Author Topic: Current IE8 build renders the ACID2 Test correctly! (Read 53715 times)

dlagesse1992 · « **Reply #25 on:** December 23, 2007, 08:01 PM »

I'm happy that IE finally supports more code, but there are a couple of other things to think about:
-Woo! It renders one thing right! How about the rest of the internet?
-Still not fun to use. It can take lessons from FF and its extensions to fix this.
-Bad interface. Takes forever to do anything. Weird layout.
-Ugly Icon. Needs to be fixed.
-Name: not creative enough.

I may be a bit critical, but I am impressed that the developers are at least trying to do something right.

Josh · « **Reply #26 on:** December 23, 2007, 08:09 PM »

The rest of the internet? I've yet to run into a site that ISNT A TEST SITE that IE has failed to render properly.

No fun to use? IE has been extendable since its initial release. The API has always been there and has been used by hundreds of thousands of developers. You can tie just about anything into IE.

Bad interface? Thats subjective

Ugly Icon? Again, subjective, but does it matter when it comes to browsing the web? Does an icon affect your browsing?

Name? Umm, sounds like reaching for straws to me.

nosh · « **Reply #27 on:** December 24, 2007, 02:20 AM »

The only reason I have IE (6) still on my system is coz of MS's underhanded approach (some links simply refusing to load my default browser).

Josh · « **Reply #28 on:** December 24, 2007, 08:19 AM »

Like what? What refuses to open your default browser?

nosh · « **Reply #29 on:** December 24, 2007, 12:58 PM »

Clicking the "x new msgs" button within MSN Messenger, for one. I also do Windows updates manually and I had to use IE for it to work, IIRC. I've been using IE for that ever since so I don't know how compatible the windowsupdates site is with other browsers now.

f0dder · « **Reply #30 on:** December 25, 2007, 08:21 AM »

Like what? What refuses to open your default browser?
-Josh (December 24, 2007, 08:19 AM)

Anything using an embedded IE control + a few other apps. Some apps (including firefox and µTorrent) also specifically launch explorer.exe instead of whatever app is associcated with HKLM\Folder and HKLM\Directory... weird, since that actually requires more code than the simple ShellExecute...

Josh · « **Reply #31 on:** December 25, 2007, 08:56 AM »

And that is the fault of IE how? That is the developer of said applications fault, not IE

nosh · « **Reply #32 on:** December 25, 2007, 09:29 AM »

I don't think anyone pointed their finger at IE, more like the people behind IE - esp. when the tools that are hard-coded to use it instead of the default browser are made by the same corporation.

f0dder, I managed to make a few apps that always loaded explorer.exe load X2 by modifying the association for the folder shell context 'Open' key.

f0dder · « **Reply #33 on:** December 25, 2007, 09:31 AM »

And that is the fault of IE how? That is the developer of said applications fault, not IE
-Josh (December 25, 2007, 08:56 AM)

Well, with the "uses IE instead of system default browser", it's the fault of IE... but it would have been the same with any other browser component, after all when you click a link IE, you don't expect it to open in firefox, even if you select "open in new browser window".

It's annoying nonetheless, when you click a link in PlatformSDK or whatever.

f0dder · « **Reply #34 on:** December 25, 2007, 09:32 AM »

I don't think anyone pointed their finger at IE, more like the people behind IE - esp. when the tools that are hard-coded to use it instead of the default browser are made by the same corporation.

f0dder, I managed to make a few apps that always loaded explorer.exe load X2 by modifying the association for the folder shell context 'Open' key.
-nosh (December 25, 2007, 09:29 AM)

I have x2 associated to both "Folder" and "Directory", but still firefox and µTorrent choose explorer.exe...

nosh · « **Reply #35 on:** December 25, 2007, 09:59 AM »

I assume you're talking about creating your custom X2 key (eg: Open_X2) under 'Folder' & 'Directory' and then making that key the default action, like it says in the manual. I was talking about modifying the 'Open' key itself to point to X2 instead of Explorer. I don't have the setting on right now coz I restored a previous Windows image so can't confirm WRT ut & ff.

f0dder · « **Reply #36 on:** December 25, 2007, 10:35 AM »

I assume you're talking about creating your custom X2 key (eg: Open_X2) under 'Folder' & 'Directory' and then making that key the default action, like it says in the manual. I was talking about modifying the 'Open' key itself to point to X2 instead of Explorer. I don't have the setting on right now coz I restored a previous Windows image so can't confirm WRT ut & ff.
-nosh (December 25, 2007, 09:59 AM)

Ahah!

