Opera Passes the ACID3 Test

Sorry to double-post. Here's some information on the ACID tests. You can try the ACID test yourself, using nothing more than a Web browser. The ACID tests are designed to test the standards compliance of browsers, and browser makers seem to be competing on who can pass the tests first. This is generally good for standards.

Here's a direct link to the ACID3 test.

Except that IE is still competing in the Acid 2 test

Here's an interesting response from Eric Meyer:

Acid Redux

Basically what he's saying is that the Acid 3 test isn't an adequate measure of standards support. It's just "cherry picking" certain difficult elements to test and ignores large parts of the specifications. I think that even CSS 3 on it's own is probably too big to measure with one test.

He's correct, but it's the best test we've got. Not only that, but his complaint is that it only tests small parts of the specifications. He's missing some important points, that make the test work, though:

1. it tests stuff like SVG, this requires XML support, something certain browsers lack;
2. since it tests a wide range of different Web standards, browsers need basic support for the features or the test will not work at all (see point one);
3. testing corner cases often makes you find other bugs (it's one of the ways I test my own code);
4. it's good that--already very compliant browsers--are competing to be more standards compliant;
5. when this bunch of corner cases have been tested, a new ACID test will be formulated to exercise the browser's rendering engines;
6. these tests are cumulative, the different ACID versions all test different things, once we get up to ACID 10 we'll have a pretty comprehensive test suite, whilst Eric Meyer is still whining on his blog ;

I don't see Eric Meyer offering up solutions, only complaints. Am sure I've heard the same line from a certain Redmond based company on why version seven of their browser wouldn't pass ACID2. Meyer does seem to have morphed into a Microsoft apologist since WASP started working with them. How the mighty have fallen.