IE 8 Passes Acid2 Test

notamicrosoftlover writes to tell us Channel9 is reporting that Internet Explorer 8 has correctly rendered the Acid2 page in "standards mode". "With respect to standards and interoperability, our goal in developing Internet Explorer 8 is to support the right set of standards with excellent implementations and do so without breaking the existing web. This second goal refers to the lessons we learned during IE 7. IE7's CSS improvements made IE more compliant with some standards and less compatible with some sites on the web as they were coded. Many sites and developers have done special work to work well with IE6, mostly as a result of the evolution of the web and standards since 2001 and the level of support in the various versions of IE that pre-date many standards. We have a responsibility to respect the work that sites have already done to work with IE. We must deliver improved standards support and backwards compatibility so that IE8 (1) continues to work with the billions of pages on the web today that already work in IE6 and IE7 and (2) makes the development of the next billion pages, in an interoperable way, much easier. We'll blog more, and learn more, about this during the IE8 beta cycle." There's also a video interview regarding IE8 development on Channel9."

So let's geek this out

[smitty_one_each (243267)]

If it takes until version 8 to support Acid 2, or 2^3,
then, when Acid 3 comes out, we can expect conformance by IE27?

Re:So let's geek this out

[hcmtnbiker (925661)]

You might note that only a couple browsers completely pass it. [wikipedia.org] Officially released web browsers that pass there is only Konqueror, Safari 2.02; firefox does not make the list. So ~97% of all browsers don't pass it.

Since you had to...

[by Anonymous Coward]

...google for how to take a screenshot on linux... I do not think I trust your findings... Ad hominem FTW!!!.. ;P ... j/k

Re:So let's geek this out

[Tavor (845700)]

As posted here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=394500&cid=21761480 [slashdot.org]

The acid test is currently broken.
Coincidence?

Proof: Here's a mirror of the Acid2 Test, FF passes. http://www.hixie.ch/tests/evil/acid/002/ [hixie.ch]

Re:On further investigation...

[Tony Hoyle (11698)]

That was actually my first thought

"IE 8 Passes Acid 2 test"

"In other news, Acid 2 test updated to be 'more standards compliant', and hosted on microsoft.com"

Re:So let's geek this out

[ShieldW0lf (601553)]

The real question is, how back-portable is the IE8 browser? If it only runs on Vista, it's not going to matter much.

Platform compatibility

[Kelson (129150)]

how back-portable is the IE8 browser? If it only runs on Vista, it's not going to matter much.

That depends on when IE8 is released. It took them 1.75 years to get from announcing IE7 (Feb 2005) to releasing it (Nov 2006). Presumably they've been working on IE8 for a while, but if it takes them another 21 months, we're looking at fall 2009. Who knows what the Windows install base will look like then?

Personally, I'm hoping it'll be out by the end of 2008, though my current goal is to get people the hell off of IE6. Upgrade to IE7, switch to Firefox, Opera, Safari, whatever, just ditch that aging monstrosity of a browser if you possibly can (and aren't barred by your IT department, or a need to access some critical site that only works in IE6).

Re:Platform compatibility

[Korin43 (881732)]

As far as I know, any new browser has the option to turn off tabbed browsing (in firefox you go to options then "tabs" (on the top) and change "New Windows Open in.." from tabs to a new window.

Re:Tabs are evil

[Peaker (72084)]

The reason we need tabs is that:

1. There's no easy shortcut to opening in new window in the background (so you can switch to it when its loaded).
   
2. Tabs let you form a hierarchy of windows (organizing your tabs into groups that are windows).
   
3. Tabs namespace the browser windows into its own space, not messing up the other applications' namespaces.
   
4. Window switching sucks (The task bar is a bad interface).
   

I agree that tabs suck, but unfortunately, they are the best we have right now :-)

If an easy shortcut to open in a new window existed, and window organization (easily!) into hierarchies was allowed in the general case, such that switching inside any level of the hierarchy was possible, and was convenient (the Window scale effect comes to mind), then tabs would become an unnecessary ad-hoc kludge.

Re:Tabs are evil

[uglyduckling (103926)]

Think about it why should we use tabs, really?

