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IE7 not Acid test compliant? Why? Not enough programmers, Microsoft?

IE7 apparently won't pass a set of tests defined by the W3C (of which Microsoft is a member). What's the excuse? Not being able to write code which passes the test? If you are not able to implement it, Open Source shows it's a better method, as they are soon able to pass the acid tests.

IMHO this is just Microsoft being annoying on purpose, just for fun. There's a reason for this: the more IE will become standard compliant, the more IE isn't really needed, which means other browsers take over. If that happens, Microsoft can't swap IE with a XAML platform later on, as the alternative, a real browser with AJAX, has a too big marketshare.

Get a life, Microsoft. Implement these standards and give web-developers a browser which is standard compliant. After all, you too agreed on these standards, as member of the W3C. Without standards, web-developers have a hard(er) time to construct proper sites which look good in every browser. Wasn't it so, that developers were so important to you, Microsoft? Aha, I see.

Published Tuesday, August 02, 2005 9:05 AM by FransBouma

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Comments

# re: IE7 not Acid test compliant? Why? Not enough programmers, Microsoft?@ Tuesday, August 02, 2005 3:17 AM


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_version

Plip

# re: IE7 not Acid test compliant? Why? Not enough programmers, Microsoft?@ Tuesday, August 02, 2005 3:21 AM

RTFA, I wasn't commenting on the beta of IE7, but on remarks made by the IE dev team.

Frans Bouma

# re: IE7 not Acid test compliant? Why? Not enough programmers, Microsoft?@ Tuesday, August 02, 2005 3:33 AM

Frans, you're terrible right... IE7 is a new browser and a new browser MUST BE Standard compliant. Thanks for your words... I agree totally.

Stefano Demiliani

# re: IE7 not Acid test compliant? Why? Not enough programmers, Microsoft?@ Tuesday, August 02, 2005 4:02 AM

Sorry my point was that changes can be made.

A lot of things can happen if enough people shout enough about them.

ASP.NET is a great example of this, there are loads of features people complained about which will be changed before release.

Plip

# re: IE7 not Acid test compliant? Why? Not enough programmers, Microsoft?@ Tuesday, August 02, 2005 4:15 AM

The answer is simple: Backwardscompatibility. If the IE team made IE7 completely CSS compliant, a lot of sites would suddenly stop looking right in IE7. The IE team is aware of the mess they have put themselves in, but when so many websites has been designed to be only IE compliant, they can't just change everything. Read more about their comments here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/07/29/445242.aspx
It would be nice with full W3C compliance, but I think they make a reasonable argument.

Morten

# re: IE7 not Acid test compliant? Why? Not enough programmers, Microsoft?@ Tuesday, August 02, 2005 4:37 AM

plip: what I find annoying is that the IE7 team apparently doesn't know what's the most important thing they have to do, and that's make the browser compliant to standards.

EVERYWHERE you look, people complain about the lack of standard compliance in IE. How can they still ignore that? Do they need even MORE voices to get convinced?

When you write a piece of software, you look at the specs what you have to write and you write the code. That is, if there are specs, otherwise you first have to go through a long research phase. Here, these specs are written out, very detailed, everyone can download them. So I find it really hard that they themselves decide what to implement from these specs and what to skip as 'not that important'. If you plan to do that, why even agreeing on these specs in the first place!

Morten: I understand they'll break sites if they change CSS behavior, but with a proper doc-type it should work. And what's the alternative? Be aware that IE7 is the final browser they'll release. If IE7 doesn't have it, forget it. So, if IE7 doesn't support the full CSS1 and CSS2.x standards, as well as full DOM compliance, we can safely say, these standards are then officially dead.

Frans Bouma

# re: IE7 not Acid test compliant? Why? Not enough programmers, Microsoft?@ Tuesday, August 02, 2005 4:42 AM

I think you need to read the announcement one more time. First of all MS states that:

"I want to be clear that our intent is to build a platform that fully complies with the appropriate web standards, in particular CSS 2 ( 2.1, once it’s been Recommended)."

