The Yadis HTML Test Suite

Why HTML parsing?

The YADIS HTML parsing test suite is a set of files that you can run your application against to see how well it handles different kinds of HTML document structure. YADIS allows the use of the HTML <meta> tag to embed a pointer to the services document. This is an allowance for users who cannot alter the headers that are sent with a document.

In particular, a YADIS relying party must parse a <meta> tag in the <head> of a <html> document with its http-equiv attribute set to X-XRDS-Location. For example:

<html>
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="X-XRDS-Location"
          content="http://openidenabled.com/yadis-test/discover/xrds">
  </head>
</html>

Since these links will be embedded by users, there may be bad HTML markup. Additionally, the relying party should protect users against injection of YADIS URLs into generated pages, such as blog comments or bulletin boards.

These two requirements mean that the parser cannot be strict, but must still attempt to understand the document structure, in order to avoid parsing <meta> tags that are not in the <head> of the document.

The test suite

The test suite can be found at http://openidenabled.com/yadis-test/html/

It consists of a manifest file with a list of URLs pointing to documents and the expected result of parsing the document. The manifest document is a text file that contains details about its format.

To use the tests:

download the manifest file and parse out the URLs and the expected results

retrieve each URL and run your HTML parser against the content
compare the extracted URL to the expected result for that file

If your HTML parser's results match all of the expected results, you can be sure that it will work for YADIS users.