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."
Go Apple! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Go Apple! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Go Apple! (Score:5, Funny)
*ducks*
Re:Go Apple! (Score:4, Funny)
After all, HTML 3.2 is a standard.
Re:Go Apple! (Score:5, Informative)
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.slashdot.or
Re:Go Apple! (Score:5, Informative)
CSS parsers are designed to degrade when they come across things they don't recognise; that's what it's testing.
Re:Go Apple! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Go Apple! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Go Apple! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Go Apple! (Score:2, Insightful)
Nick
Re:Go Apple! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Yes, but... (Score:5, Informative)
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/200
Re:Yes, but... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Yes, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Although it doesn't seem to be very useful [kdedevelopers.org].
Shocked and disappointed (Score:5, Interesting)
While many of the patches were simple logic changes, a few of them had OS X specific code in them which makes them non portable. Hyatt's follow-up comments indicate that he tried to hide many of the Mac-isms behind an abstraction layer so that they could port cleanly to other platforms, but a cursory glance at the patches shows that he didn't hide everything.
So while this is a great win for Apple and for Mac OS X, it's not the boon to KHTML that many thought it would be.
Personally, I'm disappointed that the Safari team would put Mac-specific code into the KHTML engine, making some of their patches impossible to incorporate back into the KHTML baseline. This is the kind of thing I would expect from a novice programmer who's only ever coded for, say, Windows.
(Just a side note to the poster I'm responding to: Most folks who read your comment probably didn't realize the significance of it because they didn't follow the link. A brief summary of what the link is pointing to would have been really useful.)
Re:Shocked and disappointed (Score:3, Insightful)
At this point, WebCore is mor
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
Re:Go Apple! (Score:2)
And you can see (on his blog) the patch that should be applied to the KHTML engine, which means that KHTML users will soon benefit from these (while the release date of these patches in Safari is unknown, since 1.3 and 2.0 just went live with OS 10.4)
well ya know..... (Score:2)
And if that doesn't make you happy, you can always create some new ones.
Re:well ya know..... (Score:3, Funny)
Now what will I use as useless knowledge on slashdot?
Try something arcane like female anatomy.
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:Go Apple! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Go Apple! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Go Apple! (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, the same "schmoe" who happens to be the development lead for the Safari project. Seeing as how he works for Apple, it would most certainly be Apple who did this.
Re:Go Apple! (Score:5, Informative)
Passed test but not available? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Passed test but not available? (Score:5, Funny)
Ahh grasshopper, you are learning the zen of microsoft.
If an O/S works in the forest but no one is around to see, will it still crash for Bill?
Re:Passed test but not available? (Score:2)
I mean, how did he test the test?
Re:Passed test but not available? (Score:3, Informative)
In-Brain Parser. In other words they didn't. In fact there was a bug in the test that Dave Hyatt found by implementing a compliant browser! The ACID2 Test is now at version 1.1 to reflect that bug fix!
More to the point (Score:5, Interesting)
Will the patches appear in Konqueror (KHTML)?
Re:More to the point (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:More to the point (Score:2)
Re:More to the point (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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.
Re:More to the point (Score:5, Informative)
Zack Rusin just blogged about this [kdedevelopers.org].
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: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, i
Re:Konqueror? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:More to the point (Score:3, Interesting)
And the reason its not there is that (like a bunch of other stuff in the apple branch of the GCC tree) is because those patches have a negative impact on something (e.g. a non-apple target, compile time, compile size etc) that apple doesnt care about but that the GCC core (and the GCC community at large) does care about.
But will they share? (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, anyway, good for the dev in question. Will he be contributing his code back to the KHTML project, or are Apple going to try and keep this proprietary?
Re:But will they share? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:But will they share? (Score:4, Informative)
KHTML (Score:4, Informative)
I hope these fixes trickle back down to KHTML soon. In time for KDE 3.5 would be great.
Excelent (Score:2)
It will be nice to have standards complient rendering on OS X and linux .
Re:Use the Source, Luke. (Score:3, Funny)
Hmmm (Score:5, Interesting)
Which does point out the problem with tests like Acid2, which really don't resemble any code in the wild that anyone has ever used. What you end up with is browsers that are brilliant at rendering completely pathological corner cases, but only at the cost of changing some other well-thought-out-but-not-standardised. behaviour.
