Safari Passes the Acid2 Test 430
TigerX writes "The Mac web browser Safari has become the first browser to pass the Acid2 test. Acid2 is a CSS/HTML test suite put out by the Web Standards Project (WASP). Developer David Hyatt had been working on the project for the past few weeks. Details can be found at his blog. The patched Safari is not yet avaliable for public consumption. It is unknown when the patches will appear in a public version of Safari."
Re:Go Apple! (Score:3, Insightful)
Another reason why open source is good (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Go Apple! (Score:2, Insightful)
Nick
Re:Purpose of Acid2 (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, don't be so forgiving with bad code. It hurts the world of web development when bad code becomes a de facto "standard."
Re:Safari was already pretty nice, thanks. (Score:5, Insightful)
You're aware you had to enter into a similar contract to like...boot the Mac? Remember that thing you clicked through right before it asked for your name? You know, with the bouncing blue thing?
Re:More to the point (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
We have browsers that can't do standard HTML / CSS because no one writes clean HTML / CSS, and we can't have clean HTML / CSS until we have a browser that supports it correctly.
This is just a small step forward in that fight, and hopefully it will go forward.
Re:Purpose of Acid2 (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that you might want to use them, but you can't, since only 3/5 major browsers support the option. Also, it's easy to say you are up to the standars, another thing to actually be.
I'm a user of CSS, but I still have to check all kinds of browsers to see if it does what I want, which is taking time and time is money.
To just solve this example with including an image would of course be suitable, but how about a whole site? Text is so much more practical, just by being able to copy it. The webpage would eat up much more memory dealing with images too.
We have the same problem with javascript, only that is 10 times more disturbing because if javascript was actually the same all other the place web surfing could be enhanced so much. The only reason people don't like javascript is because the popups, and that's not everything in javascript.
Acid2 is a friggin good one, perhaps people will get up their eyes for it and see for themselfs, I just hope the same goes on for javascript and html too...
Albert "thec" Sandberg
KHTML patches posted on his blog. (Score:3, Insightful)
Web Standards Project = WASP? (Score:3, Insightful)
First they should learn how to spell IMO
=D
Re:More to the point (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Go Apple! (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. I still use OS X 10.2, but the differences in Safari between 10.2 and 10.3 are just astounding. Especially in the areas of CSS and DHTML support. KHTML was always a nice little widget, but Apple seems to have some of the best minds I've ever seen working on this. Not even Microsoft got their act togther this fast! (And they started with Spyglass, a component that was superior to the KHTML one that Apple started with.)
Re:More to the point (Score:1, Insightful)
A stubborn OSS developer.
Apple contributes quite a bit to OSS projects, but tends to do so in the format most convenient to them, which isn't always the format most convenient to the project's maintainers. This results in some developers refusing to integrate Apple's code in to the main branch of their project (for instance gcc still has no Objective-C support in the trunk).
This also results in OSS fanatic
Re:Purpose of Acid2 (Score:5, Insightful)
General misuses and abuses of JS is, and in this general abuses are:
- Popups, of course
- Stupid effects (shitty animated gifs following cursors anyone?)
- Messing with browsers (resizing, changing parts of the global UI, alert boxes)
- Code design so bad that browsers grind to a halt (oh, i so love seing my CPU usage skyrocket to 100% and stay there because i opened a bugged page)
- Slowing the browsing
- Disabling the browsing altogether because of non standard or stupid scripts (mmm, yummy Javascript links, I mean anchor tags are certainly not hip enough for a damn link are they?)
- Probably many other i can't think of right now
"Modern" javascript and the usage of DOM scripting allow wonderful flexibility, and applying the priciples of graceful degradation and progressive enhancement [hesketh.com] while fully decoupling Javascript from HTML/CSS (by putting JS in a separate file and associating it via the Event Handlers, layering a behavioural javascript on top of an existing fully functionnal JS-less website) allows improving every JS-enabled's navigation while not degrading at all JS-disabled's navigation.As Douglas Crockford put it, Javascript is the most misunderstood programming language [crockford.com], and I'd add that it's the one with the most extensive yet qualitatively (sp, more than likely) worst documentation ever.
