Measuring compatibility of viewers by leveraging user-provided element definitions

1. A method for measuring compatibility of viewers, the method comprising:

accessing a document object model (DOM) generated by an anchor document viewer in response to rendering document code, wherein the DOM includes multiple DOM elements that correspond to graphical elements displayable by the anchor document viewer;

for each of at least one of the multiple DOM elements, allowing a user to provide an element definition that indicates how important it is that the corresponding graphical element displays as it does in the anchor document viewer,

wherein allowing a user to provide an element definition comprises providing a graphical user interface (GUI) that allows the user to activate a menu related to the corresponding graphical element, wherein the menu allows the user to set or select an importance rating and multiple properties for the element definition of the corresponding graphical element;

determining rendering differences, utilizing the importance rating and the multiple properties, between the anchor document viewer and a target document viewer, including comparing rendering of a DOM element in the anchor document viewer and a corresponding DOM element in the target document viewer to determine an element difference rating;

determining a weight value to designate an importance level for the rendering differences; and

calculating a viewer difference rating utilizing the element difference rating to determine how similarly the target document viewer renders in comparison to the anchor document viewer.

2. The method of claim 1 , wherein the importance rating for the element definition indicates the importance of an overall look and feel of the corresponding graphical element; and

each of the multiple properties for the element definition indicates an importance of a certain aspect of the look and feel of the corresponding graphical element.

3. The method of claim 2 , wherein each of the multiple properties has a value range and a weight, where each weight indicates how important it is that the corresponding aspect of the look and feel has a value within the corresponding value range.

4. The method of claim 1 , further comprising saving the provided element definitions as part of a test file or in an elements definitions file that travels along with the test file.

5. The method of claim 1 , wherein the allowing a user to provide an element definition occurs concurrently with the user creating a test to test functionality of the document code.

6. The method of claim 5 , further comprising, concurrent with executing the test with respect to a replica anchor document viewer and a target document viewer:

determining differences between a first DOM generated by the replica anchor document viewer and a second DOM generated by the target document viewer according to the element difference rating for the corresponding graphical element of each of the at least one of the multiple DOM elements.

7. The method of claim 1 , wherein the anchor document viewer is an anchor web browser and wherein the document code is code for a webpage or web application.

8. A non-transitory machine-readable storage medium encoded with instructions for measuring compatibility of viewers, the instructions executable by a processor of a system to cause the system to:

access a first document object model (DOM) generated by an anchor document viewer and a second DOM generated by a target document viewer, each DOM generated in response to rendering document code, wherein for each of multiple graphical elements displayable by the document viewers, each DOM includes a corresponding DOM element;

access element definitions that indicate how important particular differences are with respect to various DOM elements, wherein the element definitions include an importance rating and multiple properties for each of the various DOM elements, and the importance rating and multiple properties are received via a graphical user interface (GUI) allowing a user to set or select the importance rating and the multiple properties;

determine rendering differences, utilizing the importance rating and the multiple properties, between the anchor document viewer and a target document viewer, including comparing rendering of a DOM element in the anchor document viewer and a corresponding DOM element in the target document viewer to determine an element difference rating;

determine a weight value to designate an importance level for the rendering differences; and

calculate a viewer difference rating that is a quantifiable measurement of how similarly the target document viewer renders the document code with respect to the anchor document viewer.

9. The machine-readable storage medium of claim 8 , wherein for each of the various DOM elements:

the importance rating indicates an importance of an overall look and feel of a graphical element associated with the DOM element; and

the multiple properties indicate the importance of certain aspects of the look and feel of the graphical element.

10. A system for measuring compatibility of viewers, the system comprising:

a test creator to, concurrent with creating a test for a webpage or application, allow a user to provide element definitions for graphical elements that are displayable on user interface (UI) pages of the webpage or application, wherein each element definition indicates how important it is that the particular graphical element displays in a particular manner,

wherein to allow a user to provide element definitions comprises providing a graphical user interface (GUI) that allows the user to activate a menu related to the particular graphical element, and the menu allows the user to set or select an importance rating and multiple properties for the element definition of the particular graphical element; and

a test executor to:

launch the webpage or application in an anchor viewer and a target viewer and execute the test with respect to each viewer,

determine differences between how the anchor viewer and the target viewer display the graphical elements of the webpage or application based on the element definitions, wherein to determine the differences comprises determining, for each graphical element, an element difference rating based on the importance rating and multiple properties for the element definition of the graphical element,

determine a weight value to designate an importance level for the rendering differences, and

calculate a viewer difference rating based on the element difference ratings for the graphical elements, wherein the viewer difference rating is a quantifiable measurement of how important the differences are.

11. The system of claim 10 , wherein the test executor is further to generate a report for the target viewer and other target viewers, wherein the report provides the viewer difference rating for the target viewer and other viewer difference ratings for the other target viewers.

12. The system of claim 11 , wherein the test executor is further to provide another GUI to allow the user to view the report and interact with the report to expand sections to see how each of the viewer difference ratings were calculated.

13. The method of claim 1 , comprising:

determining an element difference rating based on the importance rating and multiple properties for the element definition of the corresponding graphical element; and

determining a viewer difference rating based on the element difference rating determined for each of the at least one of the multiple DOM elements.

14. The machine-readable storage medium of claim 8 , wherein the instructions executable by the processor cause the system to:

determine element difference ratings based on the importance ratings and the multiple properties in the element definitions of the various DOM elements; and

calculate the viewer difference rating based on the element difference ratings for the various DOM elements.