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Look towards the bottom of
http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/

Note: some 827 people (rough estimate, contents may have settled during shipping) have written to point out that the CSS used in the test is invalid. This is deliberate, as a means of exposing the ability of user agents to handle invalid CSS properly.

Why does the CSS test page itself contain bad CSS code?

Because the standard says how broken code should be handled.

See this link and this link for more info.

Why does the CSS test page itself contain bad CSS code?

Because the standard says how broken code should be handled.

See this link and this link for more info.

Yes, part of the test is to make sure the broswer handle errors in the correct manner. Not only should you render a perfect page correctly, you should also render an incorrect page following the specified standard.

From the about page of the Acid2 browser test site:-
Note: some 827 people (rough estimate, contents may have settled during shipping) have written to point out that the CSS used in the test is invalid. This is deliberate, as a means of exposing the ability of user agents to handle invalid CSS properly.

Why does the CSS test page itself contain bad CSS code? Is this test really valid?

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?profi le=css2&warning=2&uri=http%3A//www.webstandards.or g/act/acid2/test.html%23top

Errors
URI : http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/test.html#to p

        * Line: 44

            Parse Error - second two]
        * Line: 89 Context : .parser-container div

            Invalid number : color orange is not a color value : orange
        * Line: 95 Context : .parser

            Property error doesn't exist : }
        * Line: 98 Context : .parser

            Property m rgin doesn't exist : 2em
        * Line: 98

            Parse error - Unrecognized : };
        * Line: 100 Context : .parser

            Invalid number : width only 0 can be a length. You must put an unit after your number : 200
        * Line: 101 Context : .parser

            Parse Error - ! error;
        * Line: 101 Context : .parser

            Parse error - Unrecognized : }

-Joe

Unless I'm thinking of the wrong acid test, FF 1.0.6 still doesn't spit out the smiling face at WaSP's acid 2 test, so it can't say much, but then again, ever try to load the acid2 test in IE? horrible. I just want to be able to use the same CSS file for IE as I do for Firefox, and have it be standards compliant. Oh well, good thing I don't care about how my sites look in IE, but it is nice that they are trying to be compliant!

Anyway, also keep in mind the rumors that even FF was not acid compliant out of the door...

(Acid 1 is obviously another story)

According to the Web Standards Project site (a huge W3C standards advocate) they are meeting and working with the IE engineers to improve standards compatibility.

Kind of a surprising announcement, but I really hope MS is actively pursuing this. It will make the world a much better place for us developers.

Oh, sorry. Firefox doesn't pass the acid test, either.

Sure, Firefox may not pass the acid test, but look at Look how IE6 renders, err, butchers it. It looks like the smiley face has been blown to bits. And then look at how it is supposed to render. Firefox seems to be much closer to me...

Konqueror passes it, as does iCab.

http://webstandards.org/buzz/archive/2005_06.html# a000526

I just tried Firefox 1.06 on The Second Acid Test and it looks like it fails as well. I guess that now means Firefox is just as half-baked as IE7 if you go with the standard ranking system on Slashdot. Not that anyone will actually acknowledge that, of course.

From Dave Shea: IE7 CSS Updates
From Joe Clark IE7 The saga begins
And finally Molly Holzschlag, speaking on behalf of WaSP: That's why it's called beta

Yes, it is obviously a fanboy generated screed. I would like to see a real review of the browser by real web content developers who know about real UI design and what areas current browsers need improvement on. Wait there are a few reactions:

A reaction by Molly Holzschlag of thewebstandards.org, a reviewby Dave Shea of (CSS Zen Garden fame), or a review/reaction list on well known designer Shaun Inmans blog. But leave it to slashdot to link to some MS fanboy just to get a rise out of the flamthrower league.

observe.

This is the result of the acid2 test, a test designed to rate the CSS compliance of a browser. At the moment, afaik Safari is the only fully compliant browser, with Firefox and Opera following closely behind.

This a great shame - I had naively hoped that Microsoft would fix their broken browser, and surprise us all by conforming to the standards. They had a great opportunity to really put IE back on the right track, and it looks like they've blown it.

Good job Microsoft - you're completely out of touch with what the web development community actualy wants.

was hoping for some CSS improvements. When I first installed it, I immediately went to a few of the more difficult CSS sites, to see if they'd render correctly. Nope - no such luck. See http://meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/ for example.