Easy. The vast majority of window managers on any OS, when a new window is opened, will give it focus. Most of the time that's probably the wrong thing to do (in my opinion) but that is the default behaviour. I like to browse through pages on Ebay, Wikipedia, Slashdot etc., and when I see a link I like I middle-click on it. In Firefox and IE7 this opens a new tab without switching focus and loads the page in the background. On IE6 it opens a new window (in fact you have to right-click then select open in new window), I then have to ALT-TAB or click back to my original window to carry on browsing. Most people that I've pointed this out to have then tried browsing with tabs for a few days and never gone back. On IE6 if you're browsing with the window maximised then open a link in a new window, the new window will not be maximised, so again I have to mess around to carry on browsing the way I want.

I'm usually totally against MDI type arrangements, of which tabs I guess are really a derivative. However, I have to say that I find tabbed browsing extremely efficient and intuitive.

Re:So let's geek this out

[davester666 (731373)]

Hopefully, it's more than just:

if (url == acid2 test page)
    display jpg of correct acid2 rendering
else ...

Re:So let's geek this out

[ozmanjusri (601766)]

Blind Microsoft hate at its finest,

Nah, check out the low UID.

More likely the voice of bitter experience.

Re:So let's geek this out

[McFadden (809368)]

More importantly, when does a low UID on slashdot indicate that you are somehow more experienced than other IT professionals? Not registering for a glorified blog, until recently, has absolutely no bearing on someone's experience or lack thereof.

Re:So let's geek this out

[mabinogi (74033)]

When it's a joke.
As much as I was bemused by considering a UID > 100,000 as low, I still understood that the post wasn't serious.

Re:So let's geek this out

[EvilMonkeySlayer (826044)]

I find it something of a curious coincidence that as soon as Opera starts asking the EU to take legal action against MS and the little web developer revolt a while ago about the distinct lack of any information coming from the IE team regarding 8 that all of a sudden we have this "we'll be passing the acid2 test".

I can't help be slightly suspicious. I'll believe it when I see it.

Re:So let's geek this out

[ozmanjusri (601766)]

I can't help be slightly suspicious.

It explains why they've switched [microsoft.com] to the Word rendering engine for Outlook. The fewer places they're standards compliant, the better for their lockin.

Re:So let's geek this out

[TedTschopp (244839)]

Actually it all happened when someone cornered Bill Gates about how the IE team hadn't been communicating like he had promised they would, and how they were behind in their deliverables.

I would have loved to be in the Room when the call came in.

"Please hold for Bill Gates."
--CRAP, what did I do now--
"Hey, Junior, why did you make me look like an ass in front of the whole world?"
"Ummm..."
"SHUT UP AND DON'T TALK. I just got out of an interview, and they asked me why you were are not communicating. Don't answer that. You know how I hate interviews. You also know how I hate looking like an ass. You also know I told the world we would release IE8 in early 2008. So what gives. Do I need to fire you all and rebrand a version of FireFox as IE8? Cause I'm this close to doing it. Its people like you who give this company a bad name. Now stop wasting my time, start communicating, and the next time we talk you had better have numbers on how many people are switching from IE7 to IE8. If not, please be aware that the next group guy you talk to here at Microsoft will be our security guards escorting you off property. Oh, and by the way, Channel 9 will be there in the morning. The marketing department will be there in the afternoon, and you have been registered in the company communication 101 classes that are offered the first week of every month in Redmond. I've already spoken to the trainer and she is looking forward to working with you each month for the next year. I also what you to be aware that all this work will not impact our deliver date of 1st Quarter 2008.
"Why are you still on the phone. I thought you had code to check in."
-click-

Lesson: Never make the richest guy in the world look like a liar. Especially if he is signing your paycheck.

Re:So let's geek this out

[init100 (915886)]

Any time Linux or OSX came out with a release, we heard all about how Longhorn would do the same thing only better. Of course, when the time came, none of those features were delivered.

Sounds like the old Microsoft Cairo project. Each time a competitor was about to release a new product or new version of a product, Microsoft would launch a press release stating how much better everything would be with Cairo, who would be just six months away. The press and potential customers turned away from the competitor and started to talk about the marvelous Cairo future instead.

Except that Cairo never materialized.

Re:More like this...

[Minwee (522556)]

But it makes a _perfectly_ straight line, and that can't be an accident.

Appropriate Tag

[DarkHelmet (120004)]

I think the holyshit tag would be appropriate here.

