On 3/29/06, Gabriel Wicke <lists(a)wikidev.net> wrote:
My task at hand was to fix bugs in the current parser,
not working on a
replacement for it. The change above makes MediaWiki-generated (x)html
slightly less invalid, so i consider it an improvement overall.
It is, I agree with you on that.
What I have an issue with is that the test case I'm talking about (and
there might be others) is supposed to test whether the parser can
balance (X)HTML tags, which it can't (with or without your fix), even
though you've fixed some cases where the parser will generate output
containing unbalanced tags with a hack the core issue has still not
been solved, which is okey, we have a lot of unsolved core issues. But
what's worse is that the test case that tested whether the parser
could balance tags now passes although the parser still can't balance
tags (because your fix only fixes a very small subset of unbalanced
tags that the parser might generate).
Thus what I'm asking you to do is go over the test cases that were
solved with your fix(es) and add new ones that do fail if you didn't
solve the real problem they were supposed to test for (e.g. if it
tested whether the parser can balance tags and you only fixed
<i><b></i></b> or some other things like that), because having a
test
suite that passes when we still have some core parsing problems
doesn't mean that we have a decent parser, it means that the test
suite has become worthless.