Buzz Archives: Web Standards (general)
UK government draft browser guidance is daft browser guidance
Last friday, the UK government's Central Office of Information (COI) published a public consultation on browser standards for public sector websites: This guidance has been developed to assist those delivering public sector websites to determine which web browsers to use for testing. Public sector websites have a responsibility to be inclusive ...
By Bruce Lawson | September 8th, 2008
- Announcing the WaSP Curriculum Framework
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Since March 2008, the WaSP Education Task Force has begun working on the WaSP Curriculum Framework, a collection of tools aiming to identify skill sets and competencies that aspiring Web professionals need to acquire to prepare them for their chosen careers, as well as resources that will help both educators and students.
By Steph Troeth | July 31st, 2008
- 2008 survey of people who make websites
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In case you haven't seen it, please invest ten minutes of your time to complete the 2008 A List Apart survey so that we can build a snapshot of our industry.
By Bruce Lawson | July 30th, 2008
- Curriculum Survey Results
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The Web Standards Project Education Task Force release the results of the 2007 Curriculum Survey.
By Rob Dickerson | July 28th, 2008
- Opera Web Standards Curriculum
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Chris Mills of Opera Software ASA announced today the release of the Opera Web Standards Curriculum. The initial 23 of 50 proposed articles are published and available.
By Rob Dickerson | July 8th, 2008
- W3C Offers Online Training Course: Mobile Best Practices
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The W3C Mobile Web Initiative is offering the online training course: An Introduction to W3C’s Mobile Web Best Practices from May 26 - June 20, 2008. The course is free, registration is open, but limited.
By Holly Marie Koltz | May 4th, 2008
- WCAG 2 now “candidate recommendation”
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The W3C announced today that WCAG2 is now a candidate recommendation and is likely to be "live" by the end of the year. The W3C says Candidate Recommendation means that we think the technical content is stable and we want developers and designers to start using WCAG 2.0, to test it out ...
By Bruce Lawson | April 30th, 2008
- This is your mobile device on Acid
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The W3C's Mobile Web Test Suites Working Group have just announced a new suite of tests for mobile devices. In the spirit of the Acid tests, the test results are returned in an easily grokable visual manner—the green squares are desirable, the red squares mean a feature isn't yet supported. The ...
By Jeremy Keith | April 16th, 2008
- Showing Off My <body> and Loving It
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I’m so tired of people half-assing it on Casual Day, but Naked Day? Now you have my full attention
By Christopher Schmitt | April 7th, 2008
- Street Team: Make Your Mark
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The WaSP Street Team launches its first community project: bookmarks which you can place in libraries, schools, and bookstores to help signal to readers that the material is out of date.
By Glenda Sims | March 8th, 2008
- Yahoo! UK & Ireland TV Listings site relaunches, chock full of standards
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While it's become much more common than, say, a couple years ago, it still deserves mention whenever a high-profile website relaunches with exemplary web development practices. Such is the case with the Yahoo! UK & Ireland TV Listings site, which this past week relaunched with some of the leanest and ...
By Faruk AteÅŸ | March 1st, 2008
- What’s the best test for Acid3?
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Now that all the major browsers (and many minor ones) have pledged support for Acid2, Ian Hickson has moved on to preparing Acid3 — and you can help!
By Kimberly Blessing | January 16th, 2008
- IE8 passes Acid2 test
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Blimey. Cor luvvaduck and no mistake. Just after the announcement that Opera are complaining to the European Union about Internet Explorer's dodgy standards support, Chris Wilson reports that an internal build of Internet Explorer 8 passes the Acid2 test. This doesn't necessarily mean that IE8 has fixed all its float oddities, ...
By Bruce Lawson | December 19th, 2007
- Opera complains to Europe over IE lock-in
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Opera Chief Technology Officer and co-inventor of CSS, HÃ¥kon Wium Lie has written an open letter to the Web community explaining the reasons that Opera has filed an antitrust complaint with the European Union to force Microsoft to support open Web standards in Internet Explorer and to unbundle Internet ...
By Bruce Lawson | December 13th, 2007
- Wear the Blue Beanie with Pride
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In honor of Jeffrey Zeldman’s blue beanie on the cover of his classic book, Monday, November 26th is blue beanie day. You can participate and share the Web standards benefits with everyone!
By Stephanie Sullivan | November 23rd, 2007
- Business Week: Jeffrey Zeldman: King of Web Standards
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This week, Business Week has published a Special Report on WASP co-founder Jeffrey Zeldman.