Re:Appropriate Tag

[sootman (158191)]

How cyclical: first there were tags... then there were people using tags for comments... I've seen tags that said 'dontcommentintags'... and now there are comments suggesting how to tag. :-)

Re:Appropriate Tag

[liquidpele (663430)]

Na. Don't forget it only passes when in standards compliance mode, which must be declaired in the doctype of the page. By default (most pages) IE will render in "quirks mode", which of course is the hellhole we all hate.

Only with standard DOCTYPE

[WK2 (1072560)]

To be fair, any page without a DOCTYPE is not compliant, and can't be rendered in a compliant way. Any page without a DOCTYPE is probably buggy in other ways too. Firefox has a quirks mode too, and tries to fix buggy pages. It identifies a buggy page the same way, by looking at the DOCTYPE.

Everybody is in a pickle when it comes to rendering broken HTML. The only solutions are to do the best you can, or display an error message rather than a page. Also, to be fair, most of this mess is indeed caused by Microsoft, but even they can't fix it in a day.

I think it would be nice if browsers continued to fix spaghetti, but also showed a message somewhere that indicated that the page was buggy. Not a pop-up or anything, but a small, unobtrusive icon that was green and happy for a good page, or red and frowny for a bad. If IE had this by default, I think there would be a lot less bad pages on the internet.

Would anyone mind if....

[iknownuttin (1099999)]

...so that IE8 (1) continues to work with the billions of pages on the web today that already work in IE6 and IE7

Would anyone mind if they had rewrite their web pages or at the very least, remove the code that checks for the version of IE and if it is IE in the first place? I wouldn't mind.

Cool.

[SanityInAnarchy (655584)]

I guess when Bill Gates asks what the hell is going on [slashdot.org], he gets results!

Re:Cool.

[pushing-robot (1037830)]

Between IE passing a strict CSS test and 3DRealms planning to release Duke Nukem Forever, I'm wondering what alternate universe I woke up in this morning.

I guess I'd better check Google's top execs for goatees again.

Oh crap. [google.com]

Re:Cool.

[MrNaz (730548)]

Hahaha! [slashdot.org]

(Sorry, I have nothing more to say.)

Re:Cool.

[foreverdisillusioned (763799)]

I'm wondering if it's not too late to convert to Christianity. Which is this one, the third seal or the fourth? Have I missed the rapture?

Re:Whats the rush to IE8?

[p0tat03 (985078)]

Honestly, while I lubs me Firefox, Opera, and Safari, I'd rather have an IE that worked, for the rest of the world. Firefox gains market share, but the majority of the world will never switch - after all, it works fine out of the box, they can check their email and surf the web, right? For the sake of web developers' sanity, a standards-compliant IE can only be a good thing.

Good News/Bad News

[machineghost (622031)]

Good News:
Web developers will finally be able to develop a page once, according to standards, and have it work on all major browser ...

Bad News:
... in the year 2012 (give or take a few years), when the percentage of web users using IE 5, 6 or 7 finally dips below 5%.

Re:Good News/Bad News

[tkw954 (709413)]

Good News: Web developers will finally be able to develop a page once, according to standards, and have it work on all major browser ...

Bad news: that page has to be the Acid2 Test.

what's so great about this?

[Migala77 (1179151)]

After all, how hard is it to build a special case for one specific website?

What, No Comments?

[sexconker (1179573)]

What have we seen recently?

The people behind the Phantom actually releasing a product
A Duke Nukem Forever teaser
Dell promoting Linux
IE8 passing Acid2

What's next?
Dogs living with cats??

Re:What, No Comments?

[aitikin (909209)]

Better yet, Gates, Torvalds, Jobs, and Woz all rooming together. Gates would be the asshole control, Jobs would be the creative manipulator, Torvalds would be the one finding ways around all the agreed house rules, and Woz would sit there and play segway polo.

So they've realized how untrusted they are...

[MozeeToby (1163751)]

Am I the only one who thinks it's hilarious how thorough the author is in proving that this is really true. There's a screenshot of the test, video, and even a screenshot of the checkin.

It's almost like think we don't trust them or something.

Translation

[by Anonymous Coward]

Now that we broke the web with our own version of standards, we're going to break it again with the real standards.

Remember kids...

[sootman (158191)]

... passing the Acid test doesn't mean the browser's perfect. From http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid2/guide/ [webstandards.org]

Everything that Acid2 tests is specified in a Web standard, but not all Web standards are tested. Acid2 does not guarantee conformance with any specification.