Out of curiosity, does it pass the Acid2 test?

--Paul

Tested it on a few sites where i'm currently working and they all still work. That's a good start if it didn't break anything.

It fails the Acid2 Test pretty spectacularly - but then what doesn't!

What I'm looking forward to is when the stock Konqueror will pass the acid2 test. Anyone know when that's slated to happen?

It doesn't tell me anything, nor should it tell YOU anything.

My point was that you can't take a statement (supposedly) made about why they won't implement CSS2 and claim that it proves they won't implement CSS2.1 either.

By the way, you might be even more interested in this:

http://www.webstandards.org/buzz/archive/2005_07.h tml#a000533

And this:

http://www.webstandards.org/buzz/archive/2005_07.h tml#a000539

It doesn't tell me anything, nor should it tell YOU anything.

My point was that you can't take a statement (supposedly) made about why they won't implement CSS2 and claim that it proves they won't implement CSS2.1 either.

By the way, you might be even more interested in this:

http://www.webstandards.org/buzz/archive/2005_07.h tml#a000533

And this:

http://www.webstandards.org/buzz/archive/2005_07.h tml#a000539

Good point, but I think I'm going to go out of my way to help any STANDARDS COMPLIANT browser win the day. So, I'll wait and see when IE7 comes out how it scores on the compliance tests. Then what I'll do is put one of those really annoying hovering layers on all of my websites if the browser != Firefox or a small handful of others like Opera. Will IE7 be on this list? I would let it in if they do their job. I really seriously doubt it'll be more compliant to web standards than Firefox is today.

The only thing that benefits from the use of a table is tabular data - that's its intended purpose. It should never be used for layout. Use CSS.

h tags aren't a burden, they are essential - they define the structure of your document.

the font tag is obsolete. Once again, use CSS.

Learn web standards, CSS, and XHTML and you will find yourself in a happy place.

Submitted for your approval: Mr. Andy Clarke, creative director of his own web and media design firm, Stuff and Nonsense. He has designed, among other things, the web portal for Disney UK, the WWF (that's Wildlife, not Wrestling) UK, and the British Heart Foundation.

Mr. Clark is also a member of the Web Standards Project, and as such has a good deal of weight in the evangelism of web standards.

Of particular interest is his own blog site, And All That Malarkey, which takes on a dramatically different appearance depending on whether you use (a) anything else, or (b) Internet Explorer. This summer, if you can only look at one page in two different browsers side-by-side, let this be the one. You won't be disappointed.

The goal of any web developer worth his salt is to make something universally compatible, intuitive, functional, AND good looking regardless of extensions or security settings.

The goal of any web developer worth his salt is to make something universally compatible, intuitive, functional, AND good looking regardless of extensions or security settings.

The Second Acid Test

Google is the biggest blind reader. Might they take some lessons from web standards in design of the OS.

Now if the user is blind and deaf, I'm reminded of the best Doctor Who episode ever, Curse of the Fatal Death . Jonathon Pryce played the best Master ever too. Rowan Atkinson starred as ninth The Doctor. They ended up on a planet where the inhabitants communicated through flatulence.

This got me to thinking that if you created a FartOS people really could say your OS stinks.

iCab recently passed the second Acid test.

I'm a die hard firefox user, but firefox doesnt even pass the acid test. Don't complain that "firefox is being alienated" when it doesnt even pass rudimentary web tests

> How exactly do you detect if your user has javascript disabled without going client-side? Javascript is obviously a must for DHTML.

Well, yes. Currently you have to go client side if you want to tell if JavaScript is enabled. I didn't say otherwise. I was advancing the potential advantages of having an accurate user agent string. Perhaps some additional (like JavaScript enabling) info should be passed along to the server as well. After all, we already pass language and compression handling capabilities.

However, regardless of whether you test for Javascript client-side or some hypothetical server side mechanism, if JavaScript actually is disabled, then there is very little you can do to detect the version or capabilities of the browser unless you go by the user agent string.

And even if JavaScript is disabled, you still need this info to send out the correct CSS (unless you rely on CSS hacks). So user agent string is all you have to go by.

Amazingly enough, in certain cases, having incompatible CSS can actually affect whether the page loads or just hangs the browser.