By Andy Clarke | August 7th, 2007
- Education Task Force Curriculum Survey
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The Web Standards Project Education Task Force has created a curriculum survey and seeks input from educational professionals.
By Rob Dickerson | June 13th, 2007
- A review of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, May 2007 Working Draft
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In last month's Interview with Judy Brewer on WCAG 2.0, we read that:WCAG 2.0 went through several Public Working Drafts in recent years, and a Last Call Working Draft in 2006. Each Working Draft was sent out for public review — altogether to hundreds of individuals, organizations, and lists around ...
By Patrick Lauke | June 11th, 2007
- Current browsers and the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0
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In web accessibility, you’ll often hear emphasis being placed on the duty of web authors to create accessible content. However, this is only one part of the web accessibility equation.One that has been particularly close to me, or rather one that has provided me with a lot of opportunity to ...
By Patrick Lauke | May 20th, 2007
- Call for Review: Updated WCAG 2.0 Working Draft
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The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (WCAG WG) invites you to comment on an updated draft of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0), published on 17 May 2007. WCAG 2.0 addresses accessibility of Web content for people with disabilities.The updated WCAG 2.0 Public Working Draft incorporates changes ...
By Patrick Lauke | May 17th, 2007
- hAccessibility
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By Bruce Lawson and James Craig. (German translation) Microformats are a great idea. They allow the embedding of parsable, semantic data (like contact information and event details) into regular web pages. With the right plug-in, that information can be saved directly to your calendar program or address book. Like Microformats, a ...
By James Craig | April 27th, 2007
- The Web Standards Documentary Project
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Aarron Walter, a faculty member of The Art Institute of Atlanta, launches The Web Standards Documentary Project.
By Rob Dickerson | April 20th, 2007
- Bringing standards to Microsoft
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WaSP Emeritus (and former fearless leader) Molly Holzschlag is settling into her new position at Microsoft this week and has begun reporting from the trenches with an overview of what she’ll be doing while she’s there.
By Aaron Gustafson | April 2nd, 2007
- Spring Fling
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April 5, 2007 sees the Highland Fling in Edinburgh, Scotland - a one-day conference aimed at web developers and businesses with an interest in web standards and accessibility.
By Derek Featherstone | March 27th, 2007
- A Shopping List For Standards?
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Molly is heading for Microsoft and wants to know what your hot topics are where standards and Microsoft are concerned.
By Ian Lloyd | March 18th, 2007
- Which is better for the web: single vendor homogeneity, or OSS/Web 2.0-style innovation?
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Brendan Eich, the principal creator of JavaScript and one of the leading developers for the Mozilla project, follows up his SXSW presentation, which illustrates parallels between historical examples of user-community-driven innovation and the current state of affairs in the web useragent space. (Say that fast ten times.) In today’s post ...
By Ben Henick | March 12th, 2007
- Another way to look at validation
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In the new issue of A List Apart, WaSP Emeritus Ethan Marcotte questions the way we advocate for standards.
By Aaron Gustafson | March 1st, 2007
- Notable web experts who are [x]: Women and non-Caucasians
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[To those who are advocates of politically correct language, I apologize in advance for the blunt way in which I frame the role of race in this post.] Between Jason Kottke and WaSP founder Jeffrey Zeldman, the buzz is building yet again on the subject of conference panel composition… specifically, the ...
By Ben Henick | February 25th, 2007
- What to do with WCAG 2?
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To say that the W3C has been working on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.0 for some time would be an understatement. The first public working draft for WCAG 2 was posted on January 25, 2001 - a full 6 years ago. Just less than a year ago ...
By Derek Featherstone | February 8th, 2007
- The Dutch Embrace Web Standards
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According to Peter-Paul Koch the new Dutch accessibility laws are pretty sweeping and "go way beyond WCAG". Better yet, they read like a veritable blueprint for modern standards based web development: A few examples will show you where Dutch government accessibility is heading. As of 1 September last year, every website ...
By Dean Edwards | January 15th, 2007
- Recent Accessibility Podcasts
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Join ATF members Bruce Lawson and Patrick Lauke on some recent podcasts (with transcripts available).
By Derek Featherstone | November 24th, 2006
The Web Standards Project is a grassroots coalition fighting for standards which ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all.
Recent Buzz
Acid3 receptions and misconceptions and do we have a winner?