Now, I admit that this is purely hypothetical, but surely a better guide to browser usability is how well it renders the morass of dodgy XML/HTML that gets sent to it every single day.
Optimise for corner cases, and it possible that all you'll get are really well rendered corner cases.
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.
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
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Informative)
There is where the "quirks mode" [mozilla.org] comes in. The browser should (and is) able to detect whenever something is written after the standard, or not. If it is written in a standard compliant manner, it should be rendered the same everywhere. If it is in quirks mode, it should be rendered different, and the page will behave different.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hmmm (Score:3, Interesting)
Basically, I take issue with the idea that instead of building browsers that rigidly conform to standards, thus forcing the coders to code to standard, we allow sloppy code. It is in fact when browsers are built to try and figure out what you are trying to do that coders are given the ability to write sloppy code.
Why then even create standards? Look at
Another reason why open source is good (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Another reason why open source is good (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Another reason why open source is good (Score:4, Informative)
This is the exact same thing that happened way back when - when safari was first unveiled. Apple submitted a large tar, and then helped the KHTML team decifer it.
Being both a Safari *and* Konq user, this makes me happy.
Suggestion: know what you link
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
Argh. I thought I hit Extrans. (Score:5, Informative)
"Do you have any idea how hard it is to be merging between two totally different trees when one of them doesn't have any history? That's the situation KDE is in. We created the khtml-cvs list for Apple, they got CVS accounts for KDE CVS. What did we get? We get periodical code bombs in the form of them releasing WebCore. Many of us wanted to even sign NDA's with Apple to at least get access to the history of their internal vcs and be able to be merging the changes incrementally, the way they can right now. Nothing came out of it. They do the very, very minimum required by LGPL."
Go read the whole post. Very informative, and kind of sad.
Keep the Drugs of the Streets... (Score:2, Funny)
Dear Safari Acid Test (Score:4, Funny)
I'm testing the Safari Acid now...
Look over there! A pink wildebeest mating with a green giraffe! A blue moongoose mounting a purple elephant! Is that a lion under the zebra? Heavenly stripes galore!
Trippy,
Letter
Tiger or Panther? (Score:2)
Neither, and both. (Score:3, Informative)
The patches are actually to WebKit, which is the actual GUI component that renders the HTML. Both browsers (Safari and Safari RSS) actually use the same rendering component IIRC. As does any other of the zillion of apps on the system that embeds the webkit framework to render HTML.
Of course, the actual changes are in neither version yet. They're still in the development version. We'll have to wait for some apple updates to see the changes.
Me? I'm more interested as a programm
Re:Tiger or Panther? (Score:3, Informative)
It's avaible to Konqueror users though, of course, if they can go through applying the patch to the KHTML engine's source and recompile (or they'll just wait for the next Konqueror version that'll implement these patches)
Re:Tiger or Panther? (Score:4, Informative)
so does opera (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:so does opera (Score:5, Informative)
Sweet baby Jesus in a car seat... (Score:5, Informative)
The term "acid test" dates back to the freaking gold rush days when they would use nitric acid to test for gold.
Don't be such a square. (Score:4, Funny)
It'll make you feel better.
IE (Score:2, Funny)
Re:IE (Score:2)
A leaked version... (Score:5, Funny)
Does this include JavaScript? (Score:2)
I was playing with JavaScript the other day and found that on Safari you cannot change the table cell text by setting style.color property (because it does not exist) while it works great on Firefox. Another example is the toFixed() method of numbers. These little inconsistencies drive me nuts every time I try to do anything with JS, especially because there is very little authoritative info on the web about it. I find that 97% of my time trying to do something in JS is occupied researching incompatibiliti
Firefox Results (Score:2)
Might need a few more months, probably 1.1 will fix that action up.
Re:Firefox Results (Score:5, Informative)
Sadly, Acid2 won't be high priority before Gecko 1.9, which means that firefox won't be fully CSS2 compliant before at least version 1.2.
KHTML patches posted on his blog. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:KHTML patches posted on his blog. (Score:2)
Web Standards Project = WASP? (Score:3, Insightful)
First they should learn how to spell IMO
=D
From WASP website (Score:5, Informative)
Transparent PNGs -- The eyes are encoded as transparent PNGs.
