Simon Willison’s Weblog

Atom autodiscovery test suite

20th December 2003

Mark Pilgrim has released the Atom autodiscovery test suite, comprising 148 tests:

When we say that Atom is going to have better specs, validators, and conformance tests than anything you’ve ever seen before, this is what we’re talking about.

Mark’s atomautodiscovery.py (based on Python’s sgmllib module) passes all of the tests using a surprisingly small amount of actual code. The neatest thing about the test suite is that each test provides a <link rel="next" ... attribute pointing to the next test in the suite. atomautodiscovery.py uses these links in its test() function to run through every test in the suite, meaning that new tests can be added without modifying the test execution code.