WPT: An overview and history
A few of our colleagues and partners have asked for an overview of WPT. We wrote this internal overview and history, which we want to also share publicly here as a reference for anyone interested in the how the project operates and came to be.
Web Platform Tests, stylized `web-platform-tests` or `WPT`, is an open-source cross-browser-engine project founded in 2010 to test browser conformance to web standards. The project is actively maintained by standards developers from Apple, Bocoup, Google, Igalia, Microsoft, Mozilla, and the W3C through a governance structure described below. WPT has over 56,552 tests and counting (with 1.8 million subtests) at the time of this writing. Each test is run every couple of hours in Continuous Integration (CI) through the infrastructure behind wpt.fyi.
In 2010, browser interoperability was a mess. Web developers had to write multiple versions of the same code in order to get things to work in every browser, which often led to bugs, and bad experiences for people using the web. During the course of the 2010s, WPT was the center of a push toward making browsers interoperable. In order to make browsers render web code interoperably, all major browsers engines committed to run and pay attention to a new comprehensive automated conformance test suite called WPT.
