Konqueror Passes the Acid2 Test Too

An anonymous reader writes "A month after Safari , and after a lot of controversy, Allan Sandfeld Jensen announced today that Konqueror passes the Acid2 test too. Half of the patches could be merged from Apple's Webcore, the rest needed to be rewritten from scratch."

Comments

Re:Acid2

[minionman]

http://www.google.com/

Re:Acid2

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/

basically it's a rigorous test that ensures that a browser has all the goodies that web developers have been lusting after forever.

Re:IE, when?

[rdc_uk]

Actually, given the nature of Acid2, it would only allow us to code _broken_ css on these browsers, and have it break _correctly_.

Acid2 tests a lot of corner-case mis-constructions of CSS, and tests that the browser handles the cock-up in the prescribed manner. It doesn't actually test that _correct_ CSS is handled correctly.

Its a good test, but its NOT a full CSS compliance test.

Re:Kick to the pants.

[dmaxwell]

"Allan Sandfeld Jensen announced today that Konqueror passes the Acid2 test too. Half of the patches could be merged from Apple's Webcore, the rest needed to be rewritten from scratch.""

It's amazing what people can do when sufficiently motivated.

THIS sort of thing is EXACTLY what the khtml devs were complaining about. Yes, Apple does the bare minimum the LGPL requires with Webcore but the khtml devs accepted that.

The point these guys have been trying to get across over and over and over and over (repeat several thousand times for the extra dense) is that when Webcore can do something that khtml cannot IT IS NOT LAZINESS ON THE PART OF THE KHTML DEVELOPERS. WEBCORE CODE CANNOT JUST BE DROPPED INTO THE KHTML TREE. Webcore directly uses OS X features. That is one problem. The code bombs Apple drops periodically have inadequate documentation as to why some changes were made and not others.

Webcore at this point is a khtml fork that is about two years old. The khtml devs might as well be asked to merge Gecko code for all of the similarity they have at this point.

That's easy

[paul248]

Of course, the final patch looked something like this:

if (!strcmp(url, "http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/test.html" )) loadUrl("reference.html");

Re:Kick to the pants.

[Anonymous Froward]

You were close, but you missed the point of konq guy (see see this post) when you began talking about the "problems" of Webcore code. The konq guy's message was more or less like this as far as I can see:

When Konqueror doesn't follow Safari's new feature within 4 hours, don't blame us. When Konqueror finally follows Safari's feature list, don't automatically praise Apple, either.

It's not like Apple is giving out some drop-in patch, but that's OK. That's their right. Sometimes we take their patch, but sometimes we write things from scratch. When we'll use Apple's code, we'll be slow because of the way they produce their patch, not because we're lazy.

Apple is OK for me, but please stop bashing our laziness while praising opensource-friendliness of Apple. That hurts.

Have you forgotten what free software means?

[werdna]

Apple does the bare minimum the LGPL requires with Webcore but the khtml devs accepted that.

No, let's be clear. Apple does ALL AND EVERYTHING that the LGPL requires. Implicit in your statement is the suggestion that free software can be free if it includes tacit, implied promises not to fork and to satisfy its authors with all its changes. That suggestion is flagrantly inconsistent with the notion of free software, in any sense.

Fundamental to the notion of free software is that its authors cannot limit the rights of others to access and modify the software. Forking is not a problem with free software, it is a feature.

Ordinarily forking *is* a problem for the community, when the initial developers are adequately satsifying the needs of the community as a whole and working well with others. But this is not always the case. Sometimes politics, legitimate and petty, and aesthetics, legitimate and ludicrous, gets in the way of good agile development. When that happens, the community may well be better served by a fork.

Apple and the Konqueror clan were not working well together, but both had important and significant constituencies to serve. It was either going to work or not, but neither Apple nor the clan "owned" this free software. In its feral state, BOTH were free to decide by what methodology development of their respective trees will proceed, what features the code will have and what will be the quality of that code.

Darwin (no pun intended) takes care of the rest.

Evolution by forking is not the preferable state of nature, but it happens when it needs to happen. And people will abandon what is useless and use what is important.

If, someday, there is actually a need to harmonize this code, it will be harmonized. Otherwise, it may well be for the best there was a fork. The problem that it is difficult to harmonize advances in one tree into another is salient, but it is not due to any malfeasance of anybody. Apple WAS FREE to do what it would with the code. And glory be for that... So, too, is the Konqueror clan, and glory be for that.

The remaining whines in the message are puerile. Don't like the doco or the coding style? Its free software, change it. Don't like the way others are working on the code? No problem, ignore them, and use the free software of the existing code. Got a feature you need? Great. Code it up. Don't want to? No problem, but why are you posting your gripes HERE?

Apple has a free software realationship with the K-clan. K-clan could work with them or not, and vice-versa. If it doesn't work out, so be it. The code is out there. It was built the way it was built, and people may use it or not. Nobody has a gripe, because it is free software -- if you don't like it -- change it.