Installation instruction ambiguities

[jrpool]

Installation instruction ambiguities

[guygastineau]

    How the output from HTMLCS_RUNNER.run() can be captured for further processing in either the puppeteer or the jsdom case.

That is currently my issue. I am using the script with both marionette and webdriver (using geckodriver). It runs, but I get null as the return value. Is it printing it to the console or something?

I discovered this script is what pa11y uses to scan for accessibility. Maybe I can figure out how they are getting the information out of it.

[guygastineau]

I found the code in Contrib/PhantomJS/runner.js. It is indeed printing the results to the console separated simply with vertical bars |. The HTMLCS_Run.js file in the same directory has a function that suggests it returns JSON, but I don't know how to use that. The HTMLCS_RUNNER.run function says it takes a callback, but it doesn't use it. I was hoping I could just pass some callback to turn it all into JSON or something. Anyway, it looks like I'll have to patch it, since I don't find tricks for capturing the console output suitable for my needs.

[jrpool]

Testaro (https://www.npmjs.com/package/testaro) runs HTMLCS (and other packages). Testaro captures the output of HTMLCS and integrates it into its own output. The code and README file of Testaro show how it does that.

[guygastineau]

@jrpool thank you for the link. Hopefully, I didn't take this issue too far off topic.

I wrote a new runner locally that actually returns a value, but then I realized the machinery at the heart of HTMLCS is like continuation passing style but without return values. I started adding returns to the final expressions in all branches, but then work was over and I started drinking to cope with having to walk the graph manually.

I noticed many functions return false under some failure conditions, but otherwise they implicitly return null. I just want to get return values from the callbacks threaded through HTMLCS. Do you think a PR adding this while preserving backwards compatibility would be welcome? I'm sure I'm off topic now.