I'll give that a try later, thanks.

assk7 · « **Reply #37 on:** December 25, 2007, 04:57 PM »

For me, new Firefox ver 3 , opens blazing fast in 7 secs while ver 2 (Official release ) takes 20 to 30 secs on my comp.

f0dder · « **Reply #38 on:** December 25, 2007, 06:30 PM »

Humm, I just changed "Folder" back to using "Open" as default, and changed "open" to use xplorer2. FireFox still launches explorer.exe. Renamed the DDEExec key as well, and still the same. Shitty coders.

zridling · « **Reply #39 on:** December 26, 2007, 02:12 PM »

nontroppo, thanks for the Opera tip to mimic IE7's auto menu-hide feature!

nontroppo · « **Reply #40 on:** December 27, 2007, 10:26 AM »

you're welcome

Lashiec · « **Reply #41 on:** January 22, 2008, 07:19 PM »

Breaking news! In a effort to improve standards compliance in IE8, Microsoft reinvents the Web. The Internet breaks loose

In related news, the HTML5 draft is published. List of changes

(6 links in two lines. Gotta catch them all!)

nontroppo · « **Reply #42 on:** January 23, 2008, 10:24 AM »

Ian Hickson's take:

If Web authors actually use this feature, and if IE doesn't keep losing market share, then eventually this will cause serious problems for IE's competitors — instead of just having to contend with reverse-engineering IE's quirks mode and making the specs compatible with IE's standards mode, the other browser vendors are going to have to reverse engineer every major IE browser version, and end up implementing these same bug modes themselves. It might actually be quite an effective way of dramatically increasing the costs of entering or competing in the browser market. (This is what we call "anti-competitive", or "evil".)

Big sites will become locked in to particular IE version numbers, unable to upgrade their content for fear of it breaking. Imagine in 18 years — only twice the current lifetime of the Web! — designers will not have to learn just HTML, they'll have to learn 4, 5, maybe 10 different versions of HTML, DOM, CSS, and JS, just to be able to maintain the various different pages that people have written, as they move from job to job.

http://ln.hixie.ch/?...01080691&count=1

From Opera's Hallvord Steen:

Browsers will have to support an unmanageable and confusing mess of different rendering modes (and the PocketIE team will hate you for the bloat).
Because the META tag affects every part of the page, progressively enhancing such pages with new CSS features will be harder.

http://my.opera.com/...log/show.dml/1688321

And more from Mozilla's Robert O'Callahan:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="X-BALL-CHAIN">

;-) http://weblogs.mozil.../2008/01/post_2.html

The webkit team also ain't drinking the coolaid:

So, in conclusion, we don’t see a great need to implement version targeting in Safari. We think maintaining multiple versions of the engine would have many downsides for us and little upside.

http://webkit.org/bl...ility-and-standards/

This is like an 8.5-9 on the web developer richter scale...

nontroppo · « **Reply #43 on:** January 23, 2008, 10:27 AM »

And specifically related to Acid2 and IE8, Ian Hickson (who authored Acid2) says this:

It will be interesting to see whether IE8 really supports Acid2, since that test page doesn't include any of the special magic words being proposed here. Will they hard-code the URI? Will they check every page against a fingerprint and if it matches the fingerprint of the Acid2 page, trigger the IE8 quirks mode instead of the IE7 quirks mode?

Note Acid3 is also in the works and getting close to completion:

http://ln.hixie.ch/?...00301306&count=1

justice · « **Reply #44 on:** January 24, 2008, 03:57 AM »

It's hard to see how it works out and whether or not this is a good solution or not to me personally. But ever since the development restarted on Internet Explorer the team and Microsoft in general have been supporting standards (at least minimally), so to me version targeting shows that they still don't think the web can be standard based. Or big corporate partners can't afford the cost of converting to standard. Still though I've not made up my mind on it from a practical perspective.

app103 · « **Reply #45 on:** January 24, 2008, 04:37 AM »

Does anybody here really know what is required to pass the acid2 test?

Not only does a browser have to support the standards, it must also support invalid CSS code and render it 'properly'.