In principle, CSS should ignore things it doesn't understand. In practice, some browsers don't handle things like that well (cough Firefox). Usually, the best you can hope for is that the CSS parser will skip over CSS attribute names it doesn't understand. But some parsers can get hung up on values they don't understand for attribute names they do understand. CSS is supposed to degrade gracefully (and most times it does) but as you push the envelope on newer (version specific) capabilities, you start to run into problems.

> I'm a huge proponent of (as others have since posted in replies to the GP) detecting if your browser has the feature you need on the client-side, and working from there.

I used to believe that too (and I tend to code that way by habit and necessity).
I was a big believer in the original WASP http://www.webstandards.org/
I believed in the "level 5 browser" concept. And in the DOM "standard" concept (with suitable workarounds for IE of course)

However, at the time, the test was supposed to be

if(document.getElementById)

Unfortunately Opera didn't have createElement (because it had no reflow capability) but they got WASP rubber stamped anyways. So much for the concept of "level 5 browsers" supporting DOM.

When Netscape 6.0 came out (and the next few subsequent ones) The model was sufficiently hosed that elements could not be relied on to be adjacent to each other (some unwanted inter cell gaps were added). Version detection was the only possible answer and client side detection was the only reliable way, but detecting versions in this way assumes that there will always be a JavaScript feature you can test for on the same version of a bug that isn't discoverable by JavaScript. At the time of Netscape 6.0 finding JavaScript reachable differences between versions was a highly target-rich situation.

More recently, the Firefox DOM has stabilized, and going forward, you may not be able to rely on a convenient test.

Note: this is not to say that WASP failed to achieve its goals (although goals are easier to reach by lowering the bar just before attaining them). WASP did help a lot (even if they had minimal impact on MSIE)

With proper OO JS there is no need for code to be "sprinkled everywhere with little browser validation tests" - you only need make your test once, your objects handle it from ther on.

What I was referring to was the idea that you have to add "if(ie5)" or "if(event.preventDefault)" throughout cross-browser framework code. This is because the code can be entered by application developers at any point, so detection must be placed inside any exposed API that needs it (and ECMA 262.3 has no way to make things private). I presume, most of us who code cross-browser frameworks have gotten used to it, but it

Just knowing HTML and CSS does not result in web pages that are easy to use and accessible.

Of course not, it takes a professional to know all that stuff. This book is not for a professional, in fact the reviewer mentions that right off the top.

Anyways, does this book cover XHTML at all? And what about CSS 2.0?

Seeing as how Molly Holzschlag is a member of the Web Standards Project, I'd assume she's presenting up-to-date information.

That said, I remember Molly's articles in Web Design Techniques back in the day, and found them to be very fluffy and a bit self-important. Hopefully she doesn't come off that way in a how-to book such as this.

It's noticeably faster than the version that ships with Tiger (and yes, it passes Acid2

"What you don't know about testing, would float a battleship."

It's noticeably faster than the version that ships with Tiger (and yes, it passes Acid2 :)

Error handling is just the 8th item out of 11 items tested

Couldn't have put that better, could you huh?

Acid2 tests a lot of corner-case mis-constructions of CSS, and tests that the browser handles the cock-up in the prescribed manner. It doesn't actually test that _correct_ CSS is handled correctly.

This is the second or third time I've seen this posted in this article alone. You are completely wrong. You would know this if you had actually read the code or even just the guided tour.

The guided tour explains that there are a number of features tested; it lists eleven areas of the specifications that are tested, and error handling is just one of them. The vast majority of the test is testing that correct CSS is handled correctly.

Where is everyone getting this misinformation?

This has been featured on Slashdot before. The Acid 2 test is a web browser standards compliancy test, and it applies to all web browsers not just Konqueror and Safari. These are just the first two that can pass the test. The others will hopefully follow later.

Take the Acid 2 Test.

Acid2 is a test page, written to help browser vendors ensure proper support for web standards in their products.

Recently, one of the Safari developers announced that Safari (the HTML parsing part of which is Webcore, which is derived from KDE's KHTML component) now passed the Acid 2 test. This led to a lot of comment, on Slashdot and elsewhere, asking when Konqueror (KDE's web browser) would pass Acid 2. This led to a post by a KDE developer saying that Webcore and KHTML had diverged significantly, and this is turn led to a lot of badly informed comment (mostly on Slashdot), slagging of KDE, Apple, or both.

