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Actually, IE6 was the first after WaSP complained about IE 5.5:
http://archive.webstandards.org/ie55.txt

http://www.webstandards.org/2012/02/09/call-for-action-on-vendor-prefixes/

Without web developers including all prefixes plus a non-prefixed version of every experimental CSS rule, the state we were in with the IE monopoly of pseudo-standards becomes a -webkit- prefix monopoly of pseudo-standards.

In fact, WaSP was asking for it as early as 2000:
http://archive.webstandards.org/wfw/ieah.html

Err, the CSS 2.1 spec is not a proper recommendation yet. It's a candidate, though.

CSS 3 is tested by the Acid3 test [reference 1], [reference 2].

Let's take a trip down memory lane.

Network protocol stack: TCP/IP
Application protocols: HTTP, MIME
File format: HTML, GIF, JPEG
Security protocol: SSL (designed by their main competitor)
Scripting language: JavaScript (designed by their main competitor)
User profiling: Cookies (designed by their main competitor)

If there is anything that could on the long run kill proprietary, monoplies (sic), vendor lockin, etc, etc. then it is IE 3. During the early browser wars, Microsoft tried to use open standards as a club.

A 100/100 however does *not* indicate a pass, browsers need to pass all the tests at over 30fps to pass the whole test.

Only when running on a MacBook Pro, according to Hixie. Phones and netbooks with lesser CPUs need not run at 30 fps to pass, according to WaSP.

It's not fucking rocket science. Yes it is. Many years ago, I implemented an embedded web server with custom slider controls in Javascript. Try as I may, I could not get the sliders to render the same in IE and Netscape. (Yes, I know, should have done a conditional and used completely different code for each browser. Ever hear of "deadlines"?) So I eventually had to give up and just make it work with IE. Hopefully the situation has improved by then, but the main problem is that the most popular browsers out there are not standards compliant. Get back to me when Firefox and IE pass the ACid3 Browser Test, 'cause right now they both fail. (IE fails quite spectacularly.) Opera, on the other hand, supposedly passes with flying colors.

There are 220 messages from @microsoft.com, out of almost 20,000 messages on the mailing list of the HTML WG, and many of those have been Chair-related administrative issues - I only remember a handful of occasions where any Microsoft employees offered feedback on the spec (though they wrote some tests too). The editor says: "Personally I would like Microsoft to get more involved with HTML 5. They've sent very little feedback over the years, far less than the other browser vendors. Even when asking them about their opinion on features they are implementing I rarely get any feedback."

(A lot of the spec is indirectly contributed by Microsoft, via reverse-engineering their implementations (for old features like parsing, and newer ones like drag-and-drop and contenteditable), but that's not really the same thing.)

The blog entry is quite misleading (or maybe just assimilated). The market share of MSIE has only gone down as much as the market share of MS Windows has gone down. It can be that Windows has disappeared at a rate of 5% - 10% per year recently, but Microsoft is fighting back by tying IE to other products to block competition. That other product is MS Windows.

MSIE must be removed from MS Windows. Or better yet, just ditch MS Windows and save your economy.

You have a different definition of "fine" than I do, then, since in my Firefox 3.0.10, the smiley is missing its eyes and has a red box over them instead.

Apparently the Acid2 on webstandards.org Acid2 on acidtests.org behave differently. Acid2 on webstandards.org renders instantly, but Acid2 on acidtests.org has a red box until the "Connecting to damowmow.com"/"Waiting for damowmow.com" disappears from the status bar, and then the red box is replaced with eyes. But given the slow response time and intermittent timeouts of the version on acidtests.org today, I think acidtests.org might be slashdotted.

Actually, IE 8 passes the Acid 2 test (yes, they are last, but its an improvement). Not to mention that Microsoft contributed 2524 test cases to the CSS 2.1 test suite. I'm a web developer, and I know the horrors of developing for multiple browsers (especially IE), but I have to give Microsoft some credit for their interest in standards in this coming IE version.

Also, the acid tests are just one indicator of how well a browser does standards. To make it the defining standards test would not be completely fair. More info on that here.

I want the same page to display the same way on Konqueror, Safari, IEWhatever, Chrome (please, a marketing guy needs a spanking), Opera, or whatever. Stop for a while and get it right guys.

well, getting there...

IE8, Opera9, Webkit- and Mozilla-based browsers all pass. And that's meant to highlight the vast majority of edge cases.

However when I navigate here: http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html in the Chrome browser it fails.

It works fine when I try it. Windows XP, 32-bit, normal-sized fonts.

Perhaps you should find out what Web Standards are really about.

http://www.webstandards.org/about/mission/

Clearly it is not what you think.

