robotskip Posted December 20, 2007 Share Posted December 20, 2007 At first glance, this test seems simple. I think it actually offers a view into the subtle and complex world of web standards in a number of ways. Showing the Acid2 page correctly is a good indication of being standards compliant, but Acid2 itself isn’t a web standard or a web standards compliance test. The publisher of the test, the Web Standards Project, is an advocacy group, not a web standards defining body. When we look at the long lists of standards (even from just one standards body, like the W3C), which standards are the most important for us to support? The web has many kinds of standards – true industry standards, like those from the W3C, de facto standards, unilateral standards, open standards, and more. Some standards like RSS or OpenSearch lack a formal standards body yet work pretty well today across multiple implementations. Many advances in web technologies, like the img tag, start out as unilateral extensions by a vendor. The X in AJAX, for example, has only started the formal standardization process relatively recently. As some comments have pointed out, CSS 2.1, one of the key standards that Acid2 exercises, is not “finalized” yet. Different individuals have different opinions about different standards. The important thing about the Acid2 test is that it reflects what one particular group of smart people “consider most important for the future of the web.” Now, with all that context, I’m delighted to tell you that on Wednesday, December 12, Internet Explorer correctly rendered the Acid2 page in IE8 standards mode. While supporting the features tested in Acid2 is important for many reasons, it is just one of several milestones for the interoperability, standards compliance, and backwards compatibility that we’re committed to for this release. We will blog more on these topics. For IE8, we want to communicate facts, not aspirations. We’re posting this information now because we have real working code checked in and we’re confident about delivering it in the final product. We’re listening to the feedback about IE, and at the same time, we are committed to responsible disclosure and setting expectations properly. Now that we’ve run the test on multiple machines and seen it work, we’re excited to be able to share definitive information. While blog posts and links to videos are a good start, publicly available code is even better. We will have a lot more information available at sessions at MIX08 and will release a beta of IE8 in the first half of calendar 2008. http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/12/1...-milestone.aspx Parts in bold are important, especially near the end where it details some of the huge changes Microsoft is going through in relation to coding and so on. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
InorganicMatter Posted December 20, 2007 Share Posted December 20, 2007 All right, now that most of the websites out there have been written in "broken" code to get around IE shortcomings, Microsoft's going to fix it and render all the current pages incorrectly! I guess we should be happy they fixed it at all... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
REVENGE Posted December 20, 2007 Share Posted December 20, 2007 Well, I guess they got it right later rather than sooner, but progress is progress. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scj312 Posted December 20, 2007 Share Posted December 20, 2007 I think that pigs just started to fly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NeSuKuN Posted December 20, 2007 Share Posted December 20, 2007 late is better than never, but by the time IE8 is available, ACID3 will be finished xD Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Synaesthesia Posted December 20, 2007 Share Posted December 20, 2007 Awesome news! Internet Explorer has finally caught up with Safari 1 link : Safari passes Acid2 test, April 27 2005 ::some flamebait:: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
apowerr Posted December 20, 2007 Share Posted December 20, 2007 Firefox 3 will be passing as well. I'll stick with Firefox over IE or Safari . Still, this is excellent news for the industry as a whole. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Forceman Posted December 20, 2007 Share Posted December 20, 2007 A strategy to combat Firefox, any web developer knows IE is a nightmare for web standards. Regardless you couldn't get me to use that POS. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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