Build System Planning

The CSS2.1 build scripts have a lot of problems. They kinda need a rehaul. This page is for planning the rehaul. We start by cataloging the problems…

• filter HTMLonly and XMLonly tests during test generation
• handle .htaccess merging
• don't munge SGML comments or whitespace
• preserve DOCTYPEs across conversion
• handle structured directories
• Figure out how to build a cross 2.1 / 3 test suite that doesn't require hosting multiple copies on w3.org or has some other way of letting us identify common test results in the results system?

Changes to the build system should make its parts easier to use for other purposes, and to generally improve its usefulness to testers and test writers.

• incremental builds
• live copy of test suite
• break-downable list of all filenames
• search on test metadata
• sync support files (and reftest supports)

Minor improvements that don't affect architecture.

• generate HTML comments corresponding to requirements
• have build scripts add title to rel=“help” links
• add UTF-8 charset metatags to HTML files
• build zip file