Slashdot Mirror
Safari Passes the Acid2 Test
TigerX writes "The Mac web browser Safari has become the first browser to pass the Acid2 test. Acid2 is a CSS/HTML test suite put out by the Web Standards Project (WASP). Developer David Hyatt had been working on the project for the past few weeks. Details can be found at his blog. The patched Safari is not yet avaliable for public consumption. It is unknown when the patches will appear in a public version of Safari."
Big companies care about standards when they're the underdog and it suits them.
It should also be noted that all of the fixes done on the Safari KHTML codebase will eventually work their way back to Konqueror proper, meaning that GNU/Linux will benefit directly from this. *smiles* Thanks, Apple.
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
No, the test was designed to use code that many developers would use and many would use incorrectly. There are details on how a browser should handle bad code - and most fall short of the standards. That's one of the reasons why you have browser "hacks" and why many developers end up with bad habits.
In other words, don't be so forgiving with bad code. It hurts the world of web development when bad code becomes a de facto "standard."
Now if only it would play a CD without forcing me to enter a contractual relationship with iTunes (which I am not interested in doing) I'd be less disappointed in it.
You're aware you had to enter into a similar contract to like...boot the Mac? Remember that thing you clicked through right before it asked for your name? You know, with the bouncing blue thing?
Catch-22.
We have browsers that can't do standard HTML / CSS because no one writes clean HTML / CSS, and we can't have clean HTML / CSS until we have a browser that supports it correctly.
This is just a small step forward in that fight, and hopefully it will go forward.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
" So... the test was designed to see if a browser can use some weird code that most web designers would never use, and could (in this case) easily be done with an image tag? I don't see the point."
The problem is that you might want to use them, but you can't, since only 3/5 major browsers support the option. Also, it's easy to say you are up to the standars, another thing to actually be.
I'm a user of CSS, but I still have to check all kinds of browsers to see if it does what I want, which is taking time and time is money.
To just solve this example with including an image would of course be suitable, but how about a whole site? Text is so much more practical, just by being able to copy it. The webpage would eat up much more memory dealing with images too.
We have the same problem with javascript, only that is 10 times more disturbing because if javascript was actually the same all other the place web surfing could be enhanced so much. The only reason people don't like javascript is because the popups, and that's not everything in javascript.
Acid2 is a friggin good one, perhaps people will get up their eyes for it and see for themselfs, I just hope the same goes on for javascript and html too...
Albert "thec" Sandberg
Go Apple!
Indeed. I still use OS X 10.2, but the differences in Safari between 10.2 and 10.3 are just astounding. Especially in the areas of CSS and DHTML support. KHTML was always a nice little widget, but Apple seems to have some of the best minds I've ever seen working on this. Not even Microsoft got their act togther this fast! (And they started with Spyglass, a component that was superior to the KHTML one that Apple started with.)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
General misuses and abuses of JS is, and in this general abuses are:
- Popups, of course
- Stupid effects (shitty animated gifs following cursors anyone?)
- Messing with browsers (resizing, changing parts of the global UI, alert boxes)
- Code design so bad that browsers grind to a halt (oh, i so love seing my CPU usage skyrocket to 100% and stay there because i opened a bugged page)
- Slowing the browsing
- Disabling the browsing altogether because of non standard or stupid scripts (mmm, yummy Javascript links, I mean anchor tags are certainly not hip enough for a damn link are they?)
- Probably many other i can't think of right now
"Modern" javascript and the usage of DOM scripting allow wonderful flexibility, and applying the priciples of graceful degradation and progressive enhancement while fully decoupling Javascript from HTML/CSS (by putting JS in a separate file and associating it via the Event Handlers, layering a behavioural javascript on top of an existing fully functionnal JS-less website) allows improving every JS-enabled's navigation while not degrading at all JS-disabled's navigation.As Douglas Crockford put it, Javascript is the most misunderstood programming language, and I'd add that it's the one with the most extensive yet qualitatively (sp, more than likely) worst documentation ever.
And yet, finding good javascript tutorials and stunning Javascript reference websites is possible. People just don't bother looking for them...
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
IOW there's a big difference between "not breaking the license" and "working well with outside projects".
The GCC changes they make are the same. Some aren't rolled back in and whilst the tree is available, documentation on what the patches are and where you can get them are not (and it's a CVS branch so you can't just do a "svn log" and see the individual commits).
A lot of their changes make no sense to merge. They do lots of things to ahve the compiler fit with their development and library model, which is quite a bit different from how everyone else does things.
And some Apple patches, especially with regards to Objective-C, have made their way into GCC. Maybe they could be doing more, but they're allready doing more than many corperations of their stature.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
Saying that a browser should not support full standards because people generally don't write standards compliant code is absurd. Make the browser support the standards and then expose the faulty css/html writers for the hacks they are. Just because someone is too stupid or too lazy to follow the standard is no reason to effectively abandon the standard!
Konqueror still put in place all of the stuff necessary to make this happen. According to his blog, the he's only been working on this since April 12, but Konqueror has been in development for years. That's what we call standing on the shoulders of giants.
Also, I'll be interested to see when Dave/Apple get around to contributing this back to the KDE team.
So what, "Here's our source tree" is obfuscation? That's a pretty extreme position to take.
I suspect it's more of a cultural clash. To someone being paid, being told to take the patches from the source tree is a minor irritant at best. For a volunteer, any extra effort streches allready scarce donated time.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
So how come this isn't in the /. "Apple" section too?
Seems kinda relevant, what with kudos and all...
I'm not sure Zack Rusin's response is entirely well thought out. Hyatt links directly to the individual patch files for each of the bugs in KHTML. I've scanned through them, and there isn't much OS X specific at all, except in files that are explicitly platform specific.
Look at http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/acid3.txt as an example.
In one of the other patches, an APPLE_CHANGES ifdef was actually replaced with entirely cross-platform code.
The KHTML team would understandably like every change in Safari to be packaged up into a nice little independant patch, but it realistically cannot work that way. I'm sure everyone who has tried to contribute to a project maintained by someone else has had to wait before their patch was (or was not) accepted, and Apple really can't wait on the KTML devs. They have a job that needs to get done by a particular deadline (a deadline that doesn't apply to the KHTML devs).
The patches posted by Hyatt look really well done to me, and not at all representative of what Rusin is accusing them.