Task Forces' Latest
Accessibility TF
The Accessibility Task Force works with accessibility organizations, technology vendors and others to help promote Web accessibility.
Call-to-action: Save the UT Accessibility Institute
The University of Texas is closing its Accessibility Institute today. Non-profit Knowbility has started a petition to save it. Though you may not have heard of the Accessibility Institute, you have been influenced by its work. Its late founder, Dr. John ...
By James Craig | August 29th, 2008
Acid3
Acid3 is a test of dynamic browser capabilities which exists to encourage browser vendors to focus on interoperability.
Acid3 receptions and misconceptions and do we have a winner?
Acid3 progress and what it really means.
By Lars Gunther | October 2nd, 2008
Dreamweaver TF
The Dreamweaver Task Force works with Macromedia's engineers to improve standards compliance and accessibility in Dreamweaver.
Announcing the Adobe Task Force
Today WaSP announced that the Dreamweaver Task Force will be renamed the Adobe Task Force to reflect a widened scope.
By Stephanie Sullivan | March 10th, 2008
Education TF
The Education Task Force works with educational institutions to promote instruction of Web standards and standards-compliant public sites.
Announcing the WaSP Curriculum Framework
Since March 2008, the WaSP Education Task Force has begun working on the WaSP Curriculum Framework, a collection of tools aiming to identify skill sets and competencies that aspiring Web professionals need to acquire to prepare them for their chosen careers, as well as resources that will help both educators and students.
By Steph Troeth | July 31st, 2008
Microsoft TF
WaSP and Microsoft work collaboratively on issues related to Web standards support in Microsoft products, including Internet Explorer.
Microsoft rethinks IE8’s default behavior
Perhaps it was our complaining or perhaps it was a reconsideration of its own interoperability principles, but Microsoft has decided to change its course on IE8 and will opt-in to its new standards mode by default.
By Aaron Gustafson | March 3rd, 2008
Street Team
The WaSP Street Team runs community projects to get the message about Web standards out everywhere.
Street Team: Make Your Mark
The WaSP Street Team launches its first community project: bookmarks which you can place in libraries, schools, and bookstores to help signal to readers that the material is out of date.
By Glenda Sims | March 8th, 2008
The Web Standards Project is a grassroots coalition fighting for standards which ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all.
Recent Buzz
Acid3 receptions and misconceptions and do we have a winner?
By Lars Gunther | October 2nd, 2008
Acid3 progress and what it really means.
Acid3 is probably the most visible thing that WaSP has done the last year. When Google Chrome was launched almost every review included our little test as an indicator of standards support. It is often mentioned in blogs and articles. Now the Surfin Safari blog has announced that the team behind Webkit considers that they have passed the test in every aspect. And no doubt this is a great achievement. Congratulations to the Webkit team, but even more we would like to congratulate the average web user - who in a few years thanks to our test we hope will get a better experience!
What exactly does it mean to pass the Acid3 test?
There has been some confusion about the test and its importance. Some people have been saying things like ”my browser does not pass the test and I have no problems using it”. Quite a few other people seem to think that Webkit and Gogi (Opera’s internal build) passed the test already in March – despite the fact that neither team has made this claim.
To answer these misconceptions we need to address the issue of what exactly is being tested and how. The main part of test is automated through JavaScript, a sort of test harness that runs 100 subtests. Getting a score of 100 is not the same as passing Acid3 – a common misconception, or perhaps an oversimplification.
Many subtests are high on a developer’s wish list: Full CSS 3 selectors support, media queries, SVG fonts. Admittedly a few others test edge cases and more esoteric features – but the test was supposed to be a significant challenge!
The second part is a rendering test. Some of the scripted subtests produce results that affect the rendering, but there are also rendering issues that come in addition to these. Some of them are high on many designers’ wish list: Text shadow, downloadable fonts, and display: inline-block.
The third test is the so called “smoothness” criterion. It is basically a speed test. No subtest may take too long – and especially subtest 26 is challenging. Compared to Slickspeed, Sun Spider, the V8 test suite or Dromaeo Acid3 is not so thorough. It will give some indication of a browsers speed, though.
This is exactly as planned. Acid3 was not meant to be the one and only indication of a browser’s performance. In fact many other test suites are far more important. (We provide links to some of them below.)
Testing is really important. Without tests that check how well a certain browser follows standards, i.e. applies mark up and displays the result correctly, we can never guarantee an open, fully interoperable web.
A highly visible test like Acid 3 hopefully helps to promote such interoperability. One can also hope that all the other tests will receive the attention they deserve. Writing them is not a glamorous task, but highly essential.
Apart from improving its support for CSS in its browser, Microsoft has contributed 2524 test cases to the CSS 2.1 test suite. For that they deserve credit!
We all know that Internet Explorer currently lag a bit behind the other browsers in standards compliance. Indeed they are last of the big ones to pass Acid2 and they fail Acid3 more than any other browser. But can we declare Webkit as the best rendering engine now that they pass it?
Of course not. Since Acid3 is only one indicator of many. Webkit’s achievement is great – and there are many other really exciting things they are pioneering, like CSS transitions and transformations. And with Squirrelfish Extreme JavaScript performance looks really exciting as well.
In other regards Opera is a clear leader. It is the only browser that supports more than 90 % of the SVG test suite. It is the only browser that implements Web Forms 2.0, currently being merged into HTML 5. They supported media queries and SMIL long before Acid3 came out.
Gecko (with Spidermonkey) is no longer an underdog. Besides the fun of meeting the technical challenge it is not hard to guess that the Webkit team rushed to pass Acid3 also for marketing reasons – that they perhaps need a bit more than Mozilla. Mozilla concentrated on releasing Firefox 3 before Acid 3 received any real attention. Now that they are working on it they are impressive in another way, compared to Webkit. Looking at the discussions for bug 410460 and its related bugs, it is clear that any improvement must be rock solid. Work often continues even when a particular feature is good enough for Acid3.
In fact, there is actually one open issue still in Acid 3 that might temporarily cause Webkit to become incompliant again. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2008Sep/0218.html. I rest assured that a fix probably already is being made, though.
Perhaps one can compare this to a race where you are supposed to run a distance, with a bucket of water. One competitor crosses the finishing line first, the other, on the other hand, has not lost a single drop from his bucket. Both have done great. (By the way, internal builds of Firefox get a score of 97 now, and downloadable fonts work on Windows and Mac.)
In the end the winner is neither Webkit, Opera, Mozilla nor Microsoft, but developers who get more powerful features to work with and more consistency between browsers. And that means that in the long run they are able to focus on user experience, not browser shortcomings. This means that the true winner of Acid3 is anybody who surfs the web.
Some other test suites for your review:
- Cascading Style Sheets level 2 revision 1
- Selectors
- CSS Color Module
- Collection of DOM tests
- SVG
- Web Forms
- Canvas
Filed in Acid3, Browsers, Bugs | Comments (1)