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."

Comments

Hmmm

[gowen]

The patched Safari is not yet avaliable for public consumption. It is unknown when the patches will appear in a public version of Safari.

Hypothetical : Which might mean that fixing the browser to display Acid2 broke something else (related to the browser making reasonable attempts to display broken code, perhaps).

Which does point out the problem with tests like Acid2, which really don't resemble any code in the wild that anyone has ever used. What you end up with is browsers that are brilliant at rendering completely pathological corner cases, but only at the cost of changing some other well-thought-out-but-not-standardised. behaviour.

Now, I admit that this is purely hypothetical, but surely a better guide to browser usability is how well it renders the morass of dodgy XML/HTML that gets sent to it every single day.

Optimise for corner cases, and it possible that all you'll get are really well rendered corner cases.

Acid2's Smiley = Excellent Visual Explanation!

[rewinn]

Quite apart from the merits of the Acid2 test, its use of rendering a smiley face both (a) to be the test itself and (b) to show the quality of the test result ... is clever!

Most tests create an abstract "score" such as "85% compliant" which can be rendered by a graphic, such as a pie chart, but which is fundamentally different from the test itself. This abstraction process is extra work both for the researcher and for the reader. There is also the danger that it can be misleading. Edward Tufte has written on this at length in "Visual Explanations" and other books.

To put the test & the results together in a meaningful, intuitive package, as Acid2 seems to have done, is just great!