molly.com
Wednesday 13 April 2005
Acid2 Test Formally Released
THE ACID2 TEST FOR WEB STANDARDS and related compliance is now available at the Web Standards Project. You can read the press release, and visit the acid2 test site to see the test, understand the test, and find out information about how to provide feedback, bug reports and other items of interest regarding acid2.
Opera, Firefox and Safari have already tested against acid2 and failed beautifully. It’s important to keep in mind that the point of acid2 is precisely to show browser and tools developers what’s lacking in their products. This is to assist them in improving the product, and testing repeatedly along the way until (at least in my ideal world) the product is compliant.
Dave Hyatt from Safari writes:
I started work today on making Safari pass the test, and I thought I’d blog my progress as I fix bugs in the test. This will be a fairly slow process as whole features may have to be added simply to make one row of the test render correctly.
It will be interesting to follow his blog as Safari bugs are fixed and unsupported features are implemented. It’d be great to see other vendors do something similar, too.
Filed under: WaSP, professional, software, standards
Posted by: Molly | 09:52 | Comments (21)
David is incredible with this sort of thing. When betas of Safari were leaked and bugs started popping up he was very forward thinking.
I talked about that here: http://tinyurl.com/67o5l
Good stuff, I look forward to seeing what Acid2 is able to accomplish.
I’m totally lost looking at that code. is the .parser area supposed to be all wierd? what is width:200; no unit specified?
nevermind i read the explanation…
Interestingly, IE/5 Mac — which was the first browser to pass Acid 1 test — shows a blank page (!) Guess it fails every aspect of the Acid2 test
BTW, could anyone remind me what “about:” command you can type in IE5/Mac URL field to have it display the Acid 1 test page?
Wow. IE6, Opera 7, and Opera 8 fail MISERABLY. Firefox almost has it… not close enough though.
How’s it look in Safari?
“How’s it look in Safari?”
Nevermind: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/2005_04.html#007932
IE5 PC fails. Horribly. Like… wow (I’ll post a picture tonite if I remember)
It’s a little disconcerting that all browsers fail (according to Dave). Let’s hope that developers are all trying to do something about that as rapidly as he is. That man’s amazing when it comes to reaction time.
Omniweb fails miserably..
So Dave Hyatt has been all over the bugs in Safari, but as far as I’ve seen, the Firefox developers have been quiet. Are they going to speak up and say if they are goin to be working on this – or maybe I missed something – anyone know anything? While I’m thinking of it – Molly, as a WaSP member, do you know why the WaSP site doesn’t have commenting?
What a pleasantly demanding and delightfully documented test. While I have a complaint on my site, it is still good work any way you view it.
It’s great to see another test like this. I’ve been looking forward to it since I heard about it.
One big thing I’ve been wondering is what tool the developers of this test used to make sure that what they wrote is indeed correct? The reason I ask is becuase if all current browsers on the market fail the test, how did they test it when building it? I’d be interested in working with that application. Can you shed some light on this, Molly?
It’s also great to hear that developers are already working on fixing bugs introduced by this test. I can only hope all developers are as dedicated.
Anyone have an answer to Nicholas Rougeux’s question above?
Nicholas: That’s an interesting question regarding the actual dev of the test, which was spearheaded by Ian Hickson, Hakon Wium Lie and several WaSPs.
The guide explains the rationale. Insofar as the process (which continues as developers find problems with the test and we improve the test as that feedback comes in) but you do bring up a curious point.
I think a “Making of Acid2″ would be a very helpful guide, we’ll look into doing something just like that once we shore it up a bit more.
I’ve got screenshots of the test in IE 6 PC and Firefox version 1.0.
As I said. IE PC fails *miserably*.
This is probably one of the most pointless test even. What is the point of testing INVALID standards. it is like a project spec written by a bunch of managers asking for the “do what I mean” function.
Test compliancy, disuade people from using bad coding practice. But this is encouraging them in their bad ways. “it is fine. I can use that code… I know it is invalid but the Acid 2 test says it should work anyway.”
Browsers should fail the test. it is invalid code. Their is therefore no way it can be displayed “properly”.
Now that the IE 7 Beta is released its nice to see how well it supports it. Its about the same as IE6 so far.