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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.'"
What an awful example. FTP is a nearly completely static protocol with no defined presentation layer for user interaction. On the other hand HTML5 is not even a completed standard yet and is almost entirely focused around creating user interactivity with the data.
What you are missing is this ... FTP doesn't correlate to HTML5. FTP correlates to HTTP. HTML5 would correlate more with the concept of the GUI to utilize FTP. Of which there are MANY completely different examples, none of which work perfectly for all situations. If you want to compare FTP to something regarding the web, then make comments about how well your web browser complies with the ability to communicate with a web server. In which case pretty much all browsers will be compliant.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
Or doesn't work properly if you have JS disabled since they removed or disabled the old comment controls. In a similar vein, the W3C test results are presented via some javascript crud. Assuming that is that the visitor has it enabled.
A lot of website functionality is built with JavaScript - that's just a fact of life. You don't have to enable it, but you really can't complain when websites don't cater to the small minority of users who either disable or block all scripts. We're trying to get sites not to support the dying number of IE6 users, and I'd be willing to bet the % of users not using JS is even lower than IE6 users. If all sites were simply written in HTML there would be a lot less 'web' out there.
Well, how about this: Limited to Windows 7 / Vista. That's a much bigger problem for the 50% of us who use Windows XP.
+0 Meh
I think the Anonymous Coward has a stronger case here. Graceful degradation is the way sites are supposed to work. You can't complain when the snazzy stuff doesn't work with JS turned off, but you can complain when basic forms don't work.
Nobody disables javascript because they want to, they disable it because javascript is the number one source of web browser vulnerabilities by at least an order of magnitude, probably two.
No it isn't, not even close. Flash and Acrobat Reader are by far the biggest infection vectors; raw, browser-based JS is positively benign by comparison.
Stuff like making it easier to do tracking cookies and be generally annoying are JS's biggest flaws.
As a CSS guy, this means I find other browsers infuriating. Now that we have Webfonts I want to render ever piece of text with fonts instead of graphics...but getting a banner to just the right size is often impossible without a fractional font size. As a normal user, it means Firefox more often than not looks "wrong," because it's far enough ahead of the curve to be out front alone.
This is the web, not desktop publishing. If you want pixel perfect rendering 100% of the time generate a PDF or PostScript file (or Flash). While CSS has certainly improved the visuals, the sites I like the best are ones that actually still useful when I use lynx/elinks to visit them (e.g., Daring Fireball, Ars Technica).
While I'm a fan of good design, you have the wrong mind set when creating a site if you want the above IMHO. Even in engineering physical things there, are some +/- tolerances; you need to have some "give" in your designs and I think it's true with HTML as well. All of this advanced CSS is nice, but after a certain point you're into the realm of "control freak" designers.
Please remember: web site != desktop publishing. If your layout can't handle a few pixel offset here or there, then it's veered into the realm of "control freak" country.
Having access to a 14.5px font has absolutely nothing to do with using 8px font.
GP was complaining about the inability to use fractional-sized fonts in general, and his explanation as to why he needs it is so that he can precision-match text on various UI elements. My point is that his expectation of being able to precision-match text size at all is incompatible with basic accessibility issues, and that any website relying on such tricks is broken for many people.
It doesn't have anything to do with specific font sizes. Mine's minimum is set to 13px because that's what I can read well without squinting on my display. My mother's vision is much worse, so hers is at around 15px or so (I don't recall exactly), so even in a browser which supports fractional font sizes, a webpage requesting 14.5px would not get it.