lyon, France. The TPAC conference gets together all working groups and allows them to share their specifications with everyone else and demo implementations if there are some complete.
The Browser Automation Working group was there too to discuss moving the current specification further. We had 2 days of meetings and below is a break down of the topics we discussed.
Day One - Minutes
On the first day we discussed the following
- Interoperability (the spec is very loose on this, but interoperability is vital)
- Internationalised input (do we need the IME methods from OSS WebDriver? Our current solution is very desktop-centric)
- Possibly adding an ARIA locator
- Handling the shadow DOM
- Do we use strings or numbers for status codes (there are arguments either way)
- Identifying areas of the WebDriver spec that better belong elsewhere
Day Two - Minutes
Discussion of open issues in the spec:
- Screenshots
- Non-HTML content (SVG, XML, XHTML, canvas, text/plain)
- Publishing a new working draft
- Start work on the conformance tests
The main items that came from the work this week are:
- Browser Vendors are to provide a shim that understands the HTTP JSON Wire Protocol. This allows browser vendors to use the best transport mechanism they want but gives implementors of the local end library to use the same approach for all browsers ensuring interoperability between browsers.
- We are going to be changing error codes to error strings. Using strings allows us to pass back a meaningful error without it needing to be translated from an integer to allow easier development of libraries for local ends.
- We are going to be adding the ability to get a screenshot of a specific element on the page.
- We have started work on the conformance tests for the specification. The first tests actually found a bug in the Selenium WebDriver implementation which is great.
We will be cleaning up a few sections and hopefully be pushing the next version of the specification in the next few weeks. If you have thoughts or you spot any errors please let us know!
