When we see a list of, let's say, banners, and each one has a link to
edit them, the word "banner" in the text "edit banner" is redundant and
adds noise; even for users with cognitive disabilities, it's obvious
that the "edit" link refers to the banner.
Using placeholders having similar (or identical) text as already present
as a label has a few issues.
First, it's a distraction. Reading the same information twice is
useless, requires an extra effort, and might even frustrate users.
Second, if users start typing before reading the placeholder and see it
disappear, they might think they're missing relevant information,
delete what they typed, and read the placeholder. That will get them
nowhere.
Finally, we display placeholders using a text offering very low contrast
against the background, so users don't think the placeholder is an
actual value entered in the field. Using such low contrast makes the
text hard to read, particularly for users with visual impairments.
So we're removing these placeholders.
This commit only deals with placeholder texts with similar (or
identical) texts as the label text. There might be other places where we
should replace placeholder texts with labels, but that's a different
topic.
We were checking content which was already present/absent before making
a certain request, so the expectations were not checking the request had
already finished. Our intention here is to check the page contents after
the request has finished.
Changing the database after the process running the browser has started
is proving to be one of the reasons tests are failing sometimes, so
we're reducing the number of times were that happens. In this case, we
were changing a setting.
JavaScript is used by about 98% of web users, so by testing without it
enabled, we're only testing that the application works for a very
reduced number of users.
We proceeded this way in the past because CONSUL started using Rails 4.2
and truncating the database between JavaScript tests with database
cleaner, which made these tests terribly slow.
When we upgraded to Rails 5.1 and introduced system tests, we started
using database transactions in JavaScript tests, making these tests much
faster. So now we can use JavaScript tests everywhere without critically
slowing down our test suite.
This menu requires JavaScript to open/close subnavigation menus, so
we're now testing the way users with a browser supporting JavaScript
(98%-99% of the users) deal with the menu.
IMHO testing the navigation once is enough. In the rest of the tests we
can access the page directly and make the tests faster by reducing the
number of requests.
We were repeating the same code over and over (with a few variants) to
setup tests which require an administrator. We can use a tag and
simplify the code.
In some tables, we had "actions", and some columns were also links
pointing to some places. Having both of them at the same time is
confusing, particularly since traditionally the links in the columns
pointed to the same place as some of the actions (although that's not
the case since commit 48db31cd).
We're still keeping links in tables which don't have an action column.
For instance, the proposals table has a "select" button which would be
harder to use if we had action buttons next to it.
This rule was added in Rubocop 0.89.0. However, there are some false
positives when we don't use interpolation but simply concatenate in
order to avoid long lines. Even if there weren't false positives, there
are places where we concatenate to emphasize the point that we're adding
a certain character to a text.
We might reconsider this rule in the future, since we generally prefer
interpolation over concatenation.