By Lars Gunther | October 2nd, 2008
Acid3 progress and what it really means.
Acid3 is probably the most visible thing that WaSP has done the last year. When Google Chrome was launched almost every review included our little test as an indicator of standards support. It is often mentioned in blogs and articles. Now the Surfin Safari blog has announced that the team behind Webkit considers that they have passed the test in every aspect. And no doubt this is a great achievement. Congratulations to the Webkit team, but even more we would like to congratulate the average web user - who in a few years thanks to our test we hope will get a better experience!
What exactly does it mean to pass the Acid3 test?
There has been some confusion about the test and its importance. Some people have been saying things like â€my browser does not pass the test and I have no problems using itâ€. Quite a few other people seem to think that Webkit and Gogi (Opera’s internal build) passed the test already in March – despite the fact that neither team has made this claim.
To answer these misconceptions we need to address the issue of what exactly is being tested and how. The main part of test is automated through JavaScript, a sort of test harness that runs 100 subtests. Getting a score of 100 is not the same as passing Acid3 – a common misconception, or perhaps an oversimplification.
Many subtests are high on a developer’s wish list: Full CSS 3 selectors support, media queries, SVG fonts. Admittedly a few others test edge cases and more esoteric features – but the test was supposed to be a significant challenge!
The second part is a rendering test. Some of the scripted subtests produce results that affect the rendering, but there are also rendering issues that come in addition to these. Some of them are high on many designers’ wish list: Text shadow, downloadable fonts, and display: inline-block.
The third test is the so called “smoothness” criterion. It is basically a speed test. No subtest may take too long – and especially subtest 26 is challenging. Compared to Slickspeed, Sun Spider, the V8 test suite or Dromaeo Acid3 is not so thorough. It will give some indication of a browsers speed, though.
This is exactly as planned. Acid3 was not meant to be the one and only indication of a browser’s performance. In fact many other test suites are far more important. (We provide links to some of them below.)
Testing is really important. Without tests that check how well a certain browser follows standards, i.e. applies mark up and displays the result correctly, we can never guarantee an open, fully interoperable web.
A highly visible test like Acid 3 hopefully helps to promote such interoperability. One can also hope that all the other tests will receive the attention they deserve. Writing them is not a glamorous task, but highly essential.
Apart from improving its support for CSS in its browser, Microsoft has contributed 2524 test cases to the CSS 2.1 test suite. For that they deserve credit!
We all know that Internet Explorer currently lag a bit behind the other browsers in standards compliance. Indeed they are last of the big ones to pass Acid2 and they fail Acid3 more than any other browser. But can we declare Webkit as the best rendering engine now that they pass it?
Of course not. Since Acid3 is only one indicator of many. Webkit’s achievement is great – and there are many other really exciting things they are pioneering, like CSS transitions and transformations. And with Squirrelfish Extreme JavaScript performance looks really exciting as well.
In other regards Opera is a clear leader. It is the only browser that supports more than 90 % of the SVG test suite. It is the only browser that implements Web Forms 2.0, currently being merged into HTML 5. They supported media queries and SMIL long before Acid3 came out.
Gecko (with Spidermonkey) is no longer an underdog. Besides the fun of meeting the technical challenge it is not hard to guess that the Webkit team rushed to pass Acid3 also for marketing reasons – that they perhaps need a bit more than Mozilla. Mozilla concentrated on releasing Firefox 3 before Acid 3 received any real attention. Now that they are working on it they are impressive in another way, compared to Webkit. Looking at the discussions for bug 410460 and its related bugs, it is clear that any improvement must be rock solid. Work often continues even when a particular feature is good enough for Acid3.
In fact, there is actually one open issue still in Acid 3 that might temporarily cause Webkit to become incompliant again. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2008Sep/0218.html. I rest assured that a fix probably already is being made, though.
Perhaps one can compare this to a race where you are supposed to run a distance, with a bucket of water. One competitor crosses the finishing line first, the other, on the other hand, has not lost a single drop from his bucket. Both have done great. (By the way, internal builds of Firefox get a score of 97 now, and downloadable fonts work on Windows and Mac.)
In the end the winner is neither Webkit, Opera, Mozilla nor Microsoft, but developers who get more powerful features to work with and more consistency between browsers. And that means that in the long run they are able to focus on user experience, not browser shortcomings. This means that the true winner of Acid3 is anybody who surfs the web.
Some other test suites for your review:
Filed in Acid3, Browsers, Bugs | Comments (5)
