django.test.TestCase and subclasses don’t warn you if the fixtures specified in their fixtures list don’t exist — double check naming if your tests mysteriously start failing or run suspiciously quickly

Yesterday we at Vísar tested the neat SVG image element hack on all the devices and browsers we had at hand to see how it performed and whether or not it was viable to use in production.

Given this markup:

<svg>
    <image xlink:href="http://example.com/the-image.svg" src="http://example.com/the-image.png" width="100" height="100" />
</svg>

Here’s a table of what each browser+device downloaded:

Note that the Kindle downloaded the PNG despite having pretty good SVG support. Tests carried out locally by watching the Django request logs.

At first, this looked perfect — browsers which supported SVG only downloaded the SVG (apart from IE 10), and other browsers just got the PNG. However, it seems that SVG image elements can’t be sized with percentages, meaning our flexible layouts were never going to work. I tried to fix it using the dreaded viewBox and user units (as I have previously to compensate for percentage-based units not being allowed in SVG paths), but that just led to everything being completely the wrong size.

So, (unless someone can show me how to fix this), whilst we think this is a great hack, it’s not going to work out for our product due to the weirdness of SVG sizing limitations.

when-changed is a really nice little #python script for running a command whenever any file(s) change /by johj

Requesting a nonexistent page whilst testing on old IE incorrectly blames the user with message “files on this webpage require a program that you don’t have installed” #ux #ui

The windows mobile device I’m testing on is at 0% battery, isn’t charging and powers down every 30 secs. Problem is, it then starts up again. Best put it out of it’s misery.

Testing websites on old windows mobile devices is an… experience.

Connecting to WiFi gave me the option of connecting to “The Internet” or “Work” (?).

On form submit using the software keyboard, I get a dialog warning me about the certificate, with the options “yes” and “no” but no question. Turns out the software keyboard was hiding “Do you want to proceed?”

Now I’m finally in the site, there’s no support for label, so those nice big touch targets I made are mostly useless. Also, there’s no text wrapping.

#exeterweb conversation summaries:

Doing acceptance #testing in a different language to your application is philosophically a good idea.

When syndicating data, the quality can be used to determine the canonical version even if the separate versions don't link to each other (example: photographer takes RAWs, gives TIFF to client, RAW is proof of provenance) #POSSE

Not drinking tea and not having cream on cream teas reduces the day to day hassle, stress and confusion of living in Devon by approximately 90%.

Anyone know a good way of integration testing how a web app communicates with twitter? I want to make my testing better so I can test syndication, but I’m not entirely sure how to go about it.