We’ve recently fixed a pretty significant bug on Tenon, thanks in large part to Ashley Bischoff. Ashley has been using Tenon to provide quick feedback on 150 or so home pages for microsites owned by one of The Paciello Group’s Clients. In the process, she’s provided us with valuable feedback on bugs or inconsistencies in Tenon. One of them was a big deal.
tID 57 looks for “Blank Link Text” – that is, links that don’t have any printable characters in them. Unfortunately the test wasn’t properly following the links’ subnodes. So a link such as <a href="/path/to/url.html"> <span> Foo </span></a> would look blank to Tenon. The test itself had been passing all of its unit tests but, naturally, our unit tests didn’t include that type of link.
The code for that particular test uses a function we had written to get all text in a node and it simply wasn’t doing it. Scratching my head, I reached out to Justin Stockton who turned me on to createTreeWalker which allowed us to do exactly what we want to do. We’re concentrating on test improvements over the next few weeks and having this bug fixed enables us to fix, improve, or create other tests that are also more accurate.
When we say on social media that we love our user community, we mean it, and this type of thing is why. Simply by telling us about a weird result she was getting, Ashley actually improved 17 of our tests that use that function, which improves the results seen by our 887 users.
Thank you, Ashley and Justin, for being part of what we’re doing.