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IE8 Will Be Standards-Compliant By Default
A number of readers wrote in to make sure we know about Microsoft's change of heart regarding IE8. The new version of the dominant browser will render in full standards mode by default. Developers wishing to use quirks mode for IE6- and IE7-compatible rendering will have to opt in explicitly. We've previously discussed IE8's render mode a few times. Perhaps Opera's complaint to the EU or the EU's record antitrust fine had something to do with Redmond's about-face.
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/03/03/microsoft-s-interoperability-principles-and-ie8.aspx
Firefox 2 is one of the most standards compliant browsers around. What other browser does significantly better overall at standards compliance than Firefox? Check out the link I provided to webdevout's information on browser standards support before you reply...
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
They've said it already passes Acid2.
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By standards compliant they pretty much just mean HTML CSS javascript and the DOM. There are many web technologies, but there isn't a single browser that fully supports all of the standards you listed. I wish there was. Feel free to correct me If I'm wrong.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
So does Safari. Yet from my experience it has way more rendering bugs than most other browsers I've used and tested against. Passing Acid2 does not mean that it is standards compliant. For instance. IE doesn't support the :last-child pseudo-class, but that doesn't appear in Acid2. So even if it does pass Acid2, it may still not support this feature.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Informative? mods on crack, as usual
That link is from 2004.
ROMANES EUNT DOMUS
Sites that depend on the behavior of IE7 will break unless they add a tag saying they are designed specifically for IE7. Sites that were developed according to standards, and do not rely on the behavior of specific versions of specific browsers, will not break. This is the advantage of designing web sites according to the standards. As a further advantage, they also tend to work in other browsers and on other operating systems.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Well, since the link you provide is largely question marks for the Webkit based browsers, that's hard to say. Also, the comparison you link to is missing a lot of standards where Firefox is a bit behind. These include:
That is not to say Firefox is necessarily behind other browser for standards compliance in general. No one with a clue would cite the Acid tests as proof of anything in that regard, but it does indicate that the link you provide is not particularly strong evidence one way or another. The whole question is probably too vague to be answered. There are a lot of Web standards and what really matters is which ones are most universally supported and what functionality cannot be used because of lacking support in one browser or another.
In summary, I reject your assertion, not because I'm convinced you're wrong, but because you haven't provided enough evidence to support it and there is significant contradictory evidence (cited above).
There's still one big reason not to switch back to IE - security. I don't want to go look at the open web using an integral part of my OS, thanks.
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
I disagree. At my last employer I used OmniWeb for a while (a very niche browser). Most of the Web UI developers used Firefox, but a couple used Konquerer. A few used Safari. A few used Camino. A few used Opera. Regardless of what you used, when you found a bug, you tested it with a couple of other browsers and if the remote Windows box was available (or you had an emulator running), you tested it on multiple browsers and multiple platforms.
The upshot of all of this was, when a bug was listed, it was pretty easy to see which bugs were specific to a given browser. Bugs that appeared in some version of IE, but in no other browser at all, were by far the most common occurrence. Realistically our approach boiled down to, "write to standards; then hack for IE. " Make no mistake, we did not code for some other browser then try to make it work on every one, because that was not needed for the most part. We were programmatically generating Web pages and interfaces from XML data and a couple of databases. For the vast majority of the time, all browsers but IE were close enough to the standards we used (HTML3, CSS2, XHTML) so that there were no discrepancies when tested.
You must not have read the press release!
"While we do not believe there are currently any legal requirements that would dictate which rendering mode must be chosen as the default for a given browser, this step clearly removes this question as a potential legal and regulatory issue"They aren't putting their neck on the line... it's already there. :)
IE doesn't support the :last-child pseudo-class, but that doesn't appear in Acid2.
I suppose this is why they already designed Acid3. Hint: Firefox 2 scores 50/100.
The real story here is that "Developers wishing to use quirks mode for IE6- and IE7-compatible rendering will have to opt in explicitly."
If you've been following any of the design / developer blogs and community response about this, you'll know that in a previous plan, all web pages would render in IE7 standards mode unless the developer inserted a specific meta tag
into each web page of a site. (For the truly avant garde, one could set the content to "edge", which would tell IE to render in the most current standards compliant version available). The outcry was that while it was clear that IE was making progress in standards, in order to take advantage of those improvements, developers were being asked to touch each page of their sites and tell IE to use its more standards compliant mode. That discussion is what was at play here.No, what they said was that they didn't necessarily have all standards met; but at no point did they say that they only fixed just enough to do Acid2.
Just for fun I tried Acid3 with a couple browsers (all MacOS 10.4.11):
Firefox3 nightly from March 3rd: 66/100. (Second closest to the reference rendering.)
Safari 3.0.4: 39/100.
Opera 9.26: 46/100. (Looked the least like the reference rendering though.)
Webkit nightly from March 4th: 87/100. (It also looked the closest to the reference rendering.)
Sorry, but this is false. There's support for those, and has been for a good long time.
Only one problem: IE is still the largest single share of the browser market, and likely will be by the time IE8 hits the market, which means people like me (web developers) and Joe Average (end users) are very interested in how it's going to turn out, even if I don't actually use IE for anything other than testing purposes. When IE has a viable competitor in the market share category, then the heat will be on and the focus will shift. For now, not enough people use Firefox or other browsers, though the shift is in progress.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
That aside, I think supporting an open web is worth it.
/Mike
-- "So, what's the deal with Auntie Gerschwitz et all?"
Have you ever tried implementing something described in an RFC ?
When you get to the should / should not stuff, it comes down to in most cases you really want to listen to it, but there tend to be specific cases (say, embedded devices) where it really doesn't make sense to follow the normal behavior. Generally, if you run into one of those cases, it tends to be obvious that deviating from the spec is the right thing to do.
The optional and recommended stuff tends to be things that really depend on the specific product and shouldn't be forced.
Making things more strict would be a bad thing and make people break the standards more. The current setup acknowledges that different implementations have different needs and does a good job of accommodating.
Hence the fact that Wine runs it is moot.
/mike
-- "So, what's the deal with Auntie Gerschwitz et all?"
AIUI Windows NT was POSIX compliant. But the POSIX specifications of the time left huge swathes of API defined where it was perfectly OK to return ERROR_NOT_IMPLEMENTED.
None of the mainstream Unix vendors actually did this, so most Unix code was written on the assumption that very little was not implemented. Windows, OTOH, returned ERROR_NOT_IMPLEMENTED everywhere it could. With fairly predictable results.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer