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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."
If it takes until version 8 to support Acid 2, or 2^3,
then, when Acid 3 comes out, we can expect conformance by IE27?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I think the holyshit tag would be appropriate here.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Would anyone mind if they had rewrite their web pages or at the very least, remove the code that checks for the version of IE and if it is IE in the first place? I wouldn't mind.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
I guess when Bill Gates asks what the hell is going on, he gets results!
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Good News: ...
... in the year 2012 (give or take a few years), when the percentage of web users using IE 5, 6 or 7 finally dips below 5%.
Web developers will finally be able to develop a page once, according to standards, and have it work on all major browser
Bad News:
What have we seen recently?
The people behind the Phantom actually releasing a product
A Duke Nukem Forever teaser
Dell promoting Linux
IE8 passing Acid2
What's next?
Dogs living with cats??
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?
Am I the only one who thinks it's hilarious how thorough the author is in proving that this is really true. There's a screenshot of the test, video, and even a screenshot of the checkin.
It's almost like think we don't trust them or something.
Apparently that's now changed, and that's a very good thing. Personally, I credit the fact that Gates has given up the role of "software architect" in order to spend more time on his philanthropy. When he left, he seemed to take a lot of organizational arrogance with him.
Somebody is going to point out that ACID2 is not that great an example of real world CSS usage. That's perfectly true (how often do you use CSS to make silly pictures?) but the mere fact that MS has made passing the test a priority indicates a shift in attitude that we should all applaud.
Now that we broke the web with our own version of standards, we're going to break it again with the real standards.
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.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
...google for how to take a screenshot on linux... I do not think I trust your findings... Ad hominem FTW!!!.. ;P ... j/k
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.
Why fix bugs when the bugs worked better than the fixes? With the standard breaking IE6, random "updates" that makes IE7 css hacks useless, and now a new "standard compliant" IE8 that may or may not contain other bugs The task of writing pages to support IE6, IE7, IE8 will become equivalent to travelling on a mine field, a melting glacier and an active volcano in 3 parallel universes in the same car at the same time
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"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.
Crazier things are happening *now*. I have a date tonight. With a girl! :3
To be fair, any page without a DOCTYPE is not compliant, and can't be rendered in a compliant way. Any page without a DOCTYPE is probably buggy in other ways too. Firefox has a quirks mode too, and tries to fix buggy pages. It identifies a buggy page the same way, by looking at the DOCTYPE.
Everybody is in a pickle when it comes to rendering broken HTML. The only solutions are to do the best you can, or display an error message rather than a page. Also, to be fair, most of this mess is indeed caused by Microsoft, but even they can't fix it in a day.
I think it would be nice if browsers continued to fix spaghetti, but also showed a message somewhere that indicated that the page was buggy. Not a pop-up or anything, but a small, unobtrusive icon that was green and happy for a good page, or red and frowny for a bad. If IE had this by default, I think there would be a lot less bad pages on the internet.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
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.
But it makes a _perfectly_ straight line, and that can't be an accident.
Firefox has Standards Mode, too (right-click anywhere on a page->View Page Info). It differentiates between "Quirks" mode and Standards-compliance mode. "Quirks" mode is used when invalid markup is detected, or if there's no DOM declared; Standards-compliance mode simply means that the site is being displayed to spec, instead of being cleaned up by the browser's interpretation as to what way it should look. Standards-compliance mode, in theory, should always look the same on every browser (it's why standards *exist*), but as everyone who's done web design knows, that's not the case. That's not to say I support Microsoft, but as a web developer, I have to look forward to the day when most of the audience on the web can view my pages properly, without the need for time-consuming workarounds. In actuality, IE7 really has impacted me to an extent, since none of the old workarounds for IE6 work for it any more, and it still doesn't get things right. So I have to work around IE6, IE7, and any differences that those workarounds cause in browsers like Opera and Firefox who display it right the first time, which is a major headache and waste of time considering there's standards for these browsers to follow.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
I agree that tabs suck, but unfortunately, they are the best we have right now
If an easy shortcut to open in a new window existed, and window organization (easily!) into hierarchies was allowed in the general case, such that switching inside any level of the hierarchy was possible, and was convenient (the Window scale effect comes to mind), then tabs would become an unnecessary ad-hoc kludge.
Think about it why should we use tabs, really?
Easy. The vast majority of window managers on any OS, when a new window is opened, will give it focus. Most of the time that's probably the wrong thing to do (in my opinion) but that is the default behaviour. I like to browse through pages on Ebay, Wikipedia, Slashdot etc., and when I see a link I like I middle-click on it. In Firefox and IE7 this opens a new tab without switching focus and loads the page in the background. On IE6 it opens a new window (in fact you have to right-click then select open in new window), I then have to ALT-TAB or click back to my original window to carry on browsing. Most people that I've pointed this out to have then tried browsing with tabs for a few days and never gone back. On IE6 if you're browsing with the window maximised then open a link in a new window, the new window will not be maximised, so again I have to mess around to carry on browsing the way I want.
I'm usually totally against MDI type arrangements, of which tabs I guess are really a derivative. However, I have to say that I find tabbed browsing extremely efficient and intuitive.