The object element -- The eyes of the face are attached to an object element. Being able to use object (which can have alternative content) is one of the oldest requests from web designers.
Absolute, relative and fixed positioning -- Being able to position elements accurately is important for advanced page layouts.
Box model -- The original Acid test focused on the CSS box model. Acid2 continues in this fine tradition by testing 'height', 'width', 'max-width', 'min-width', 'max-height' and 'min-height'.
CSS tables -- There is nothing wrong with table layouts. It is a powerful layout model which makes sense on bigger screens. However, the table markup is troublesome as it ties the content to these screens. Therefore, being able to specify table layouts in CSS is important.
Margins -- CSS defines accurate algorithms for how margins around elements should be calculated.
Generated content -- The ability to add decorations and annotations to Web pages without modifying the markup has long been requested by authors.
CSS parsing -- Acid2 includes a number of illegal CSS statements that should be ignored by a compliant browser.
Paint order -- We test that overlapping content is painted in the right order. This is not a feature in itself, but a requirement for other features to work correctly.
Line heights -- The Acid2 test checks a few key parts of the CSS inline box model, upon which any standards-compliant Web page depends.
Hovering effects -- One of the elements in the face changes color when you hover over it. Which one?
IT section? (Score:3, Insightful)
Seems kinda relevant, what with kudos and all...
Acid2's Smiley = Excellent Visual Explanation! (Score:5, Interesting)
Quite apart from the merits of the Acid2 test, its use of rendering a smiley face both (a) to be the test itself and (b) to show the quality of the test result ... is clever!
Most tests create an abstract "score" such as "85% compliant" which can be rendered by a graphic, such as a pie chart, but which is fundamentally different from the test itself. This abstraction process is extra work both for the researcher and for the reader. There is also the danger that it can be misleading. Edward Tufte [edwardtufte.com] has written on this at length in "Visual Explanations" and other books.
To put the test & the results together in a meaningful, intuitive package, as Acid2 seems to have done, is just great!
Firefox failed? (Score:3)
Konqueror (Score:3, Informative)
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:Purpose of Acid2 (Score:5, Informative)
Acid2 is a test page for web browsers published by The Web Standards Project (WaSP). It has been written to help browser vendors make sure their products correctly support features that web designers would like to use. These features are part of existing standards but haven't been interoperably supported by major browsers. Acid2 tries to change this by challenging browsers to render Acid2 correctly before shipping.
Acid2 is a complex web page. It uses features that are not in common use yet, because of lack of support, and it crams many tests into one page. The aim has been to make it simple for developers and users to check if a browser passes the test. If it does, the smiley face on the left will appear. If something is wrong, the face will be distorted and/or shown partly in red.
The purpose of this document is to explain how Acid2 works. The markup behind Acid2 is peculiar in that it attempts, on one single page, to test many different features. We do not envision or recommend that normal Web pages should be written this way, but it is appropriate for a test page. At first sight, the source code is hard to understand, but the guided tour offered in this document will explain it in some detail. The guide assumes a technical understanding of HTML, CSS and PNG.
Re:Purpose of Acid2 (Score:5, Informative)
Basicaly the point being not in obscure code , but in rendering normal code properly
Web designers/developers will use the code when it is avaliable in their arsenal.
As of now , the newest version of webcore is the only rendering engine that can do it so congratulations to apple(and ofcourse the khtml team
Re:Purpose of Acid2 (Score:2)
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
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:Firefox? (Score:4, Informative)
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:Safari was already pretty nice, thanks. (Score:4, Informative)
Change the entry "when you insert a music CD open iTunes" to your favourite app. Bob's your uncle.
Good luck finding something better than itunes by the way.
Re:Safari was already pretty nice, thanks. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What is it supposed to test ? (Score:2)
Re:What is it supposed to test ? (Score:3, Informative)
Acid2 page is not supposed to validate because it tests both compliance with how things should be rendered and with what shouldn't be rendered at all.
Re:The acid2 test doesn't use valid CSS... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The acid2 test doesn't use valid CSS... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The acid2 test doesn't use valid CSS... (Score:3, Informative)
This page states that:
"Acid2 includes a number of illegal CSS statements that should be ignored by a compliant browser."
Re:CSS (Score:3, Informative)