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Firefox and Opera Fail the Acid2 Test
naylor83 writes "Four weeks ago, Opera's CTO Håkan Lie put forward the Acid2 challenge to the IE developers at Microsoft. The Web Standards Project has now silently published the promised browser test. Somewhat surprisingly, both Opera and Firefox fail to correctly render the test page. Obviously though, they're no where near as lousy as Internet Explorer. More screenshots are available at my blog, as well as at other people's."
Right. So none of the browsers tested can display the test page correctly? And they're the best, most compliant browsers available?
And they've had how long to get it right?
In that case, it would seem to me that it is the standard that is broken, if it's really that difficult to render a page with a cascading style sheet.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
is an analysis of what failed with each browser (especially Firefox.) None of the links told us why the browser failed to render the smiley face or what the WSP did to obfuscate the code. Any takers?
http://webstandards.org/act/acid2/reference.html == proper rendering
http://webstandards.org/act/acid2/test.html#top == test page
Jay | http://oldos.org
It was known before the test was published that no browser would get it right. That's the whole point!
The reason for having this is to expose bugs in current implementations. Internet Explorer is the obvious retard, implementing about 50% of CSS 2.1, but that doesn't mean that the other browsers can just slack off at 95%. That's not what the W3C is about, it's not what WASP is about, and it's not what this acid test is about.
In order for something to qualify as FUD, it has to be untrue.
Given that Microsoft itself does not pretend that IE has a complete CSS 2.1 implementation, it cannot be FUD to state that it is obvious that IE will do worse on a test of CSS 2.1 than other browsers which do claim to implement that particular standard.
Note also that many people consider CSS 2 to be overcomplicated and not very useful in practice. It is therefore not necessarily even a bad thing for a browser to fail this test - arguably, a browser that passed it would be bloated, as it would implement all sorts of things that are not necessary to view 99.99% of web pages. So to say that IE fails the test badly is not only not FUD - it isn't even (necessarily) a criticism!
Any chance you could train your knees not to jerk so quickly, please?
Umm take the actual test this time, rather than looking at the reference image.
I tried it on the pretty much the same machine as you (just plain Server vs Adv Server though), and it was the same hideous red mess shown in the IE screenshot.
Just out of curiosity...what browser did they use to get the successful reference rendering? I'm presuming there's one that successfully renders, otherwise, how do they know their test code is valid? I've clicked around but don't know what they used to generate that png.
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
It's supposed to be invalid. The CSS specification defines error handling, and Internet Explorer gets it wrong. A conforming user-agent would never apply those rules.
In fact it is necessary for this stylesheet to be invalid - otherwise it wouldn't test the error handling parts of the CSS specifications.
The real lessons to be learnt from this seem to be getting lost here. If we put aside the MS vs Moz, FUD vs non-FUD and not-as-broken vs either broken or not debates we can see that web designers should have something to look forward to in the (near?) future.
Finally, here is something that could actually give the browser developers something to aim for and help to pull together the standardisation of modern CSS rendering. From how that smiley face is supposed to look I'm already quite excited about what we'll be able to do once all of the browsers are up to scratch.
Now all we need is for the browser developers to take note of this, use it as a learning tool and a target to aim for and give the web design/development community a hell of a lot less stuff to debate about.
It could happen...
But of course, in addition to this they shouldn't let the acid2 test be a final goal and then just sit back and let themselves get rusty. Personally i'd like to see a publicly available acid test for all the new versions/revisions of CSS standards so that Joe Home User can more easily choose which browser to use. An acidN test once every 8 years?
This is the fast moving world of technology, don't you know.
They deliberately made errors which the browsers should cope with according to the specs.
Firstly, the errors are there on purpose, to check the error handling conformance.
As for whether the <textarea> is shrink-to-fit or not, the CSS 2.1 specification has this to say.
The "rule number three" says that it is shrink-to-fit.
Your mistake is in referring to 10.3.3, which explains what to do for non-replaced block-level elements in normal flow. You should be referring to 10.3.7, which explains what to do for non-replaced block-level elements that are absolutely positioned.