Facebook announces Ringmark mobile browser test suite

Ringmark in the Chrome Beta for Android Facebook has announced the availability of Ringmark, its new mobile browser test suite. Douglas Purdy, the company's Director of Developer Relations, says that Ringmark is intended to help developers understand which mobile browsers will support the functionality required by their apps.

The tests in the web-based suite are based on a set of specifications that were identified and prioritised by its developers "as being important for modern mobile applications". These specifications are then arranged into "rings" of features, with each higher ring containing more challenging tests.

There are currently three rings; the first ring, Ring 0, includes 83 tests, while the second has more than 300. If any of the tests in a ring are not completed successfully, the tests in the next ring will not be run. The Ringmark developers note that the project is not yet considered to be finished and that more rings will be added to the initial three over time.

Created by developers at Facebook and Bocoup, the web-based suite will be made available as open source "in the coming weeks". The Ringmark developers then plan to donate it to the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) recently announced Core Mobile Web Platform Community Group, of which Facebook and Bocoup are members.

The new Community Group for creating mobile browser standards and testing tools aims to bring together developers, equipment manufacturers, browser vendors and network operators, as well as other members of the industry to, it says, agree on core features that developers can depend on. Participants in the group include software vendors such as Adobe, Microsoft and Mozilla, chip makers such as Intel, Qualcomm, NVIDIA and Texas Instruments, carriers such as Orange, Telefonica, and Vodafone, and phone makers such as Samsung, HTC, Nokia, Huawei, ZTE, Sony and ST-Ericsson.

Further information about Ringmark can be found on the project's About page and in a Bocoup blog post.

See also:

• Mozilla and Facebook working together to make mobile browser support more predictable, a posting on hacks.mozilla.org.
  
• Community-Prioritized Web Standards, a blog post by Brendan Eich.

(crve)