W3C Says IE9 Is Currently the Most HTML5 Compatible Browser 382
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.'"
Re:Posting from IE8... (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a "brightness" knob on my TV, but that never seems to work either.
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BMO
Re:What kind of a "standard" is this? (Score:2, Insightful)
Technically ... neither is IE9. This article seems to fail in pointing out that it just compared a browser still in the preview phase to other browsers that are released. The board will keep changing, the difference is that within a few months of IE9 coming out there will be new Firefox and Chrome releases. The further difference here being that a year or two after IE9 coming out those same browsers (and likely Webkit/Safari, Opera, etc) will all have multiple releases.
So IE9 has essentially caught up ... so what? Microsoft was dragged kicking and screaming to the point of being the "most compliant" and once it reaches that goal it will end up touting that marker well after the other browsers eclipse it.
Re:What kind of a "standard" is this? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:I feel conflicted (Score:2, Insightful)
Its easy to look back at IE6 and say "holy crap what a wreck!" but IE6 happened because the standards weren't moving fast enough. There is a reason IE6 took so much ground, because it actually did what people wanted. Then years later people come in with how it should have been done and now IE6 is the devil. I mean, yeah, its a pain in the ass and unfortunate, but its not like we didn't get anything out of the deal.
Re:Irrelevant (Score:3, Insightful)
Apparently you weren't paying attention when IE6 became IE7, nor when IE7 became IE8, and you're certainly not paying attention now when IE8 is about to become IE9.
Microsoft is obviously continually improving their product. If they weren't, this article would not exist.
They are not, however, doing it on the schedule you would like them to do it on, and for some reason in your mind that qualifies as stagnation. Most reasonable people can recognize that this is, in fact, a major improvement in a long line of major improvements, which obviously discredits your claim completely.
Re:Posting from IE8... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Posting from IE8... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Not suprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, how about this: Limited to Windows 7 / Vista. That's a much bigger problem for the 50% of us who use Windows XP.
Embrace comes before Extend (Score:3, Insightful)
It's all part of their standard operating procedures after all. If they wish to get back on top, they will need to support the standards... then, of course, they will extend on them, get developers to use the extensions and then make sure everyone else looks "broken" again. Seen it all before.
Re:Not suprising (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a lot easier to just not use IE9.
Re:Posting from IE8... (Score:3, Insightful)
The list of scripts present in a random website is positively scary. It's little wonder that Windows users always get infected with some nonsense. There's no way for a webmaster to control and manage all of the external dependencies present in the sites created by the "screw the minority" crowd.
It's like medical outsourcing out of country where your medical history becomes subject to hijacking or auction.
Every external dependency is another place for management, security and responsibility to fail.
Re:Posting from IE8... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
But you can damn will complain when javascript is used unnecessarily, especially when it's used as a crutch by obviously lazy and/or neophyte developers because their laziness results in their users being unnecessarily exposed to increased security risks. 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.
Web developers are (supposed to be) the experts, web users are regular joes -- it should be the experts that bear the burden of making websites that encourage good security practices, rather than putting the burden on the non-experts to have to deal with increasing array of vulnerabilities.
If all sites were simply written in HTML there would be a lot less 'web' out there.
I disagree. There would be a lot less crap, and probably only slightly less useful content. But above all there would be a hell of a lot less malicious websites and compromised ad networks.
Re:Posting from IE8... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Not suprising (Score:3, Insightful)
As a user, I find any site specifying any font size to be infuriating as they tend to not display properly with my settings. A damn good example of that is /. itself. I've had to push the font size in Firefox to 16pts as the minimum, just to get a readable size on screen. It's the same for many websites and that violates the entire spirit of HTML, which was basic formating yet all of a sudden we're seeing so many sites use damn screwy fonts and sizes just to be different.
Re:Posting from IE8... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
RFC (Score:1, Insightful)
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).
In the same way that an RFC is a "Request for Comment", which makes it sound like a glorified memo. :)
(And there's plenty of software that doesn't conform to RFCs.)
+/- tolerances (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:What kind of a "standard" is this? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, since the alternative is to wait another half-decade for W3C's glacial pace to finally (maybe) get to a finished standard, I think most people prefer to start in on it now, rather than continue being stuck on the now decade-old HTML4.01/XHTML 1.1 combo.
Re:Not suprising (Score:4, Insightful)
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.