MS Claims Future IE8 Will Pass ACID2 Test

[ByronM]

I think something just froze over ;)

The IE team has been very hard at work on IE 8 for the past several months and they hit a huge milestone last Friday evening. The IE dev team checked in a bunch of code that included several new features implemented in the core rendering engine that enable IE to pass the ACID 2 test! This is great news for web developers: IE 8 is going to be our most standards compliant browser to date. Passing ACID 2 is really a combined side effect of all the new features that have been developed for IE 8.

[channel9.msdn.com...]

[edited by: tedster at 12:04 am (utc) on Dec. 20, 2007]
[edit reason] attribute the quote [/edit]

[willybfriendly]

A standards compliant version of Explorer would break 90% of the websites out there.

As Marcia said over here [webmasterworld.com]

"I have never yet encountered a website that didn't work in IE - not so with FF, though I've started using it a lot. A very tiny percentage of sites are put together by perfectionistic CSS "religious fanatics" and IMHO it's far more inportant to be WEBSITE compliant than W3C compliant."

[tedster]

I don't think that's true at all. Only websites that were coded to actually use IE's previously buggy behaviors will break. That is certainly not the majority of sites that I see.

We do need a world where the "signal" of a website can be dependably rendered by all manner of "receivers", just as it long has been in broadcast media. And that's the value of web standards.

The heartening news for me is that IE development 8 is moving along just fine. I was thinking we'd need to wait for another 5 year gap.

Of course it's most important that your website be practical: to make your real-world users the top priority rather than following some idealistic concept. But how nice it is that developers will have available a set of features that were previously difficult or even impossible to use: full PNG support, all kinds of new and more efficient CSS code, extended hover behaviors, full support for the object element, etc.

Also note, the Acid 2 test is not really "purist".

It should be noted that Acid2 is rendered in standards mode. That is, the test page includes a DOCTYPE which signals that the browser should treat the page according to standards. Vendors that are reluctant to make changes in how they render legacy documents can continue their current behavior in what is known as quirks mode.

[webstandards.org...]

So for all who would continue to use older approaches to HTML, you certainly still can. Just skip the doctype. I'm sure IE8 will have a quirks more and be backwards compatible.

[timster]

Only websites that were coded to actually use IE's previously buggy behaviors

This seems to imply only websites deliberately written to IE's buggy behaviors will be affected. Many sites (and not just small/hobby sites -- some of these I've seen are otherwise nifty web apps) have HTML slapped together and declared done when they work with the latest version of IE.

Of course they often need work when the next version of IE is released.

[mattur]

Markus Mielke, MS program manager in IE team, emails [lists.w3.org] on the www-style list:

I do not think I am disclosing too much by saying that HasLayout will be history with IE8...

IE8 is a significant update, much more significant than IE6 to IE7.

[ByronM]

Any decent webmaster who programs to the bugs of prior versions would be able to add in a few lines of code to detect a good version.

To blame microsoft for working towards standards as a fault is the dumbest thing i've ever heard!

[bcolflesh]

Good work by MS - when this goes public, hopefully it will cut down on some of the crybaby whinging you see on various webmaster forums.

[tedster]

HasLayout will be history with IE8

Can I hear a "Hallelujah!"