For a lot of companies, especially companies struggling to break into the online space, lowering their development costs by 30-40% could justify leaving out 10% of their potential customer base.

Actually by designing a standards compliant website you can increase your potential customer base. A standards compliant website is easier for search engines to index and once done can raise ranking. So more people would be able to reach your website, even those using the dominant IE browsers.

The Acid3 test is a NEW test that uses/tests the NEW feature that the CSS3 intoduces.

Let's do exactly what you suggest, and "RTFM". From the Acid3 page at webstandards.org, with links to the specifications and dates added by me:

Here is the list of specifications tested:

• DOM2 Core [specification published in 2000.]
• DOM2 Events [specification published in 2000.]
• DOM2 HTML [specification published in 2003.]
• DOM2 Range [specification published in 2000.]
• DOM2 Style (getComputedStyle, ...) [specification published in 2000.]
• DOM2 Traversal (NodeIterator, TreeWalker) [specification published in 2000.]
• DOM2 Views (defaultView) [specification published in 2000.]
• ECMAScript [specification published in 1997, although I could only locate the third edition, published in 1999.]
• HTML4 (<object>, <iframe>, ...) [specification published in 1997.]
• HTTP (Content-Type, 404, ...) [specification published in 1999.]
• Media Queries [specification published in 2002.]
• Selectors (:lang, :nth-child(), combinators, dynamic changes, ...) [specification published in 2001 , with some of it part of the CSS 2.0 specification published in 1998 .]
• XHTML 1.0 [specification published in 2000.]
• CSS2 (@font-face) [specification published in 1998.]
• CSS2.1 ('inline-block', 'pre-wrap', parsing...) [specification published in 2007.]
• CSS3 Color (rgba(), hsla(), ...) [specification published in 2003.]
• CSS3 UI ('cursor') [specification published in 2004.]
• data: URIs [specification published in 1998.]
• SVG (SVG Animation, SVG Fonts, ...) [specification published in 2001.]

As you can see, the majority of the Acid3 test is comprised of behaviour described in specifications published years ago, with a substantial portion of them over five years old and some over a decade old.

CSS3 intoduces many changes,

Actually, CSS 3 is not a single specification, but a group of

possibly a newbie HTML question but, when you go to http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html it shows one bit of text, and when you go to http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html#top it shows another. How did they do that? I can't figure it out.

possibly a newbie HTML question but, when you go to http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html it shows one bit of text, and when you go to http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html#top it shows another. How did they do that? I can't figure it out.

You should read. The explanation that he gave, I will now give, in my own words, hoping that you will read them correctly this time.

The portion of the acid2 test that is at issue with IE8 here works like this:

1. The test has markup that points to an object at http://www.webstandards.org/404/; basically, the object's not there, on purpose.
2. The test has subsequent markup that contains a data: URI with embedded replacement/fallback content.

What should happen?

Two claims:

1. MS IE team: Because the lark document resides on a different domain if you run the test from another site, they feel it's insecure to check some other domain's content like that.
2. Rest of us: We acknowledge that it is in fact nice of them to be security minded in this way, BUT the fallback content is still there, embedded in the test, and they should go ahead and render it if they aren't able to get the first-ordered content because of a 404 OR because they are paranoid.

It's content designed to be used in the place of the real content if for whatever reason (offline browsing? paranoia? maybe the original content was eaten by a grue?)

Who cares if they're ACID2 compliant anyway? That's old news now... Let me know when they can pass ACID3

Sort of. Their response was to claim that because the failure didn't occur on the original test (ignoring this, where IE8 also breaks), that the mirrors are unfair because they test something which the original did not.

IE8's behavior is definitely wrong (and has nothing to do with XSS), but Microsoft claims the original test didn't test that particular behavior, so failing on that doesn't mean they fail the original test.

It's not that big of a deal since this will most likely be resolved before the next release.

Sort of. Their response was to claim that because the failure didn't occur on the original test (ignoring this, where IE8 also breaks), that the mirrors are unfair because they test something which the original did not.

IE8's behavior is definitely wrong (and has nothing to do with XSS), but Microsoft claims the original test didn't test that particular behavior, so failing on that doesn't mean they fail the original test.

It's not that big of a deal since this will most likely be resolved before the next release.

...make sure you copy all the files the test depends on, and make hard-coded links such as http://www.webstandards.org/404/ to point to your copy. Not rocket science.

I just want to the Acid2 test in OmniWeb 5.6, FireFox 2.0.0.12, and Safari 3.0.4, all the current stable releases of the browsers I have installed. Only FireFox failed. What good is it to "pass" the test if you don't continue with regression testing to make sure that future versions pass, too? Exactly what version of FireFox did pass Acid2? If "public" versions over a year ago worked, why doesn't the current release version?

