Acid3/2 hype
People are getting all excited because Opera and Webkit are passing the Acid3 tests. This is similar to the hype for the past couple of years over Acid2. These tests largely get their backing due to the fact that the original Acid test was included as a reference test in the CSS1 specification. The same cannot be said of Acid2. It used severely broken code to test how well browsers could cope with the severely broken code found all over the web (though there was some real nasty stuff in Acid2). Once a browser passed the test, it was proclaimed that it was the “most standards compliant” browser available. Of course, if your browser implemented the spec perfectly (though last time I checked, there was some ambiguity in certain portions of CSS2.x; so, that is not even possible), it may not deal particularly well with broken code and thus would fail Acid2. That a browser happens to deal with a particular set of broken code as that creator intended just does not excite me. Acid2 has not been adopted as a test suite for any specification for this reason exactly. It may be useful for developers to know how their browser may be breaking by just visiting one site. If I was developing a browser and if the rendering is sane, but not what the Acid2 person wants, I would not care much at all, except for the fact it is all kinds of hyped, and I would want to defend my product from attacks based on that hype.
I have not investigated Acid3 much at all. But I am not aware of anything that says it is a standards tester, just another browser rendering tester, with a focus on JavaScript EMCAScript and DOM Level 2 instead. So, the fact that Opera and WebKit are passing Acid3 does not excite me whatsoever. That is, Acid3 will not be a reason for me to switch over to Konqueror, even once it adopts WebKit (you know, I hate that phrasing. WebKit is a fork of KHTML. Konqueror isn’t adopting WebKit, Apple is creating a set of conditions where the forks can be merged, which should have happened a long time ago).
Hopefully, the last computer post for a while.
