Today Web developers everywhere breathed a sigh of relief when Microsoft's Internet Explorer team revealed their latest milestone: IE8 now renders the Acid2 face properly! For those who aren't familiar with this test, Acid2 is designed to determine how compliant a given web browser is with published HTML. A fully compliant browser displays a smiling yellow face. However, non-compliant browsers show varying degrees of garbage.
While we appreciate Microsoft's effort to embrace open web standards (finally), there is something a bit suspicious about the wording of the announcement. Apparently, IE8 only passes the test when operating in something called "Standards Mode".
We can only wonder what Microsoft is up to with such an odd distinction. Will IE8 run in Standards Mode or another mode by default in the future? Only time will tell.
[Via OSNews]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
12-20-2007 @ 8:20AM
Joel I. Johnson said...
I get the feeling that "Standards Mode" is activated through the use of a certain attribute in the web page. As things stand now IE will change it's rendering and CSS behaviour based on the presence or absence of this attribute.
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12-20-2007 @ 8:30AM
bag0rice said...
well my firefox did poorly on this test
2.0.0.11 Linux
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12-20-2007 @ 8:37AM
Ray Merkler said...
Yeah, Firefox 2 doesn't pass. Firefox 3 will, though.
12-20-2007 @ 8:33AM
Ray Merkler said...
Standards Mode refers to the mode that browsers go into after parsing out the DOCTYPE tag at the top of (responsibly written) HTML documents. When this line is absent, the browsers go into what is called Quirks Mode, which is basically the browser doing whatever it pleases. Nothing fishy about saying that the test only renders correctly in Standards Mode -- that'll be true of any browser.
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12-20-2007 @ 4:57PM
Ian Dumych said...
Well that's good to hear, I was worried it would be something the user had to opt in to.
12-20-2007 @ 9:05AM
NathanG said...
OMG the whole earth is exploding!!
Just kidding well anyways, glad to hear that Microsoft's next browser will be better. It was such a pain to create a standards complaint website and then have it rendered all weird in IE.
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12-20-2007 @ 9:08AM
Kelly said...
The Acid2 test is an utterly meaningless piece of softcore maturbatory material for OCD fetishists. The fact that 99% of all browsers have never passed this test certainly hasn't hindered the development of websites.
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12-20-2007 @ 9:43AM
Dan said...
I respectfully disagree. WebKit (and therefore Safari) passes the Acid2 test. The updated Gecko engine (and therefore FF3) pass the Acid2 test. And now IE8 will pass the test. To say 99% of all browsers haven't passed the test, doesn't really account for the near to immediate future when most browsers will be Acid2-compliant.
12-20-2007 @ 3:37PM
James said...
Yeah, test suites are *so* pointless -- who gives a shit if your code does what it's supposed to, as long as you can get a lot of suckers to use it?
Seriously, the whole point of the acid test is to get everybody rendering HTML consistently, so web developers don't have to resort to hacky per-browser bullshit to make pages appear the way they want them to. Frankly, it's about friggin' time.
12-20-2007 @ 9:26AM
HardwareGuy said...
Firefox 3 beta does pass the Acid2 test. I'm looking forward to a day when all browsers pass so I won't have to modify every website I make just so it can pass through the different hurdles of each browser.
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12-20-2007 @ 9:47AM
Whatevar said...
Not that I care FF is good enough but stop lying, FF3 does not pass the Acid2 test.
I think Standards Mode will be activated if a page use a proper doc type. This made sense doesn't it? You don't want all those old sites to be broken.
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12-20-2007 @ 10:37AM
izzy said...
Firefox 3 beta 2 does indeed pass the Acid 2 test.
12-20-2007 @ 10:47AM
Whatevar said...
Does this look like a propperly rendered smiley to you?
http://img299.imageshack.us/img299/340/acidps3.jpg
12-20-2007 @ 12:25PM
Tutor said...
@Whatevar
The test is broken since yesterday, that's why FF3B2 and others don't pass it right now. No conspiracy involved as far as I know ;-)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=289480#c172
And yes, standards compliance is important. It means interoperability and freedom of choice.
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12-20-2007 @ 12:57PM
Whatevar said...
While it's hard to believe the test is "broken". it does seems you're right. I tried it Opera just now and the image gets rendered in about the same way as my picture above. So yes I was wrong. It does look like FF3 would pass the test.
12-20-2007 @ 12:49PM
Nathan P said...
Well, I hope Microsoft FINALLY starts following web standards! The biggest pain for every web developer is debugging and hacking your site so that it looks right in IE.
I'm still clueless as to why they didn't do this with IE7. Oh well, Microsoft will eventually catch up with the Open Source world.
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12-20-2007 @ 6:16PM
GMB said...
Give me a break Opera has been light years ahead in compliance and it hasn't been open source.
12-20-2007 @ 2:11PM
Conda said...
this is good to hear, since they had previously said they didnt care about standards and passing the Acid2 wasnt something theyd particularly strive for
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12-20-2007 @ 6:16PM
Adam said...
Developers won't use products they don't like. If Microsoft wants a snowball's chance in hell of getting silver light off the ground they need developers to start liking them. Making their browser compliant will go a long way to making web developers happy.
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12-20-2007 @ 6:49PM
Ian Dumych said...
As long as they have a working Silverlight Solution on Linux and OS X, I think it will be fine. Of course, there might be complaints from the likes of Richard Stallman, but Adobe Flash isn't open source either, so at least it's not a step backwards.