And yet, finding good javascript tutorials [howtocreate.co.uk] and stunning Javascript reference websites [quirksmode.org] is possible. People just don't bother looking for them...
Re:More to the point (Score:5, Insightful)
IOW there's a big difference between "not breaking the license" and "working well with outside projects".
The GCC changes they make are the same. Some aren't rolled back in and whilst the tree is available, documentation on what the patches are and where you can get them are not (and it's a CVS branch so you can't just do a "svn log" and see the individual commits).
To be fair to Apple about the GCC... (Score:5, Insightful)
And some Apple patches, especially with regards to Objective-C, have made their way into GCC. Maybe they could be doing more, but they're allready doing more than many corperations of their stature.
Error Has No Rights (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Error Has No Rights (Score:3, Insightful)
Couple of things
1) I don't think he was saying that they should not, rather that they do not.
2)Do you think most people care more about their web browser conforming to standards or displaying most web pages properly? Yes, it would be good for browsers to have an option to provide a "full compliance" mode, but if that mode breaks a website, I suspect most people would just turn compliance off, not stop using the site.
Re:Another reason why open source is good (Score:3, Insightful)
So there is a bit of co-operation there, or was a while ago, but it seems to be more a case of patches appearing when the Safari team feel sorry for the KDE team. Now go look at how Red Hat or SUSE have worked with the open source community to see how it should be done.
Yes, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Konqueror still put in place all of the stuff necessary to make this happen. According to his blog, the he's only been working on this since April 12, but Konqueror has been in development for years. That's what we call standing on the shoulders of giants.
Also, I'll be interested to see when Dave/Apple get around to contributing this back to the KDE team.
Their source tree is not acceptable? (Score:4, Insightful)
I suspect it's more of a cultural clash. To someone being paid, being told to take the patches from the source tree is a minor irritant at best. For a volunteer, any extra effort streches allready scarce donated time.
IT section? (Score:3, Insightful)
Seems kinda relevant, what with kudos and all...
Re:Yes, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
So would I, if ever. Thats the beauty of Open Source; someone takes your hard work and leaves you with... ?
Re:Error Has No Rights (Score:2, Insightful)
for what it's worth, i hypothesize that following your prescription would result in the immediate and near-total failure of that browser in the marketplace.
why? let's use firefox as an example, and assume the firefox team takes gecko to 100% compliance.
because there are, in fact, "faulty css/html writers," a non-trivial number of sites may now appear (to the casual web surfer) to render incorrectly. but guess what? IE will continue to display those pages in such a fashion that those same casual users will be of the opinion that it is firefox, not IE, that is behaving "incorrectly." and, of course, perception is 9/10 of reality.
as soon as that happens, firefox can kiss its market share goodbye, because it will have virtually guaranteed IE's victory.
so i disagree that draconian adherence (all at once) to the standards would be a good thing. the process should be gradual, and should be accompanied by an aggressive "education in standards" campaign.
Re:More to the point (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Yes, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I absolutely don't have any insight in this matter. But to me it seems that he is not so happy that they only get a couple of weeks (or rather months) worth of changes in one big chunck, littered with changes specific to Mac OS X. I can understand that this is a pain in the ass to merge back (if you can do it at all). This has nothing to do with being lazy, especially if your working on kHTML as a hobby. And I can also understand that he would have wished for a more fruitful cooperation (maybe being able to see and apply individual patches?).
And he is also explicitly stating that Apple has the right to do what they are doing. He is merely pointing out that people will not understand why the changes are not merged into KDE (quickly or at all), and the developers will get the blame. I can understand him...
Re:More to the point (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/acid3.txt [mozillazine.org] as an example.
In one of the other patches, an APPLE_CHANGES ifdef was actually replaced with entirely cross-platform code.
