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."

Comments

Remember kids...

[sootman]

... passing the Acid test doesn't mean the browser's perfect. From http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid2/guide/

Everything that Acid2 tests is specified in a Web standard, but not all Web standards are tested. Acid2 does not guarantee conformance with any specification.

And, from what I've read before, it tests how browsers handle incorrect code as much as anything else--i.e., if it deals with errors correctly. I'd rather have it handle every bit of the spec correctly in the first place, and if it fails gracefully, that's nice too.

It'll also be nice it it handles transparent PNGs properly with nothing more than an <img> tag--like how IE/5 Mac did almost eight fucking years ago. Here's how much progress they had made as of 6/2006. (Yeah, it's been a while, and maybe they've fixed that, but c'mon.... it was 2006!) Too bad they lined up the Mac guys against a wall and shot them, ensuring that it would take almost a decade to get that one feature into IE/Win.

Feel free to correct me if I've made any factual errors in this post.* Flame if you want, but nicely worded, verifiable responses are preferred and worth a lot more to readers in general.

* aside from the part about shooting the Mac team--I'm (pretty) sure that didn't happen.