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Opera 9.0 Fully Passes ACID2 Test
Rytis writes "Opera has just become the second browser after Safari to be able to pass completely the famous ACID2 test. Mark Wilton-Jones is running a little article on the history of the Opera and ACID tests. Of course, it includes a screenshot of Opera 9 showing the nice happy face saying "Hello world!"."
Great that they pass the ACID test, but the real-world is just not perfect or by-the-book. They need to be able to handle what really happens, too. Example, my workplace Exchange web interface- Safari misses parts of the page, FireFox renders it fine. ACID test or no, I like the one that works in all situations.
What's more interesting, will it pass ACID3? It's easy to tweak the engine untill it passes a single known test. Historicaly, Opera had (and still has?) problems with both JavaScript and CSS. I must admit though, that the rendering in Opera 8 (pre ACID2) is much better than Mozilla's.
RTFA and you'll see this.
"Opera 9 (get the weekly build) now passes the Acid 2 test, making it the second browser to do so. And yes, I can count. Safari passed first, and Opera is second. Konqueror and iCab almost pass (and claim to pass), but they both fail to apply one of the styles required by the test..."
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
I don't think this should be judged based on how much of an achievement it is. The important part is that the browser passes the ACID2 test. How hard it was for each individual browser to get there is not important.
Who got there first also isn't important, we just need all browsers to get there.
FTA:
... overflow: hidden; /* hides scrollbars on viewport, see 11.1.1:3 */ ... }"
"Konqueror and iCab almost pass (and claim to pass), but they both fail to apply one of the styles required by the test, and as a result they display a scrollbar even though they shouldn't (the Acid 2 guide neglects to mention this style, but see the source code for the test itself):
html {
"Max, come over here. French-Canadian bean soup. I want to pay. Let them leave me alone." - Dutch Schultz
... they show IE screenshots, but don't show how close/far away Netscape and Mozilla and Firefox are from passing.
Firefox is good. The plugins extend the browser hugely.
But I'm happy with Opera, be it for the faster responce I get on the same machine as I have Firefox installed on, the ability not to search for plug ins for whatever feature I need, 'it just works'
I just find Opera is faster at implementing standards, is more reliable with IE geared sites (don't like the fact, but I have to be pragmatic and deal with it as promoting interoperability is not what pays my bills), is more innovative (has important new features first and has them 'out of the box') and makes a good testing ground for my projects, and is all together very nice. And now it's free (as in beer).
Firefox is good. Opera is good too. Different priorities for different users, I don't have access to source code or the ability to contribute in the same way, but for me I'm fine with that. Both are far superior to IE's features, security and map for an interoperable internet in the future. Nuff said.
I am happy to see that Internet Explorer 7 passes the ACID2 test somewhat better now. It is actually possible to see the resemblance of a happy face now. Good job, Microsoft!
Full Tilt
I was merely pointing out what the article said. And since the Opera guy points out the page *isn't* supposed to scroll, I imagine a scrolling bug would indeed qualify as incorrect rendering, so the artifacts in your screenshot would merely support Opera's point.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
Take the ACID2 test...
That's not a bug, that's exactly what is supposed to happen when you scroll the page. From the technical guide:
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Example, my workplace Exchange web interface- Safari misses parts of the page, FireFox renders it fine. ACID test or no, I like the one that works in all situations.
There are a lot of crappy pages out there. If a page doesn't make it through the HTML validator why should anyone expect a browser to render it? Are your pages at work valid? What's the point of standards-compliant rendering engines if they all allow exceptions to the standard to be rendered?
A lot of times Safari won't render big chunks of web pages because of malformed markup. Dave Hyatt (rightly, I believe) doesn't want to spend lots of coding effort dealing with error recovery when parsing sloppy web pages. Browsers like MSIE and Netscape (pre-Mozilla) are too permissive and have allowed people to get away with downright bad HTML.
That said, the Safari Compatibility Hit List was recently created, to either fix Safari compatibility problems or to encourage sites to fix their markup.
Can opera handle third party cookies properly yet? A little more important than styles rendering in my opinion.
It's the :hover event. If you hover the nose with the mouse, the nose turns blue.
> I'm all for web standards, but isn't ACID2 a purely academic excercise? It's nice that a browser passes it,
> of course, but in the real world practically nobody is going to be using CSS in that way.
It's not purely academic, it's eminently practical - as the site explains, all of the features are unlikely to be used on the same page, but designers rely on each one of them to work correctly at some point, and have been requesting proper support for years so their pages look consistently good on all browsers.
So the test is verifying conformance not only with treatment of valid CSS, but also correct treatment of invalid CSS, which is very important given that a significant part of compatibility problems between current web-browsers is caused by different behavior in the face of errors - whether they ignore it, stop parsing, try to render it anyway etc.
Then maybe you should stop making websites, because people like you are the problem.
They're "only a guideline" in that the FBI won't knock on your door if you don't follow the standards. And oh yeah, a lot of browsers will accept your sloppy coding and "render it fine." However, if you want a world where all browsers render all content in the same way, that can't be accomplished by the developing team of any browser. That can only be accomplished by developing and following standards. So, you blame the browser when they don't follow them, and you blame the web developer when he doesn't follow them.
I'm fine with browsers who want to go the extra mile and have non-standard code render correctly, as long as they don't sacrifice proper rendering of the standard code to do it. That doesn't excuse you coding incorrectly, though.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
awww, lynx doesn't pass the test :(
It's just such a complex problem to tuckle that it seems to me (as a sideline spectactor) to be stupid to block the entire Firefox train just for it. They are working on it.