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IE 8 Passes Acid2 Test
notamicrosoftlover writes to tell us Channel9 is reporting that Internet Explorer 8 has correctly rendered the Acid2 page in "standards mode". "With respect to standards and interoperability, our goal in developing Internet Explorer 8 is to support the right set of standards with excellent implementations and do so without breaking the existing web. This second goal refers to the lessons we learned during IE 7. IE7's CSS improvements made IE more compliant with some standards and less compatible with some sites on the web as they were coded. Many sites and developers have done special work to work well with IE6, mostly as a result of the evolution of the web and standards since 2001 and the level of support in the various versions of IE that pre-date many standards. We have a responsibility to respect the work that sites have already done to work with IE. We must deliver improved standards support and backwards compatibility so that IE8 (1) continues to work with the billions of pages on the web today that already work in IE6 and IE7 and (2) makes the development of the next billion pages, in an interoperable way, much easier. We'll blog more, and learn more, about this during the IE8 beta cycle." There's also a video interview regarding IE8 development on Channel9."
You might note that only a couple browsers completely pass it. Officially released web browsers that pass there is only Konqueror, Safari 2.02; firefox does not make the list. So ~97% of all browsers don't pass it.
If i had one dollar for every brain you dont have, i would have $1.
Standards mode is invoked when you specify a strict doctype in the page.
This IS out of the box support. Let's have less false assumptions and cheap shots at Microsoft, okay?
The concept of "standards mode" and "quirks mode" has been around for several years, and is implemented in IE6, IE7, Firefox, and Opera, and for all I know in Gecko as well. The user does not have to flip a switch. The developer has to put some code at the beginning to show that he knows what he's doing, usually in the form of an appropriate DOCTYPE.
"Standards mode" is a browser rendering mode which first appeared in Internet Explorer 6, as a way for Microsoft to get around the Catch-22 of fixing their browser to be more standards compliant, and not breaking so many websites at the same time.
"Standards mode" is triggered by the presence of a proper DOCTYPE, like one of the ones here.
"Quirks mode" is a rendering mode triggered by the lack of the DOCTYPE, which causes the browser to emulate many of the bugs that, if fixed, would break lots of sites.
All the major browsers implement standards/quirks mode these days. Internet Explorer 7/8's quirks mode rendering has not changed since IE6, which means, if your non-standards-compliant site worked in IE6, and doesn't use a DOCTYPE, it's not going to further break in IE7/8.
They finally did in IE7, released in November 2006.
That's not the only thing it tests, but proper error handling is critical for forward compatibility. A fully CSS2-compliant browser, when faced with CSS3, will see it as incorrect code. Ditto for an HTML4 browser looking at HTML5 or XHTML1. If there are well-specified ways to handle errors, and the browsers follow them, then you can predict what browsers will do if they don't support a particular feature.
I noticed the same error on Konqueror 3.5.8, Opera 9.5a, & Firefox 3 on Linux, and on Opera 9.24 and Safari 3.04 on Windows -- all of which are supposed to pass the test.
Earlier today I tried to pull up the webstandards.org website, and couldn't. This got me thinking it might be a server problem.
I looked at the code for the test, and at one point it has an OBJECT where it tries to load the url, http://www.webstandards.org/404/. That should fail, causing the browser to display the fallback content inside the OBJECT element instead.
Guess what? That URL is returning a 200 OK code instead of 404 Not Found, so the compliant browsers are doing what they're supposed to do and displaying the content of that page in a little rectangle with scroll bars, and hiding the fallback content that we would normally see.
When their webmaster fixes the server config, the various compliant browsers should start displaying it correctly again.