IE 8: On the Path to Web Standards Compliance - ACID 2 Test Pass Complete
- Posted: Dec 19, 2007 at 12:03 PM
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- 55 Comments
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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.
In this interview, I sit down with IE GM Dean Hachamovitch and Architect Chris Wilson to discuss this milestone and dig into compliance in general, lessons learned from IE 7 and discuss the IE team's ultimate goal of de facto interoperability. Of course, no Channel 9 interview is complete without meeting some of the devs who actually write technology so we take a walk from Dean's office to super developer Alex Mogilevsky's office to discuss what's been done to provide IE with the core rendering features that enable IE 8 to pass the ACID 2 test. We also chat with CSS guru Markus Mielke who was instrumental in identifying and planning the feature set required to pass ACID 2.
Tune in!
In this interview, I sit down with IE GM Dean Hachamovitch and Architect Chris Wilson to discuss this milestone and dig into compliance in general, lessons learned from IE 7 and discuss the IE team's ultimate goal of de facto interoperability. Of course, no Channel 9 interview is complete without meeting some of the devs who actually write technology so we take a walk from Dean's office to super developer Alex Mogilevsky's office to discuss what's been done to provide IE with the core rendering features that enable IE 8 to pass the ACID 2 test. We also chat with CSS guru Markus Mielke who was instrumental in identifying and planning the feature set required to pass ACID 2.
Tune in!
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Go ahead and Digg it, man! The link you speak of will be in the next version of C9.
C
EDIT: DIGG IT!
http://www.digg.com/microsoft/Internet_Explorer_8_passes_ACID2_test
Thanks man!
For IE7, they remained tight-lipped about IE8.
Will IE8 pass the ACID2 test if we change the default font from Times New Roman to Cambria?
I tried changing the default font to Cambria on Firefox 3 Beta and Opera.
Firefox 3 renders it a bit off and incorrect.
Opera seems to be rendering it properly.
See pictures below.
1) Firefox 3 Beta 2 Fails ACID2 test
2) Opera 9.5 Beta Passes ACID2 test
In fact, Alex is saying the same thing in this video: "Passing the test is not something we build the project around. We build the project around implementing important features in a standards compliant way, and when we do it, the test just happened."
So as far as I understand it, more standards compliance is a focus for IE8. The test, as is its purpose, just points out that they succeeded at the compliance.
Thanks, man! The IE team were more than encouraging when it came to doing a C9 interview. You will see more of these in the future and we'll go a bit deeper into the technical side of things as well.
Dean and Chris are big C9 fans!
Thanks again, guys. Always great to chat with you.
C
You are correct! Passing ACID2 is a (pleasant) side effect of the substantial IE 8 feature work and IE team's heavy investment in compliance (interoperability), generally.
C
Wohoo! This is the first time I wish we had a party icon on C9.
We just got Frontpage'd on Digg!
Congrats IE8 team! (and w3bbo too)
Seems that this was a good job well done by MSFT.
Yes.
I know a lot about ACID2 by now
Thanks all for encouraging comments!
Alex
That's not amazing. Amazing would be if that happened on slashdot.
This is... Interesting
However, in the end this is good.
Kudos, guys, really. This is a very important step in getting IE up to spec with other browsers.
Keep up the good work!
This is a huge deal, so please don't screw it up by making IE 8 only for Vista and Server 2008.
Microsoft better support XP at the least or people are going to hate you even more!!
I think I'd prefer that it was done right, rather than release early, just to start a fight...
Not too shabby.
Congrats to the IE team. I've 1000+ rants and bug reports but I don't want to discourage you right now. Btw, if:
"We’re building IE8 for many different customers (consumers, web service providers, independent software vendors, enterprises, web developers, and others." then how about also building IE8 for media and print/photo professionals and including JPEG 2000, HD Photo, SVG, APNG and ICCv4 color management support and A-V tags, opacity: value; etc?
I hope the IE does not forget over time that "Acid2, is by no means a complete measure of CSS standards support and CSS is not the only standard. In fact, many IE issues are not CSS-related."
And btw, if you don't continue to release IE9,10,11 for XP, forget it. I'll still be pissed off. Because Opera 9 also runs on Windows 95 and MS should make a browser independent of their beloved OS. It is not just your duty to support Windows XP, people won't care about IE and use some other browser, its share will increase if you don't keep supporting XP even when Windows 7 or 8 comes out.