And, from what I've read before, it tests how browsers handle incorrect code [webstandards.org] as much as anything else--i.e., if it deals with errors correctly. I'd rather have it handle every bit of the spec correctly in the first place, and if it fails gracefully, that's nice too.

It'll also be nice it it handles transparent PNGs properly with nothing more than an <img> tag--like how IE/5 Mac did almost eight fucking years ago. [wikipedia.org] Here's how much progress they had made as of 6/2006. [slashdot.org] (Yeah, it's been a while, and maybe they've fixed that, but c'mon.... it was 2006!) Too bad they lined up the Mac guys against a wall and shot them, ensuring that it would take almost a decade to get that one feature into IE/Win.

Feel free to correct me if I've made any factual errors in this post.* Flame if you want, but nicely worded, verifiable responses are preferred and worth a lot more to readers in general.

* aside from the part about shooting the Mac team--I'm (pretty) sure that didn't happen.

Re:Remember kids...

[Kelson (129150)]

It'll also be nice it it handles transparent PNGs properly with nothing more than an tag--like how IE/5 Mac did almost eight fucking years ago.

They finally did in IE7, released in November 2006.

And, from what I've read before, it tests how browsers handle incorrect code as much as anything else--i.e., if it deals with errors correctly.

That's not the only thing it tests, but proper error handling is critical for forward compatibility. A fully CSS2-compliant browser, when faced with CSS3, will see it as incorrect code. Ditto for an HTML4 browser looking at HTML5 or XHTML1. If there are well-specified ways to handle errors, and the browsers follow them, then you can predict what browsers will do if they don't support a particular feature.

Re:Remember kids...

[Kelson (129150)]

And to follow up, here's a page that goes into much more detail on just what Acid2 tests [webstandards.org], including:

• Data URLs
• Transparent PNGs
• The object element
• Absolute, relative and fixed positioning
• Box model
• CSS tables
• Margins
• Generated content
• CSS parsing (this would be the part about handling incorrect code)
• Paint order
• Line heights
• Hovering effects

Why fix bugs when the bugs worked better than the

[CrackPipePls (1205568)]

Why fix bugs when the bugs worked better than the fixes? With the standard breaking IE6, random "updates" that makes IE7 css hacks useless, and now a new "standard compliant" IE8 that may or may not contain other bugs The task of writing pages to support IE6, IE7, IE8 will become equivalent to travelling on a mine field, a melting glacier and an active volcano in 3 parallel universes in the same car at the same time

I'll get in trouble for this...

[toddhunter (659837)]

But I have hacked the IE8 code base. Here is the code they have added to pass ACID2: if (url.equals("http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html#top")) { draw("smileyFace"); }

Re:any standard will do

[PhxBlue (562201)]

So in other words, it will be standards compliant but at the same time render all the old crap that wasn't even close to standards compliant??? So what's the point?!! If people can still write crap code, they will. You may as well write IE in 1995 Visual Basic if you are going to be that wishy washy.

Wow, talk about moving the goalposts. It's reasonable to expect a Web browser to adhere to standards -- so when IE finally does, the new reason to hate MS is because IE also supports the pages that are on the Web today?

Making IE8 render pages the way IE7 does is the smart way to go for Microsoft. If people woke up one morning and none of their sites looked right, they'd be rightfully pissed off. IE8 will give people the time to make their "crap code" standards-compliant ... though if they haven't done it by IE9, they might be shit out of luck.

Oh, and BTW -- as long as people are coding, there will always be crap code. Standards will not make crap code go away.

Re:any standard will do

[fm6 (162816)]

So in other words, it will be standards compliant but at the same time render all the old crap that wasn't even close to standards compliant??? So what's the point?!!

Because different kinds of pages are rendered with different rendering engines. The rendering engine that handles all the ugly old hand-written crap is known as "quirks mode" and is full of all their weird kludges that make those pages readable. If the page has the right document type declaration [wikipedia.org], it uses a standards compliance mode. The problem with IE has always been that it didn't implement most of the HTML and CSS specs, so there was little to be gained by forcing it into standards compliance mode. In other words, standards compliance mode wasn't really standards compliant. It didn't help that clueless MS spokespeople would talk about somebody supporting "more CSS features", indicating a nasty lack of understanding of standards issues. Since the specs weren't supported on the #1 browser, there were effectively meaningless.

