Tellurium Tutorial Series: HTML Source vs. Runtime HTML Source

[John.Ji...@gmail.com]

Until Tellurium TrUMP project is mature (TrUMP is a Tellurium sub-
project to create Firefox Plugin, which will
automatically generate UI modules for you), sometimes, you may have
to look at the HTML source to see what the UI elements look like so
that you can create the UI module for them. But be aware, if you use
the view source function from the web browser, you will only see the
static HTML source, not the actual runtime HTML source.

Nowadays, a lot of web sites use Javascripts or other dynamic web
techniques to generate dynamic Web at runtime. The static HTML source
may be different from the runtime HTML source. If your UI modules are
dependent on the static HTML source, your tests may not be able to
pass.

As a rule of thumb, to create Tellurium UI modules manually, you have
to check the runtime HTML source
for some time. The correct steps should be:

Open the Web under testing -> act on the Web to bring up the portion
of Web you want to test -> look at
the Runtime HTML Source for that portion -> write UI modules

There are couple tools that you can use for the runtime HTML Source,
for example,

1) Firefox plugin "Web Developer", use "View generated source"
2) Firefox plugin "Dom Inspector", use "Copy XML" or look at each node
3) Firefox plugin "XPather", look at "Inner HTML"

For Firefox 3, "Dom Inspector" and "XPather" are bundled together. To
use "XPather", you need to install
"DOM Inspector", too.

There are many other addons/plugins there on Firefox website with the
similar functionalities. Please check more details from

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/

[Mikhail Koryak]

I find firebug -> inspect DOM to be very useful for this