Unusually for me, my current project I'm doing in the traditional Web 1.0 style. It's a forms based app, and the server is rendering HTML direct to the browser. And it's really efficient to work this way.

Until you get to automated testing. With REST APIs, or GraphQL, or anything like that, you've got very obvious test points. For example, you have an API to get a user profile, and it just returns the exact JSON for the user. That's easy to test.

With forms and views, you have a controller to render the user profile page, and this will render the entire screen of which a part is the user details. But there's a lot of other things going on too - page headers, menus, etc.

Right now I'm doing snapshot testing. This is in Java, so I'm using jsoup to normalize the HTML - that ensures that irrelevant changes to the HTML, such as whitespace, don't affect the tests - and then asserting that the full rendered string is exactly correct.

It works, but I don't like it. It feels clunky, and - well - wrong. It also doesn't ensure that it renders correctly, just that the string is as expected. If the CSS changes then this will make the page look wrong but the tests won't catch it! But I'm not sure yet what to do instead.

So - what do other people do for this kind of testing? Is there a better way to do this?