THIS IS NOW OUTDATED AND ARCHIVED

The evolution of the Working Group meant that the work has moved to Publication Manifests. See the PubManifest repository for this...

Testing the Web Publication Manifest algorithm details

This is a proof-of-concept implementation, in JavaScript using node.js, of the conversion of a Web Publication Manifest into an implementation of the WebIDL interface. More specifically, The library produces a WebPublicationManifest JavaScript class instance whose getter functions implement the attributes defined in WebIDL.

The implementation is fairly complete. The attribute values are checked, if applicable, when setting them, and the warning/error results are collected in a separate simple logger. (No exception is raised when an error is met but, rather, the values are not set in the final result. Doing that instead of some draconian error handling is closer to the Web style.)

The core of the implementation are the modules in the lib folder, and there is a top level main.js serving as a CLI test driver. There are some rudimentary tests in the tests folder, but a more systematic set of tests are obviously necessary as a future work. The whole environment runs in node.js, and it should be possible to install it locally via npm (see the package.json for dependencies).

When used as a library, the main entry point is lib/process.js/obtain_manifest() with one argument: the DOM of the primary entry page (using the JSDOM library). This function returns an object {canonical_manifest, logger}, which can be used as follows:

• wpm implements the WebIDL interface, meaning that all entries defined in WebIDL are accessible as attributes like, for example, wpm.name. In case no value has been set in the manifest, the value of undefined is returned. In the case of returned values expected as arrays (e.g., authors), invalid entries (e.g., a Person without a name) are ignored from the returned value; this means the returned array may be empty.
• canonical_manifest is the intermediary, canonical manifest format (as a JavaScript object, not a string), as defined in the WPUB document.
• logger has the warnings and errors attributes to get an array of relevant strings; it also has convenience methods for printing those: warnings_toString, errors_toString, toString, each returning a string.

It is all a first run, I am sure there are bugs or missing features:-)

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Ivan Herman (ivan@w3.org)