Read the sentence "fully complies with the appropriate web standards". Also, in response to not passing the Acid2 test, they say:

"...but the Acid 2 Test covers a wide set of functionality and standards, not just from CSS2.1 and HTML 4.01, selected by the authors as a “wish list” of features they’d like to have. It’s pointedly not a compliance test (from the Test Guide: “Acid2 does not guarantee conformance with any specification”)..."

From the announcement I don't see anything stating that MS won't conform to the normal standards.

Micael Baerens

# re: IE7 not Acid test compliant? Why? Not enough programmers, Microsoft?@ Tuesday, August 02, 2005 5:10 AM

MIcael, so you're saying that if a browser complies to all CSS standards (2.0 and 1.0), it still will fail the ACID2 test?

2.0 and 2.1 are set standards, just pick up the descriptions of the statements and start implementing them in the parser and rendering engine. If Microsoft is not willing to do that, don't agree to the standards as well in the W3C. 2.1 IS recommended btw.

And what's 'normal standards' mean btw? I thought there were just 'standards', you support them in full or not at all, there isn't a 'we support standards as we please'-way to comply to standards.

FF doesn't support all statements as well at the moment but it is at least a priority and a goal to do so. MS clearly states they won't.

And what's been said by others as well: if MS doesn't backport CSS fixes to IE6, which runs on other platforms than IE7 will, it won't matter much: more and more webdevelopers will leave the IE only path and code towards the standards, making IE look bad, as the time wasted to fix rendering bugs is too much.

Why go through all the effort to release IE7, when one of the core complaints about IE in general is that it doesn't obey standards.

Frans Bouma

# re: IE7 not Acid test compliant? Why? Not enough programmers, Microsoft?@ Tuesday, August 02, 2005 6:03 AM

If a browser complies to CSS (1.0, 2.0), then yes - it may still fail the Acid2 test. Also - a browser may pass the Acid2 test, and still not comply to standards.

Acid2 assumes basic support for HTML4, CSS1, PNG and Data Urls, so unsupported PNG or Data Url features for instance may cause it to fail. Also Acid2 depends on default stylesheets which might be different on IE7, as well as other assumptions.

I agree - "normal standards" was misleading. I meant "normal set of standards", which I would consider HTML4, XHTML1.0/1.1 and CSS1.0/2.0.

As far as I see it - MS has, with the announcement, committed itself to fully complying to CSS 2.0 and CSS2.1 as well as "appropriate web standards" which I find hard to believe won't include HTML4 and XHTML1.0/1.1 - whether or not they pass the Acid2 is in this case irrelevant.

Micael Baerens

# re: IE7 not Acid test compliant? Why? Not enough programmers, Microsoft?@ Tuesday, August 02, 2005 9:53 AM

Relax, they have clearly stated they are going to be compliant, like the post above has stated. You can be standards compliant and still fail the acid2 test.

L8r.

Jason Clark

# re: IE7 not Acid test compliant? Why? Not enough programmers, Microsoft?@ Tuesday, August 02, 2005 10:09 AM

Frans,

I don't think any modern browser passes the ACID2 test. I take that back, I think there's a version of Safari that's in CVS that passes the ACID2 test.

But Michael is correct. A browser could support all of the current standards and still not pass the ACID2 test. That's one of the things I don't like about the ACID2 test. Rather than becoming a centralized standards test, it's just a "wish list" test. So if you want to test a browser for standards complience, you have to do it on your own.

I agree about backporting the changes to IE6. I don't think they'll do that though. If they can at least get IE7 up to the current level of Firefox, it would make my life easier.

Scott

# re: IE7 not Acid test compliant? Why? Not enough programmers, Microsoft?@ Tuesday, August 02, 2005 11:07 AM

>Frans Bouma
>Posted @ 8/2/2005 10:37 AM
>plip: what I find annoying is that the IE7 >team apparently doesn't know what's the most >important thing they have to do, and that's >make the browser compliant to standards.

Frans -

Unfortunately, you are absolutely wrong here. the MOST important thing for MS to do is make IE7 MORE SECURE. Yes CSS/HTML/XHTML compliance is very important, and must be a huge part of the IE7 effort, but security is a bigger concern for the general users and administrators iof IE.