I find it very likely that WebKit is going to be every bit as much an agent for change as Gecko has been.

Try reading the Acid3 test description, which is entirely relevant to this thread. It does not appear that Acid3 tests CSS3 selectors. I don't think that KHTML developers are contributing much to Safari doing well on Acid3. It's mostly Safari developers.

It's worth mentioning that although most sites allow navigation like http://webstandards.org/ (note: the no www) this is also considered a cross domain access as www.webstandards.org != webstandards.org. This will also cause us to fail the ACID2 test and render the picture that you see above. So please type www.webstandards.org!

It's worth mentioning that although most sites allow navigation like http://webstandards.org/ (note: the no www) this is also considered a cross domain access as www.webstandards.org != webstandards.org. This will also cause us to fail the ACID2 test and render the picture that you see above. So please type www.webstandards.org!

It's worth mentioning that although most sites allow navigation like http://webstandards.org/ (note: the no www) this is also considered a cross domain access as www.webstandards.org != webstandards.org. This will also cause us to fail the ACID2 test and render the picture that you see above. So please type www.webstandards.org!

Note:
Web 2.0 = http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid2/ "Acid 2 test"
Browsers have gotten to Acid 2 compliant or closer. I would call this the current Web 2.0.

Web 3.0 = http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid3/
The Web Standards Project, seeing that the web is on the Web 2.0 level, is pushing the envelope again for Acid 3, or what I would call Web 3.0. It is interesting to note, that it took 6 months after Acid 2 came out for Safari to get it's browser compliant. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid2 ) This is applying to the display of content, but I feel this also collates to phases of the web. And yes, I cited Wikipedia for my source, I hope that 1% edited that entry to make sure it is completly correct, although I do know from news articles I can't find that the safari part is.

Note:
Web 2.0 = http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid2/ "Acid 2 test"
Browsers have gotten to Acid 2 compliant or closer. I would call this the current Web 2.0.

Web 3.0 = http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid3/
The Web Standards Project, seeing that the web is on the Web 2.0 level, is pushing the envelope again for Acid 3, or what I would call Web 3.0. It is interesting to note, that it took 6 months after Acid 2 came out for Safari to get it's browser compliant. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid2 ) This is applying to the display of content, but I feel this also collates to phases of the web. And yes, I cited Wikipedia for my source, I hope that 1% edited that entry to make sure it is completly correct, although I do know from news articles I can't find that the safari part is.

Yeah, for every item tested by Acid3, I am sure there exists a web developer who would have benefitted from the issue being fixed. If no web developers wanted a feature, it would not have been written into a web standard. If no web developers ran into a bug, they would not have known to test for it.

The bottom line is that the OP is correct. The scores are not a meaningful indicator of "goodness" of a browser. They simply indicate how many tests each browser passed. The purpose of the test is not to make browsers look good or bad, but to ensure web browsers support the features requested by web developers for Web 2.0. As the description for the Acid3 test states, Acid3 is primarily testing specifications for "Web 2.0" dynamic Web applications.

From the Acid2 page::

Are you sure you are taking the right test? I'm using Firefox 3 Beta 3 on Gentoo linux (x86) and it works here. Go to http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html and try again. I do recall that the main site for the test has a broken link, resulting in it appearing to fail on all browsers.

Actually, I believe Firefox 1 was used, albeit with hacks in order to work around the known CSS bugs. Sorry I can't find any corroborating source; I don't remember where I read this (if I did at all), and Googling only turns up a recent post on Reddit that goes undisputed by "Hixie", who seems to be Ian Hickson.

For the case of Acid3, calculations were probably easier this time around, since Javascript is simpler to compute separately. I'm not intimately familiar with the tests, but it seems like their calculation would require far less coordination with a corrected rendering engine.

As a sister comment hinted, they don't know there are no bugs in the test. Development of Safari yielded a bug in Acid2 that was subsequently submitted and corrected (scroll to the bottom).

IE8 doesn't pass Acid2! I think it cheats!

Check it out quickly guys!

http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid2/ PASS

http://acid2.acidtests.org/ FAIL

The only thing different between these tests is a 404 link on about line 130 of the source. Is IE8 cheating?!!!

IE doesn't support the :last-child pseudo-class, but that doesn't appear in Acid2.

I suppose this is why they already designed Acid3. Hint: Firefox 2 scores 50/100.

Go ahead, take the Acid test!

http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html

Yes. In fact, that is exactly what is happening at the moment. At least the vocal majority is in utter opposition. See the IE Blog.

Also:

• Eric Meyer's follow up post
• WaSP response
• Discussion which includes a disclaim of official endorsement by Andy Clarke, co-lead of WaSP

I am calling on the development community for solid alternative proposals:

Alternatives NOW!