Apparently that's now changed, and that's a very good thing. Personally, I credit the fact that Gates has given up the role of "software architect" in order to spend more time on his philanthropy. When he left, he seemed to take a lot of organizational arrogance with him.

Somebody is going to point out that ACID2 is not that great an example of real world CSS usage. That's perfectly true (how often do you use CSS to make silly pictures?) but the mere fact that MS has made passing the test a priority indicates a shift in attitude that we should all applaud.

Re:"standards mode"?

[ScytheBlade1 (772156)]

Standards mode is invoked when you specify a strict doctype in the page.

This IS out of the box support. Let's have less false assumptions and cheap shots at Microsoft, okay?

Re:Wonder how long

[Kelson (129150)]

IE requires the user to turn on a special "standards mode" to correctly render STANDARD WEBSITES.

The concept of "standards mode" and "quirks mode" has been around for several years, and is implemented in IE6, IE7, Firefox, and Opera, and for all I know in Gecko as well. The user does not have to flip a switch. The developer has to put some code at the beginning to show that he knows what he's doing, usually in the form of an appropriate DOCTYPE.

Re:Standards Mode?

[Jeremy Visser (1205626)]

"Standards mode" is a browser rendering mode which first appeared in Internet Explorer 6, as a way for Microsoft to get around the Catch-22 of fixing their browser to be more standards compliant, and not breaking so many websites at the same time.

"Standards mode" is triggered by the presence of a proper DOCTYPE, like one of the ones here [wikipedia.org].

"Quirks mode" is a rendering mode triggered by the lack of the DOCTYPE, which causes the browser to emulate many of the bugs that, if fixed, would break lots of sites.

All the major browsers implement standards/quirks mode these days. Internet Explorer 7/8's quirks mode rendering has not changed since IE6, which means, if your non-standards-compliant site worked in IE6, and doesn't use a DOCTYPE, it's not going to further break in IE7/8.

Re:Dec 19?

[BlueVelvet (75124)]

Crazier things are happening *now*. I have a date tonight. With a girl! :3

Re:Sour milk

[JMZero (449047)]

Most likely, You're talking about practices you implemented in IE that wandered from existing standards,

I don't think you have the right historical perspective here. When IE was initially becoming popular, the "standard" was "however it rendered in Netscape" - and to "look at the standard" you needed a knife and some goat entrails. I'm all for MS following standards, but I'm also happy to grant them that choices weren't quite so clear back then - and I can't really begrudge them for some of the decisions they made in that context (even if they seem odd now).

I'm just glad I don't have to do anything with "layers" anymore.

Yes, ACID2 is broken - Server error

[Kelson (129150)]

I noticed the same error on Konqueror 3.5.8, Opera 9.5a, & Firefox 3 on Linux, and on Opera 9.24 and Safari 3.04 on Windows -- all of which are supposed to pass the test.

Earlier today I tried to pull up the webstandards.org website, and couldn't. This got me thinking it might be a server problem.

I looked at the code for the test, and at one point it has an OBJECT where it tries to load the url, http://www.webstandards.org/404/ [webstandards.org]. That should fail, causing the browser to display the fallback content inside the OBJECT element instead.

Guess what? That URL is returning a 200 OK code instead of 404 Not Found, so the compliant browsers are doing what they're supposed to do and displaying the content of that page in a little rectangle with scroll bars, and hiding the fallback content that we would normally see.

When their webmaster fixes the server config, the various compliant browsers should start displaying it correctly again.

In case anyone believes the troll

[Runefox (905204)]

Firefox has Standards Mode, too [runefox.net] (right-click anywhere on a page->View Page Info). It differentiates between "Quirks" mode and Standards-compliance mode. "Quirks" mode is used when invalid markup is detected, or if there's no DOM declared; Standards-compliance mode simply means that the site is being displayed to spec, instead of being cleaned up by the browser's interpretation as to what way it should look. Standards-compliance mode, in theory, should always look the same on every browser (it's why standards *exist*), but as everyone who's done web design knows, that's not the case. That's not to say I support Microsoft, but as a web developer, I have to look forward to the day when most of the audience on the web can view my pages properly, without the need for time-consuming workarounds. In actuality, IE7 really has impacted me to an extent, since none of the old workarounds for IE6 work for it any more, and it still doesn't get things right. So I have to work around IE6, IE7, and any differences that those workarounds cause in browsers like Opera and Firefox who display it right the first time, which is a major headache and waste of time considering there's standards for these browsers to follow.