On Jan 19, 2008, at 08:01 AM, Phlip wrote:

> Eric Hodel wrote:
>
>>> As your HTML gets sicker, you can write sicker XPaths to match it.
>> YAGNI says assert_equal will work just fine for this case.
>
> This isn't the forum for this topic, but assert_equal will break  
> over irrelevant changes, such as the order of attributes, or even  
> blanks.

White-space changes are completely irrelevant to testing HTML that is  
inside a <pre>. Order of attributes changes are completely irrelevant  
to HTML construction from a String.

> Another option is assert_hpricot, except that won't break if your  
> HTML turns ill-formed!

External dependencies are not an option.

> (And the "simple things" rules apply under test-/first/. We don't  
> have that luxury here.

For code I maintain, they apply all the time.