Incorrect "tip" in text transform tests

[frivoal]

As discussed in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1498148#c40, a bunch of text transform tests give the suggestion to copy and paste the result of the transform to in some unicode tool to check if the correct characters have been produced. However, text-transform is not supposed to affect copy and paste, so that's wrong, and that "tip" should be removed. Maybe also the tests that cannot be evaluated without relying on that tip, if any, should be rewritten.

[dpino]

Besides the copy & paste trick, the tip also states that:

"To identify the characters where differences occur, in order to report problem characters,either mouse over to reveal a tooltip"

For this reason many tests have a title attribute in an span element. However, at least in the browsers I tested (Firefox and Chrome), when I hover a glyph or character the title's tooltip doesn't show up.

Thus, should this part of the tip be also removed, or should it be fixed somehow?

[dpino]

It seems the tooltip indeed shows up when opening the test in a browser using the web-platform-test tooling (wpt serve). However, tooltips don't show up when launching a test using Firefox's mach wpt. So this seems to be an issue on Firefox's tooling I suspect.

[r12a]

There are two reasons i think we should keep the tip:

1. The suggestion to copy into a tool for identification is not expected to rerun the test, it's simply a way of finding out what characters are in the code. So the advice remains valid.

2. I develop these tests for use in the i18n test suite and then copy them to WPT. I try very hard to make tests work both for people who use WPT and in the i18n context, so that it's easy to track changes between the two storage locations, and identify substantive changes that need to be applied to the other location. I would strongly prefer that people do not tidy up non-susbtantive aspects of the tests in WPT, because if you do change 138 files there, and the files come out of synch, it can become it difficult to assess what changes need to be back-ported to the i18n test suite files. I don't think the notes in question are problematic (and in fact, originally they were visible to the tester, but i made them into comments to better follow the WPT expectations), and they are there to help people who run the tests manually in the i18n context. I therefore would prefer not to fiddle with the files.

It's hard enough to find the time at the moment to port the tests we have to the WPT environment (we still have probably several hundred waiting to be copied over), so i'd like to avoid things that will increase the difficulty. (Of course, substantive errors or problems are good to change. I'm just talking about unnecessary edits.)

[frivoal]

Thanks for the feedback. With this explanation, I see how the note is supposed to mean that once you have identified the problematic characters visually, you can use copy/paste and the listed tools to find their name, which makes reporting the problem clearer. That is indeed not wrong, but I found the note's phrasing misleading, as it seemed to me that it said that you could use copy/paste + these tools to identify the differences if you were unsure just by looking at them, which would not be true. Also, I was not aware that you were running a parallel copy of the tests, I assumed that the i18n site was in some form working off the same repository, so I did not consider problems with synchronisation. With all of that in mind, I think we can revert the change, but I would suggest rephrasing/clarifying the note to avoid other people being confused the same way. Maybe something like this:

…

Tip: To identify the characters where differences have been observed, in order to report problem characters, either mouse over to reveal a tooltip, or copy and paste the sequence into a tool such as <a href='http://r12a.github.io/uniview/' target='_blank'>UniView</a> or the <a href='http://r12a.github.io/apps/conversion/' target='_blank'>Unicode Conversion Tool</a>. Note that text-transforms is not preserved during copy-and-paste, so this should only be used for find the name of characters of interest, not as a substitute for visually comparing them.

[dpino]

I've been absent for the last two weeks so I wasn't able to reply earlier. Sorry about that.

I'm fine with reverting the changes or updating the tooltip message as @frivoal suggested. If you prefer the latter I can prepare a new PR.

[frivoal]

@r12a: see previous comment. I'd prefer updating the message as suggested above. Is that OK from the point of view of the i18n group, and of keeping things in sync?

[r12a]

Gentlemen, i no longer have the bandwidth needed to maintain parity between the WPT tests and the i18n test suite tests, so please feel free to make whatever changes you'd like the tests in the WPT repo. If at some future point i work on the tests in the i18n repo, i'll consider adding something along the lines of @frivoal's suggestion (thank you).