Hang on a minute. You all seem to be talking like there is a web standard I could code to that would actually work.

Last time I checked there was not a single commercially available web browser that was truly standards compliant, is this still the case?

Will this page render correctly in you browser?

http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html#top

I think not if you use an off the shelf browser. I have firefox, IE7, safari and Opera installed on this PC since I am now at work and none of them pass.

So stop talking like there are some defined useable web standards that we can currently use when creating complicated layouts in CSS. Until every browser is truly standards compliant then creating standards compliant web pages is not going to help avoid horrible browser hacks and so is actually me wasting my employers time.

The ACID2 test is *not* about "seeing a smiley face on one page out of all the pages on the internet". It's about not having to develop a version of your complex website for every browser you wish to be able to display your page correctly, and it's about being able to use whichever browser you want to view the pages you want to visit.

I agree. Unfortunately, Håkon doesn't. From the article:

What will happen when you type http://webstandards.org/acid2 in your freshly installed IE 8? Will Acid2 be displayed correctly when you hit the test button?

This kind of narrow-minded legalism is what happens when people get so caught up with their hobby-horses that they forget what's important. IE8 would measurably increase the number of PCs that have a default standards-compliant browser, but we are told that this is bad for standards compliance. Instead, Microsoft should make IE8 render ACID2 correctly by default and make it an optional upgrade that virtually no-one will use.

Microsoft ignores standards, goes off in their own direction.

Actually... It's the web standards community that gave Microsoft the green light to go off in their own direction (and hoping other browsers will do the same).

IE8's new scheme and those supporting it are being met with an equal level of criticism.

Yeah, if you're a web designer, it's best you read the stuff that's flying around out there. It's an pretty big and important change being proposed for web development standards.

Cheers,
Fozzy

All IE8 needs to pass the Acid2 test is a simple LenPEG variant.

"If page = acid2 test, render http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/reference.html"

It can't fail!

- RG>

Did anyone notice that discussed related issues with the folks at http://webstandards.org/ before making this decision? While they do not claim to support the decision 100%, they do understand the factors that went into the decision and they seem to feel that MS generally listened to their feedback.

As far as I can see, this is just about the only option that allows them to do two very important things: "Render standard HTML in a more standard way" and "Don't break existing pages".

If you can think of a better way to do both, I would love to hear it. (And using 'doctype' is not an a better answer as it has just as many problems as this compromise does.)

Coming from the corporate world, "Don't break existing pages" is the more important of the two. I know of at least 30 products that shipped html help files way back when IE and Netscape were the only browsers anyone was using. These helpfiles shipped with the product and cannot be updated easily as they are installed locally on tens of thousands of machines around the world. If MS actually wants folks to upgrade to IE8 it _cannot_ break these pages.

Most of HTML5 was actually done outside of the W3C.

However, to address your earlier point, one of the big things we're doing with HTML5 is we're going and specifying the bits that all the other specs avoided, like 'window', like 'setTimeout', like how to parse HTML in the face of errors, and so on, and saying exactly how they should work, based on how browsers do them now, so that we can get the browsers to converge on one interoperable set of behaviours.

I'm also working on the Acid tests, e.g. Acid2 and Acid3, to foster interoperability on the older specs. It's working pretty well so far.

http://ln.hixie.ch/
http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid3

So... HTML5 should actually help bring the browsers closer on the bits that weren't specified before, and the Acid tests are directly intended to do that with the bits that _were_ specified before. If you want to help out, please do -- see the links above for how to help with Acid3, and the links below for how to help with HTML5:

http://blog.whatwg.org/w3c-restarts-html-effort

http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html#top

IE needs it more.

The Acid Test is all about seeing if browsers can properly render intentionally mis-written, broken code, including things that I find it hard to believe that anybody would do on propose on a real-world page.

This misconception seems to come up every time Acid2 gets mentioned on Slashdot.

Broken code was part of the Acid2 test, but far from the primary focus. Read the test guide sometime. The first Acid test didn't use broken code at all; it simply tested implementation of the box model.

http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html#top

The acid2 test on webstandards.org is currently broken. ( see Mozilla Bugzilla [ you might need to copy and paste that])

A reference to http://www.webstandards.org/404/ which must fail now returns 200.

Strangely enough my Opera 9.24 on windows @ work failed the test as well with roughly the same error. Even stranger, Opera 9.24 on linux seems to pass the test perfectly.
The problem might be caused by changes to the URL http://www.webstandards.org/404/ which is referenced in the test and seems to not return an actual 404 error code. (That's the one difference between the official test and your mirror.)

So yeah, someone broke, or at least changed the test. Probably accidental.