Christopher G. Lewis

# re: IE7 not Acid test compliant? Why? Not enough programmers, Microsoft?@ Tuesday, August 02, 2005 12:38 PM

Current browsers which pass the acid2 test:
Safari, Konquerer, iCab.

IE 7 will be a pain just like every new browser engine will be a pain.

Standards compliance sure it helps, but it won't replace IE 6 on all windows systems so, we still have to build for yet another rendering engine.

Sites will still have to work / look good in:
IE 5.5 / 6 / 7
Mozilla / Firefox
Safari

And to a lesser degree Opera.

HTML is just like Java write once test everywhere.

Mischa Kroon

# re: IE7 not Acid test compliant? Why? Not enough programmers, Microsoft?@ Tuesday, August 02, 2005 4:04 PM

AND MAN ... You should see the hungarian coding in their source code .. tch tch .. (shaking his head in dismay).

Sahil Malik

# re: IE7 not Acid test compliant? Why? Not enough programmers, Microsoft?@ Wednesday, August 03, 2005 12:01 AM

Acid2 has stuff that goes beyond the actual standards, including some things that may fall into CSS3. Does anyone here like to code software to unfinished requirements? Not if you like to deliver on time!

Jeff

# re: IE7 not Acid test compliant? Why? Not enough programmers, Microsoft?@ Thursday, August 04, 2005 4:17 AM

Maybe I'm not getting this right, but I'd like to doublecheck: the ACID test is no standard at all, is it? The W3C doesn't acknowledge it. It has no formal meaning beyong the Web Standards Project (http://www.webstandards.org), which is a "grassroots coalition" as they call themselves. They fight an honourable cause, but their test is nothing more than that: their test.

Teun Duynstee

# re: IE7 not Acid test compliant? Why? Not enough programmers, Microsoft?@ Thursday, August 04, 2005 12:15 PM

Frans.

If you take teh HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0 and the contridictory XHTML 1.1, CSS 1.0 CSS 2.0 and CSS 1.1 and fully implement them in the browser you will still fail Acid 2 test.

On top of that if you have to support Different Access related technologies. there are trade offs on those as well.

So IMO Acid 2 is a pipe dream that even though Safari and a 2 other browsers support will fail in implementation details with regards to accessability.

On top of that acid 2 is not a W3 suite of tests it belongs to a webstandards.org and is purposely has non valid css and html in the platform.

Douglas

Douglas

# re: IE7 not Acid test compliant? Why? Not enough programmers, Microsoft?@ Monday, August 08, 2005 9:37 AM

Not to mention that CSS 2.1 is NOT a recommendation anymore. It has been pulled back for further changes.

sdf

# re: IE7 not Acid test compliant? Why? Not enough programmers, Microsoft?@ Wednesday, August 10, 2005 9:56 AM

I havent read the comments here, so if I echo someone else, please forgive me. I honestly thought this beta 1 was specifically for this purpose ie. standards testing etc?

It certainly isn't anything special and when it almost crashed my machine a week or so ago, I uninstalled it and realised that I should never play with beta 1s on my "business" machine ever again!

If it doesnt pass these tests, what is it out there for, because it certainly isnt stable enough?!

Mark

# MS seems innovative, why isn't the IE dev team?@ Thursday, August 11, 2005 4:49 AM

Though the Acid tests aren't really the guidelines here, there are plenty of tests to think of which do give a good impression of IE's implementation of W3's recommendations.

I think Frans is right saying the IE team is plainly too lazy to fix the stuff they are obligated to the web developing crowd.

The main problem is that there is no progress if there is no innovation. The W3C does the innovation for you, why can't they deliver the progress?

It surprises me, since I feel MS is mainly being innovative (see C#, .NET framework, etcetera) and clearing the bad name they had with such a big part of the developing world for years.

However, with IE they're still behind. There is no solid answer as to why they don't satisfy the web developers out there. It's simply bad for their name.

Backwards compatibility is no argument. IE6 already has a way of switching between "standards compliance" and non-standards compliance (quirks) mode. I'm sure the same technique is fit for IE7.

(standards compliance mode is triggered with a doctype on the first line containing a reference to an online DTD)

drm