I’m not sure what you define as “getting very basic things working” but there’s no acceptable threshold for me. Are line boxes very basic? Is overflow compositi

I’m not sure what you define as “getting very basic things working” but there’s no acceptable threshold for me. Are line boxes very basic? Is overflow compositing very basic? It’s irrelevant whether or not one is bootstrapping. It is unacceptable to me to use the software I’m testing to test itself if I can’t establish a baseline for the rest of the tests. Otherwise, all of the tests could be invalid one day based on a regression and I wouldn’t know. But this is explicitly done with reftests. And I don’t know what you’re talking about with the DOM API tests, there are several layout and compositor tests that require JavaScript and it’s unclear why other than the test author decided to use JavaScript to verify DOM metrics. That’s fine, I just don’t want that in my layout tests. I’m OK with a subset of the tests just not being automated based on font rasterization and line height calculations. The standards make those expectations clear, but everything else feels like fair game to me. I can either test for it, or I can’t. If I can’t, it’s not automated. And if it’s automated, I need information about what is failing, and much of the reftests don’t explicitly point out what they’re testing. The assert data is useful when it’s available, but even then sometimes test authors neglect to point out explicitly what they’re testing for. Plenty of the layout tests in particular are just box model renders that should match with no explanation as to what section or text is being tested against. That’s just not acceptable. It’s not even about interactions between specs, the specs isolated are not well tested. If you’re testing, let’s say, the width calculation of a box based on children boxes’ widths in normal flow, it needs to say that. And I think I’ve only ever see some of WebKit’s test’s help links reference actual sections. Otherwise the WPT provide little to no value to me. My team has been better off writing our own tests because we directly refer to the recommended or living standards texts by section, quote it and link to it, and as a result there’s no ambiguity about what property, calculation, or raster output we’re testing for.