Opera Lays Down Acid2 Challenge

sebFlyte writes "The CTO of Opera has proposed a new version of the acid test for browser compatibility, and has challenged Microsoft to make IE7 a browser worth having that will do the Web good. He's asked to help from Web designers the world over to build a new page for Microsoft to test IE7 with to make sure it does everything Web designers want it to. "

Comments

Like, render Slashdot the same way every time?

[ScentCone]

*cough* Firefox

Re:Like, render Slashdot the same way every time?

[porcupine8]

Am I the only person who has never had any issues with slashdot and firefox? Or if there are, they're minimal enough that I've never noticed them, so I doubt they're really worth bitching about.

Re:Like, render Slashdot the same way every time?

[Jerk City Troll]

View the source on any Slashdot web page and observe the gigantic, sloppy cluster-fuck that is their output. Do not blame Gecko for this nightmare of deeply nested tables, font tags, missing close tags, and other crap. (What's funny is that Slashdot gives an HTTP 403 to validator.w3.org.) When Slashdot makes their code sane, then we can blame the browser. It's amazing to me that any user agent can parse this and make sense of it.

Re:Like, render Slashdot the same way every time?

[ptlis]

I too suspect it is in some way related to the iFrames - when I run Firefox without AdBlock I get the errors very regularily (a rough guestimate would be something in the region of every 10-15 page views) but with AdBlock blocking the OSDN ads the problem seems to go away (or at least it occurs very rarely).

Re:Like, render Slashdot the same way every time?

[say]

What's funny is that Slashdot gives an HTTP 403 to validator.w3.org

I saved the source of this comment page and fed it to the validator. Made 117 errors, among them a fairly serious one:

Line 2007, column 7: end tag for "TABLE" omitted, but its declaration does not permit this

It also has _tons_ of unclosed LI tags. These obviously can mess up the display quite a lot. Except for that, the errors are mainly cosmetic - & instead of & and some spurious attributes which aren't in the 3.2 standard (nobr, iframe height etc.).

The missing </table> is probably the most serious issue.

Re:Like, render Slashdot the same way every time?

[arkanes]

Slashdot declares HTML version 3.2, and the w3c validator is actually much stricter than the written standard. For example, you don't need to close LI elements, as they are implicitly closed by the next LI element. Same with non-standard attributes and even tags - the spec explicity defines behavior for undefined attributes and tags, which is a no-op. It should be a warning that you may be relying on non-standard behavior, but the standard does not prohibit them. Even the missing table end tag may be permitted under the standard, although I'd have to do some digging to check. There's something about block level elements and implicit closing by a new block element that I'd have to get the exact wording on. It's why you don't need a close tag for P elements in HTML 3.2, for example.

Why just microsoft?

[MoneyT]

Has anyone (even Opera) managed to create a browser that does what all the web designers want it to do? Does the web designer community have a consensus of what they want the browsers to do?

Re:Why just microsoft?

[Pionar]

Yes, it's called W3C specifications.

Like the one for xHTML 1.0. The one that currently has IE in my doghouse is CSS2 support, especially the Box Model. Firefox gets it right. Opera gets it right. But IE gets it totally wrong, forcing web designers to use unsightly hacks to get CSS to behave the same way in IE.

The web community has always had this consensus, going back to HTML 3.2 and even further back. It's the browser makers that can't seem to come to a consensus, which is ridiculous because the W3C tells you how a user agent should behave.

The acid test should answer the question...

[Faust7]

Will IE 7 have 'Electric Kool-Aid' tags?

Implementing full standards would help

[PornMaster]

It'd be nice if there were reference pages made by the standards committees, so a browser could be simply deemed compliant or not.

Re:Implementing full standards would help

[bersl2]

http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Test/?

Meanwhile.....

[Eradicator2k3]

Microsoft's IE7 developers allow themselves a chuckle and think, "Ha! We've been on acid for decades."

Standards, schmandards...

[glamslam]

Standards compliance is for companies that don't have 90% or more of a market.

Next!

Great Strategy

[aspx]

This is brilliant!! Appear to be helpful, but really just point out shortcomings and bugs in your competitor's product, all the while gaining visibility and recognition in the community. I really must remember to do this sometime.

Why take up the gauntlet?

[Fjandr]

Microsoft would more than likely simply ignore the challenge completely. What do they have to gain (at this point) from actually producing a standards-compliant browser?

Now, perhaps if FireFox continues to chew up the percentages of web browser usage, they might try it for PR purposes, but that's hardly an issue at the moment. Microsoft is more of an in-the-moment company (unless you're speaking of up-and-coming products, where they announce competing programs years before they actually plan to implement the changes).

My proposal for the test page.

[bigtallmofo]

I humbly submit my idea for building a new page for Microsoft to test IE7 with to make sure it does everything Web designers want it to.

Get Firefox!

If it can properly render that link, I'll be satisfied.

Re:Why Bother?

[jbplou]

If you are making a web page and you are not coding so that is renders correctly on IE you are a fool. It has 85% market share.

Re:Opera

[QuietLagoon]

Opera is hardly the bastion of interoperability.

Correct. However, Opera is falling behind in mindshare now that FireFox has all the buzz. So the best thing for Opera to do is to put up a standards challenge to Microsoft.

That accomplishes two things: (1) some free PR for Opera, and (2) if anyone really follows through with it, it is far easier for Opera to adapt to the results than Microsoft. Opera has only a miniscule installed base that it needs to stay compatible with.

Re:Why Bother?

[Low2000]

Because if IE becomes more standards complient, that means that web coders will make their websites standards compliant. Thats good for the alternative browsers out there like Firefox and Opera more then anyone else. MS has enjoyed being in control of the bulk of the web browsing community for so long that if their browser doesn't conform to standards, the web coders have to conform to the browser.

Re:Opera

[bogie]

FWIW last time I checked Opera was pretty much tied with Firefox for being standards complaint. Among browsers that normal human use that's saying a lot.

Based on that I don't see what's laughable.

Re:Opera is already dead.

[badmammajamma]

Actually they make quite a bit of money selling Opera. It's used a lot as an embedded app in cell phones, PDAs and such. As I understand it, Opera runs on more devices than any other browser. They also are more than willing to make custom versions for just about any platform or purpose.

Any money they make from people sitting in front of desktops is just bonus.

Sometimes, IE renders bad HTML well

[benhocking]

This is not meant to be an attack on IE. If reasonable assumptions can be made about what the code should do, even when coded incorrectly, then it's great that IE does this. I'm not sure of any specific examples, but when I first started writing web pages (years ago), I remember that Netscape would cough on some pages that IE rendered well. Invariably, the problem was that I had left off some terminating tags, and IE correctly figured out my intentions.

Three caveats:

First, having Netscape scold me allowed me to fix my code. IMHO, a better way to do this, however, would be to have an option called "pedantic" that would insist on matching tags (where appropriate). This might exist now, and if so, that's great.

Second, trying to "guess" what was intended is rife with problems. Anyone who has used MS Word for long enough knows what I mean.

Finally, I currently use FireFox the vast majority of the time. I do not know if any of what I said is still true.

Re:Sometimes, IE renders bad HTML well

[Anonymous Coward]

Browsers shouldn't render broken HTML.

Compilers shouldn't compile broken code.

If, as a programmer, you think that a compiler is better because it will compile buggy code without errors then god help you.

The same applies to web design. Buggy HTML might render OK as just HTML, but once you start adding CSS into the equation (and IE has its OWN little array of bugs here) then it can start causing severely bizarre behavior.