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W3C Says IE9 Is Currently the Most HTML5 Compatible Browser
GIL_Dude writes "The W3C posted results for their latest HTML5 compatibility tests and have found that, so far, IE 9 has the best overall results. 'The tests cover seven aspects of the spec: "attributes," "audio," "video," "canvas," "getElementsByClassName," "foreigncontent," and "xhtml5." The tests do not yet cover web workers, the file API, local storage, or other aspects of the spec. Not do they cover CSS or other standards that have nothing to do with HTML5 but are somehow lumped under HTML5 by the likes of Apple, Google, and Microsoft.'"
Thats why it used to be referred to as a recommendation, instead of standard (lots of discussions around it, though i think the likes of ISO and whatsnot now consider W3C stuff as actual standards).
That said, if you ever tried to implement anything from the W3C, its full of holes, inconsistencies, ambiguous parts, things "left to the implementator", and all around, Microsoft's OOXML may have been a lousy ISO standard, but it sure would fit right in anything the W3C ever published.
The only reason it kindda works, and that so many browsers seem to implement it, is because the likes of those working on Firefox, Safari, etc, kind of agree on stuff they don't like or the standard doesn't dictate. That also makes IE8 look worse than it actually is (not that its not awful, but in a few (very few) cases web developers will complain about things on which IE8 is actually right, and Firefox is wrong, but Safari, and Chrome are wrong the same way).
Its not just HTML/CSS/whatever. The XQuery specs for example, are just as bad.
The "released" browsers are:
Google Chrome 7.0.517.41 beta
Firefox 4 Beta 6
Opera 11.00 alpha (build 1029)
Safari Version 5.0.2 (6533.18.5)
The only one which doesn't have "beta" or even "alpha" in its name is Safari. So probably that one is actually released.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
On Snow Leopard, yes. FireFox uses the platform's native text rendering engine. Safari uses Apple's one wherever it runs. This means that you get Apple's sub-pixel AA instead of Microsoft's ClearType on Windows.
You also get some slightly different glyph positioning. Microsoft tweaks glyph positions by a fraction of a pixel to make them line up more closely with pixel boundaries. This makes individual characters clearer, but means that the spacing between characters looks a bit messed up. Apple renders glyphs exactly where they should be, which means that they often overlap pixel boundaries and need a lot of antialiasing.
If you're used to Microsoft's rendering, Apple's text will look slightly blurry. If you're used to Apple's rendering, Microsoft's will look weirdly spaced.
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Safari uses Apple's one wherever it runs. This means that you get Apple's sub-pixel AA instead of Microsoft's ClearType on Windows.
This used to be the case, but for a while now Safari for Windows gives you the choice between OS stock rendering, and Apple's fonts.
Microsoft tweaks glyph positions by a fraction of a pixel to make them line up more closely with pixel boundaries. This makes individual characters clearer, but means that the spacing between characters looks a bit messed up. Apple renders glyphs exactly where they should be, which means that they often overlap pixel boundaries and need a lot of antialiasing.
To be more specific, ClearType tweaks glyphs such that vertical lines are snapped to pixel boundaries - so a 1px vertical line is rendered using a single-pixel-wide column of physical pixels. On OS X, the same 1px vertical line can end up on fractional coordinates (e.g. at X=8.5px), and will be rendered using double-pixel-wide column of physical pixels to approximate that. The result is more blurry.
This is particularly noticeable on small fonts with thin elements, such as Windows system fonts Tahoma 8pt (in 2K/XP) and Segoe 9pt (in Vista/7). It's also why OS X default font is larger, and the stems are thicker.
The disadvantage with ClearType approach is not just "weird spacing", though. It distorts the overall size of the text by its adjustments. Normally, if you increase the point size twice, the physical size in pixels should also increase by exact same amount (+/-1px due to need to round to physical pixel boundary). OS X rendering actually guarantees that. On Windows, text rendered using small fonts is noticeably (by 20% or so) larger than it would be if "perfect rendering" was used, and so proportion is not maintained.
Which one is better is highly subjective, and more often than not the preference is defined by what the person was using before. Personally, I can't stand OS X rendering and love ClearType. I've met people who felt just as strong in the other direction.
If you want pixel perfect rendering of fonts and graphics, use PDF or a related technology. The whole idea behind HTML is that the content can be rendered differently on different devices. As such, a proper design should never rely on exact font sizes.