The Acid2 Test
Many of you may have heard of the Acid2 Test that was issued by the Web Standards Project to all browser makers. It is essentially a page with an image on it, but created using standards-compliant XHTML and CSS. It is designed to let browser makers test their product(s) for proper support of web standards.WaSP have even provided documentation explaining how the test was created.
If the browser passes the test, it will render a smiley face. If it fails, the face will appear distorted and broken.
I don’t think there are any browsers out there that pass this test right out of the box. One of the first to attempt to fix it is Dave Hyatt, an engineer involved with creating and updating Apple’s Safari web browser. He has been working with the Safari rendering engine over the past few weeks to make it pass the Acid2 Test.
Dave has been blogging his progress and making screen grabs of the renderings as he has tweaked the WebKit engine. On April 27, he posted the final screen grab, showing a nice, happy smiley face. He has also released the patches to the Safari engine that are necessary to make it pass the text. I wonder if any of these will be incorporated into Safair 2.0 in the near future?
As far as I know, Dave is the only one who has passed the test. I know that Mozilla has been working on it, as evidenced by this bug listing in Bugzilla, but I haven’t seen anyone posting images of their progress (although you can follow the development notes in the bug listing).
Since the IE team blogged the other day about improved CSS support in the IE7 Beta, I wonder if they are working to pass the Acid2 Test as well?
