Searching for media

The web-platform-tests project is a massive suite of tests (over one million in total) which verify that software (mostly web browsers) correctly implement web technologies. It’s as important as it is ambitious: the health of the web depends on a plurality of interoperable implementations. Although Bocoup has been contributing to the web-platform-tests, or “WPT,” for […]

Continue Reading Lessons Learned from a Year of Testing the Web Platform

Inconsistencies across browser implementations have caused web authors and users headaches since the dawn of time (or at least Jan 1, 1970), but nowhere has that pain been felt more acutely than in the realm of language and regional internationalization and localization. We have an inclusion gap on the web. Web authoring tools structurally exclude […]

Continue Reading Widening the Web with ECMA-402: Our work on the Internationalization Extension to JavaScript

Today, we are excited to announce our partnership with JoyLabz, which began in 2017 and has centered around the development of a new game console called GameBender. JoyLabz, developers of Makey Makey and Drawdio, and founded by former Lifelong Kindergarten researcher Jay Silver, has been an incredible partner. We are excited to finally share the […]

Continue Reading Glitching Scratch 3.0 on an Embedded Web Game Console

Last year we formed a team focused on using the growing number of new web APIs to build multimedia applications that push the edge of the web platform. Our main work in this area over the last 2 years has been with the wonderful team behind Scratch at MIT’s Lifelong Kindergarten Group (LLK), and with […]

Continue Reading Porting Scratch from Flash to JavaScript: Performance, Interoperability and Extensions

The web-platform-tests project (WPT) houses over a million tests written to ensure our browsers provide a consistent experience of the web. WPT predates most of today’s popular JavaScript testing frameworks, so it implements one of its own: testharness.js. In December of 2017, I offered to extend testharness.js with a new feature. No one expected this […]

Continue Reading The Eight-Month Omelette: adding a feature to one million conformance tests

On June 13, operations screeched to a halt here at Bocoup. The phones were ringing, but we didn’t answer them. Packages delivered to our door went ignored. Chicken eggs piled up. All hands were on keyboards, collaborating on the web-platform-tests project. We’ve been participating in WPT for years, largely in collaboration with the Chromium, Gecko […]

Continue Reading WPT Workshop Report

I’m excited to share that our technical partnerships team has developed a deeper focus on graphics and interactive application programming, a focus area which we are affectionately calling Gaia. As of today, Technical Partnerships is now Graphics and Interactive Applications (Gaia for short). In many ways this is a reflection of what this team has […]

Continue Reading Introducing Gaia

Regular readers of this blog are no strangers to free and open source software. From Firefox to Brave, Node.js to OpenSSL, and jQuery to React (finally), today’s web developer can’t get very far at all without relying on “FOSS.” However, there is a huge difference between consuming FOSS and maintaining FOSS. The latter task is […]

Continue Reading So, You’d Like to Start an Open Source Project

Back in 2012, on a day that is now ensconced in company lore, the IRC user tkellen joined the channel for the Bocoup-maintained F/OSS project, Grunt. The stranger immediately began to vent on all the shortcomings he saw in the task runner. This was our introduction to Tyler Kellen. We’re reflecting on that event today […]

Continue Reading Our Technical Partner Moseys On

The test showed up on my desk just like any other. There I was, working with Google’s Web Platform Predictability team to find so-called “flaky” tests in the venerable Web Platform Tests project. I’d run a hundred or so at a time, over and over again, looking for any that reported inconsistent results. It was […]

Continue Reading The Caper of the Flaky Test