So pages that wouldn't be standards compliant because the code is badly written must look as the designer intended it, but failed to code properly.

This is a bit more than being able to support the standards.

A browser that CAN support the standards can still FAIL the acid2 test based on not supporting invalid css 'properly'.

Note: Some 827 people (rough estimate, contents may have settled during shipping) have written to point out that the CSS used in the test is invalid. This is deliberate, as a means of exposing the ability of user agents to handle invalid CSS properly.
-http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid2/

Am I the only one that thinks there is something a bit screwed up about that? That a browser can be standards compliant and still be considered not standards compliant because it doesn't fix a designer's careless mistakes when rendering pages?

And I am beginning to wonder if the creators of this test have some sort of agenda, where as soon as Microsoft comes up with a browser that can pass the test, bad CSS & all, they are going to raise the bar, come up with a new test, and make them support some more bad invalid code in order to pass. What's up with that?

Like what? What refuses to open your default browser?
-Josh (December 24, 2007, 08:19 AM)
Anything using an embedded IE control + a few other apps. Some apps (including firefox and µTorrent) also specifically launch explorer.exe instead of whatever app is associcated with HKLM\Folder and HKLM\Directory... weird, since that actually requires more code than the simple ShellExecute...

-f0dder (December 25, 2007, 08:21 AM)

Actually, it's less code and much easier to let apps written in VB open links in IE. It takes more code and effort to use the default browser, and when I was first learning VB I learned about this the hard way.

It was one of the reasons why I ran away from the language. Last application I wrote in VB, I had to add an extra module to it just to get a link to open in a user's default browser.

Too much of what Microsoft makes is intended to only support their products, and while you can force it to be friendly to user preferences, they don't exactly make it easy sometimes.

justice · « **Reply #46 on:** January 24, 2008, 05:45 AM »

That's the way the specs work the invalid markup is included in the test because the browser should ignore it. Error handling is very important. However, looking for clarification on the issue, I couldn't find any discussion on this by 'well known' css / web standards people.

Looking at the Acid2 Guide, quotes such as:

Should have no effect since the object is inline (’height’/'width’ don’t apply to inlines).

seems to indicate that problems in handling these statements would expose rendering problems that affects the valid css. That would be essential to test against. Invalid CSS in this context does not mean custom elements but using them in the wrong context which can happen easily if you have a website of a couple hundred pages served by one css file.

app103 · « **Reply #47 on:** January 24, 2008, 05:50 AM »

I was under the impression that the invalid code wasn't to be ignored and was to be 'fixed' by the browser to render a particular way so that less pages will break when a designer is careless and makes mistakes.

Dirhael · « **Reply #48 on:** January 24, 2008, 08:07 AM »

I was under the impression that the invalid code wasn't to be ignored and was to be 'fixed' by the browser to render a particular way so that less pages will break when a designer is careless and makes mistakes.
-app103 (January 24, 2008, 05:50 AM)

No, invalid code or declarations that the browser just don't understand in a stylesheet should always be ignored and never fixed by the browser.

justice · « **Reply #49 on:** January 25, 2008, 04:31 AM »

Interesting take on the matter- will we be stuck with IE7 even when IE10 is out?

Immortal Internet Explorer 7
Internet Explorer 7 will be a permanent fixture on the web. [...]

When a user upgrades from IE7 to IE8, they will be upgrading from IE7 to IE7. When a user upgrades from IE8 to IE9, they will be upgrading from IE7 to IE7. Notice the trend. Whatever happens in Microsoft's browser life-cycle, Internet Explorer 7 will still be the default browser on a Microsoft Operating System.
[...]
Effectively, with this meta tag proposal, Microsoft have either absolutely guaranteed that they will remain the dominant browser on the web, or it has sown the seeds for its ultimate destruction. If it's dominant IE7 will be the instrument to hold back all standards compliant progress, just like IE6 before it.

Either way, web standards compliant web developers are no better off with this proposal. Which leaves us absolutely no reason to accept the proposal.

The only way I see to move web standards forward is to reject this meta tag proposal (and any proposal that compromises browser agnostic authoring), and then set a deadline for browsers to fully support web standards. On the passing of that deadline, no compensation should be made for browsers. They live and die based on their support of web standards.
-http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/standards/CostOfMicrosoftsMetaTagProposal