A Reintroduction to HTML

I started a series of posts earlier this year on basic HTML. Well I decided to turn that into a presentation I gave internally today and I wanted to provide that externally as well.

Enjoy

A reintroduction to HTML – Taking SWAT back to the beginning

Ways to improve the reliability and efficiency of SWAT/UI tests (Part 3 – The truth behing AssertElementDoesNotExist)

Were now up to part 3, and I am really thinking about ditching the numbers, I think this list is going to get very long very…

But on to part 3 and this will be a short one.  AssertElementDoesNotExist was one of the first commands created for SWAT.  Unfortunately many people do not know some of the dirty and dark secrets of this command.

HTML Part 2 (Containers)

For part 2 we are going to look at a few different container types and tables.

First some container types you may experience:

• DIV
• SPAN
• P

Each of these are common containers you may come across.  They each have some common similar attributes:

• InnerHTML – This is the area between the open and close tag.
  • Example: <DIV>This is the innerHTML </div>
• InnerHTML is ALL of the HTML between the tags, including pieces of other tags
  • Example:<DIV><SPAN>This is some text</SPAN></DIV>
    • The innerHTML of the div is “<SPAN>This is some text</SPAN>”
    • The innerHTML of the span is “This is some text”
• Id
• Name
• Class

Starting from the beginning, a re-introduction to HTML

To start teaching web UI automation techniques using any DOM based (SWAT, Selenium, WATIN) automation tools I think we all need to take a step back and start by looking at HTML.  A great reference for HTML is the W3Schools tutorial here.

Wikipedia definition of HTML (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Html)

HTML, which stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. It provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists etc as well as for links, quotes, and other items. It allows images and objects to be embedded and can be used to create interactive forms. It is written in the form ofHTML elements consisting of “tags” surrounded by angle brackets within the web page content. It can include or can load; scripts in languages such as JavaScript which affect the behavior of HTML processors like Web browsers; and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to define the appearance and layout of text and other material. The W3C, maintainer of both HTML and CSS standards, encourages the use of CSS over explicit presentational markup.^[1]

Hyper Text Markup Language(HTML)is the encoding scheme used to create and format a web document.A user need not be a expert programmer to make use of HTML for creating hypertext documents that can be put on the internet.

Put more clearly, HTML is the language of the Web. Every web page is created using HTML. Below you will find an example of some very simple HTML

Great post on attributes of an automated test

Just came across this from Adam Goucher and think its worth a read:

http://adam.goucher.ca/?p=1181

He really sums up where you need to start with any automated test.  As I mentioned before, one of the biggest revelations I have had with automation over the past few weeks is the need to get back to the basics.  Posts like this really help us get there.