Happily KDE and Apple seem to be working relatively well together, and this current announcement indicates that the KHTML developers have worked through all Apple's Webcore patches related to Acid 2, using the ones they can, and rewriting the ones they can't. Konqueror now becomes the second mainstream browser to pass the Acid 2 test.

http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/

basically it's a rigorous test that ensures that a browser has all the goodies that web developers have been lusting after forever.

It seems nice, but when will the Gecko engine pass the Acid 2 test?

Does it pass the Acid2 test yet?

Wouldn't Amaya (W3C's browser) be compliant? Granted, it sucks horribly, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't totally compliant.

Then suprise is your meal of the day. Amaya not only failed the acid2 test, but actually did much worse than even Firefox. Here's a screenshot for your amusement.

Here was the test page you revealed to me. I commend that this is a verry accurate test.

The reference to a correct webbrowsers's interpretation of the acid2 test was revealed here and I believe that it is a picture of a happy-faced man.

The actual acid2 test is meant to compare to the happy-faced man? My location at the moment, the clocks all say midnight and there is a full moon. I think the reference page is lying; it's not a happy-faced man, but a were-metroidman from Planet Zebes and this is the logical explanation for Firefox's true and correct interpretation. Heil Firefox (extends straight-arm at eye-height)!

Here was the test page you revealed to me. I commend that this is a verry accurate test.

The reference to a correct webbrowsers's interpretation of the acid2 test was revealed here and I believe that it is a picture of a happy-faced man.

The actual acid2 test is meant to compare to the happy-faced man? My location at the moment, the clocks all say midnight and there is a full moon. I think the reference page is lying; it's not a happy-faced man, but a were-metroidman from Planet Zebes and this is the logical explanation for Firefox's true and correct interpretation. Heil Firefox (extends straight-arm at eye-height)!

Here was the test page you revealed to me. I commend that this is a verry accurate test.

The reference to a correct webbrowsers's interpretation of the acid2 test was revealed here and I believe that it is a picture of a happy-faced man.

The actual acid2 test is meant to compare to the happy-faced man? My location at the moment, the clocks all say midnight and there is a full moon. I think the reference page is lying; it's not a happy-faced man, but a were-metroidman from Planet Zebes and this is the logical explanation for Firefox's true and correct interpretation. Heil Firefox (extends straight-arm at eye-height)!

firefox does not render the web according to a standard. check this test if you dont believe me:

http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/

no browser renders the web according to the standards. have you ever tried writing a website to work across all browsers?

even safari (the only browser so far to pass acid2) doesn't render according to standards - they had to hack the code to make it render the parts of the standards that acid2 touched on (not the entire standard).

Firefox has a bug, deal with it.

Safari only passed the Acid 2 Test because the developer David Hyatt spent time over two weeks to make it pass.

I'm not saying that this is a bad thing, in fact it's an excellent thing. But the fact is Safari, Mozilla and MSIE all failed the Acid 2 test when it was released. Using MSIE I see red. lol.

Now Safari passes. And no doubt each would fail several more tough tests. No one test can prove a superior rendering engine, unless it was 10 MB big and tested every [X]HTML/CSS1,2,3/JavaScript specification in various scenarios.

I'm looking foward to getting a Mac Mini and seing how good Safari is. It will also allow me to develop web pages against Safari for the first time.

http://webstandards.org/act/acid2/guide.html

The test was designed to check the browser implementations of the newer CSS standards.

That's their pitch, and that's how everybody is reporting on it. Dig into the details, and discover that this isn't true:

In order for row 1 to be positioned correctly, we assume that fragment identifiers cause scrolling to occur up to the top padding edge (or maybe top border edge, that isn't tested) of the element, and not its top margin edge or top content edge. This is a common convention, but is not described in a specification.

In other words, you can correctly implement the standards, and still render this wrong. So it's not a test of standards compliance (in the sense of 'css standards'; a "de-facto standard" is not a standard in the sense people are talking about here).

I don't know how many more things like this they rely on that aren't standards; I read this particular one right at the beginning, for row #1, and bailed reading the rest of the doc.