First Look At the ACID3 Browser Test

ddanier writes "Now that all major browsers have mastered the ACID2 test (at least in some preview versions), work on ACID3 has begun. The new test will focus on ECMAScript, DOM Level 3, Media Queries, and data: URLs. 100 tests will be put into functions each returning either true or false depending on the result of the test. The current preview of ACID3 is still missing 16 tests."

I bet some devs are really pissed now

[Daimanta]

Finally, the bigger browsers are ACID2 compatible now. But suddenly those fuckers release a new ACID test. Now everybody's standard incompatible again. Let's see who succesfully implements ACID3 first.

Re:I bet some devs are really pissed now

[Bozzio]

Passing the ACID2 Test doesn't imply standard compliance. It just means the browsers implement a certain subset of the standards correctly (or effectively correctly).

The ACID3 test won't be a test for standards compliance either. The way I see it it's just a tool to motivate developers to work TOWARDS standards compliance.

The ACID3 test should, therefore, not be seen as a new set of standards. It's just a different subset of standards.

Re:I bet some devs are really pissed now

[ben kohler]

Finally, the bigger browsers are ACID2 compatible now. But suddenly those fuckers release a new ACID test. Now everybody's standard incompatible again. Let's see who succesfully implements ACID3 first.

these aren't new standards, just a new test that sheds some light on how standards-incompatible our beloved browsers still are

Re:Swell, but misses the point

[roggg]

It was pointed out by Dykstra i think, that tests can reveal the presence of errors, but never their absence. So testing is in some sense a pointless pursuit.

I got your missing the point right here. It's not necessary to prove the absence of errors. Developers use the presence of errors (and knowledge of those errors) to direct efforts at improving products. In what sense is discovering errors a pointless pursuit?

Re:I bet some devs are really pissed now

[paulpach]

This is an easy to reproduce set of bugs someone else found on their browser.

I would be glad to receive bug reports with an easy to use test case. It saves me the trouble of determining if it is a bug or not, coming up with a test case, the pain of communicating back and forth with the customer trying to find out what they are doing and how the bug is being triggered, etc. Also, this test suite will improve compatibility with other browsers so it will reduce bug reports in the long run.

Why the heck would they be pissed?

Re:I bet some devs are really pissed now

[stewby18]

> Firefox 2.0.0.10 fails the test
> Camino 1.0.3 crashes when starting the test
> Safari 2.0.4 doesn't even get started.

Those aren't the current versions of any of those browsers--not even close in the case of Camino and Safari--so that's not a terribly interesting test list.

Re:I bet some devs are really pissed now

[nine-times]

AFAIK, the purpose of the ACID tests were basically to demonstrate a specific set of rendering bugs, supposedly bugs chosen because they were common complaints of web developers. So the purpose wasn't to test standards compliance, but to give browser developers a target to hit in order to help web developers with some of their more common problems.

Not quite a new "subset" ...

[davide marney]

Acid2 tests a particular interpretation of how the standards should be implemented.

Re:I bet some devs are really pissed now

[CastrTroy]

But it didn't really give any indication on what was actually going wrong. You get this smiley face, or some messed up rendering of one, and you're supposed to guess at what's not working right. I would like it better if they had a lot of HTML+CSS in ways it would generally be used, with an image beside it of what it should look like. Don't give me any smiley face junk. That tells neither the developers or users what does and doesn't work.

Re:Swell, but misses the point

[bunratty]

That would be pointless. If browsers are getting mere hacks to display the specific acid test page correctly, the jig will be up when web developers start using the features tested by that acid test and discover that the features don't really work. I suspect that no browsers have been tweaked to pass certain tests, as that tweaking wouldn't fool web developers for any significant period of time.

Re:I bet some devs are really pissed now

[kestasjk]

You should see the channel9 interview with some of the IE8 team which worked on the ACID2 test. The standard is documented in a huge book, and the ACID tests test any number of them all in one document.

It's hard enough to write one of these tests (have you seen their source code?!), let alone write it in such a way that when it fails it presents a clear message explaining why it isn't rendering correctly and giving helpful hints to the rendering engine developers.

Re:I bet some devs are really pissed now

[x_MeRLiN_x]

Do you really think that their test would be so widely used if it didn't use such a novel method to display the results?