And I second a public bug-tracking system. And "third" a ""Fix the "Operation Aborted" JS DOM error.""
And as a punishment to MS for not supporting standards for sooooo long, I probably won't switch to IE8 if all is supports is just Acid2 compliance...maybe IE9 raises the standards compliance to 98% +, then I'll surely consider.
Lastly, I expect IE8 to be performant enough, definitely not cause as much speed lag as IE6=>7 transition.
Nobody will make content until browsers support the features, and browser vendors will not make the features unless they know developers are prepared to use them.
The Acid2 test is an egg in this "chicken and the egg" scenario. It gets a lot of play and is touted by MS's competitors as proof that they are looking forward while MS is not. The downplaying of the importance of this test, while making a video talking specifically around the event of being able to run the test for the first time (in the default font)? ... it seems like there is a lot of kool aid being drunk here.
But they are caught between a rock and a hard place. The work of CSS and these sorts of tests obviously owes a tremendous amount to Opera's leadership, followed by Firefox's momentum. To admit that this test is important would be to conceed that they are playing catch up to the real leaders (who pass the test without showing off 400 pages of dead trees) and that they actually *owe* them for setting their direction.
Good point.. where's the download link?
No seriously!
Here it is. Just 'save link as....'
The key word is interoperability never mind acid. I guess the significant difficulty in being standards compliant, is that you have to be innovative along the way. The 'feature' added in 1998 is still being ruminated by WC3. Reminds of a thread where the user said effecting change at WC3 is like planting grass in a desert. It doesn't happen oft.
micosoft said the acid2 test wasnt a priority for IE7, ie8 is another story
the standards mode is something you set in the doctype had has has been around for ever.
keep up the good work ie team and thank you charles for another great interview.
Merry Christmas,
Jonathan Sampson
(This is indeed a true Christmas gift for us web-developers!)
While I have sympathy for the problems you discussed regarding maintaining compatibility with older versions of IE, I should hardly need to point out that they are much of you own making
I'd also be interested in later communications from the team to hear what is your opinion on the future of the web in terms of standards, and as an application platform? For example, what is your stance on XHTML V2 vs HTML 5? What do you think of CSS 3.0? You talked in this video about the addition and standardisation of XmlHttpRequest, but it seems like there's been less innovation of this sort in the last few years. The only major example I can think of has been the addition of the Canvas tag in some browsers (and now into HTML 5, I believe). I guess the problem is that if individual browsers, particularly IE, start adding features unilaterally, then they are screamed at for introducing proprietary extensions, but if everything is done via standards bodies then it could well be a glacial design-by-committee process. What are your thoughts on this? Do you see a greater roll for more ad-hoc groups like WHATWG, where a smaller group of vendors can more swiftly spec a new approach and then pass it to the WC3 for standardisation? Do you foresee greater cooperation with Mozilla, Apple, etc, in the future?
It seems like from a political point of view, Microsoft is ambivalent at best regarding the web as an application platform. On the one hand you're producing great stuff like ASP.NET 2, the AJAX toolkit, Microsoft Expression, etc, but on the other you mothballed IE for a long time, and you don't seem too active in really pushing to advance the web beyond its current limitations. AJAX is all very well, but it's basically just squeezing the last drops out of technology that's almost a decade old. My cynical side would say that you're reluctant to enhance the web too far, for fear of letting web applications compete too closely with the desktop. That you want to stabilise HTML + CSS as a fancy document language, but to only deliver app capability via things like Silverlight and .NET that you have greater control over. Or am I just being paranoid?
That will make the web pages a lot more beautiful and pleasing to read.
Congratulations and great work on this major milestone
I wonder then why Firefox 3 Beta 2 fails when you change the font. Did they use dirty hacks?
Except for the password manager (which would require starting regedit as a service with taskplaner) it's better than in Firefox.
When can we expect alpha, beta ...?
Anyway good job with the IE8 and keep it that way... (good
Hope the performance of rendering will be improved...
Don't know about others, but I'm happy with IE and I'm glad that it respects the standards. I had no problems with IE.
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