The KHTML team would understandably like every change in Safari to be packaged up into a nice little independant patch, but it realistically cannot work that way. I'm sure everyone who has tried to contribute to a project maintained by someone else has had to wait before their patch was (or was not) accepted, and Apple really can't wait on the KTML devs. They have a job that needs to get done by a particular deadline (a deadline that doesn't apply to the KHTML devs).
The patches posted by Hyatt look really well done to me, and not at all representative of what Rusin is accusing them.
Re:Argh. I thought I hit Extrans. (Score:1, Insightful)
There's a reason the LGPL set the requirements it did. If the KHTML authors wanted more from Apple, they should have used a different license. You don't hear the BSD guys complaining that Apple does the minimum required by the BSD license, do you? If you pick a certain license for your program, you have no reason to be unhappy when people follow it!
I use the GPL for most of my projects, and the LGPL for a few others. To find that a big-name company (a) used my code, (b) actively developed it, (c) obeyed the license, and (d) threw improved source code at me from time to time -- that would be a *dream*.
10 years ago, for Apple to be using GNU-licensed software would have seemed unthinkable. I guess some people just can't *ever* be happy. ("OK, they're using open-source, they're giving it good publicity, they're actively developing it, they're following the license, and they're giving us source code for shipping products -- but they're not giving it in the easiest format for us to use! They suck!" WTF?)
Re:Apple == not quite so helpful to KDE (Score:1, Insightful)
So let us all bitch at Apple for following the LGPL to the letter, and not following the KDE developer's interpretation of the spirit of LGPL . For whatever (business) reasons, Apple does not provide the changes (in Webcore) to KDE before they can provide it to their clients. By which time it is not "incremental" enough for KDE folks.
Yes, the KDE folks are not getting the recognition they deserve. Sounds like they are also POed that David is getting all the praise (on /., no less ;^).
KDE does deserve all the praise for the broad framework etc. As does David for working on the minutiae (In two weeks, he found a bug in the Acid Test and fixed the rendering bug in Safari (Webcore) and released all the source for it.
Too bad the KDE team, who haven't provided much code/insight in terms of passing the Acid test, want to sulk.
Re:More to the point (Score:3, Insightful)
Zack described Apple using OS X-specific APIs in the KHTML core--which is unfortunate. I also get the feeling that some of Apple's patches does not work well without help from Apple's proprietary libraries. I know I have sometimes rushed something out by making a fix in an area outside a "core" piece so that if I took the core out, it would break in certain situations. Sometimes, it would even prevent "core" from compiling.
As OSS developers, the KHTML team should be diligent in pursuing their cause with Apple. If they (KHTML developers) do not, the situation will get worse as patches pile on top of patches.
Re:Shocked and disappointed (Score:3, Insightful)
At this point, WebCore is more of a fork of KHTML, so the KHTML authors may need to re-engineer a few things that Apple did to the source to improve standards compliance or speed rendering. Apple could have cooperated more closely with the KHTML team, but they chose not to. They could have made their changes to KHTML in a more platform-independent manner, but they chose not to. (And they still could have done it in a way that would leverage OS X's advantages.)
Apple derived benefit from KHTML, but the KHTML team hasn't gotten a reciprocal amount of benefit from Apple. The code came into their hands in a form that was reasonably platform-neutral, which was useful to Apple. Apple polluted the code with platform-specific stuff in a few spots, so it didn't leave their hands in the same state. So much for the promise of Open Source. Apple's actions hurt them in the long run, because more and more people are starting to believe that Apple's commitment to Open Source is more PR than anything.
On the other hand, it's a good sign that at least Apple's engineers are willing to discuss the changes they made to the source, which mitigates the problem of how Apple sends the patches/code back to the KHTML team. So Apple's not being quite so uncooperative as they're being made out to be. But they could have done a far sight better. This kind of cynical profiteering from Open Source serves to discourage others from contributing to Open Source projects, for fear that corporate interests will benefit from free code and give nothing substantial back.