A new way to say Hooray!
Friday, 28. March 2008, 14:43:17
Since ACID3 seems to be the talk of the town lately, I figured I should at least say something about it. First of all, it's been fun "racing" against Webkit. To me the real fun isn't until the final result can be seen in stable final products though, simply passing ACID3 by itself doesn't mean full support for SVG or any other web standard AFAIK. I don't think that was the case for ACID1 or ACID2 either. Though I would consider passing these tests as a sign of commitment to web standards.
Maciej Stachowiak wrote up a nice piece on the struggles to pass the ACID3 test. We too had to fix a number of things to get the test 79, submitted by Cameron McCormack, to work, though the other SVG tests were of course easy for us since Opera has supported most of SVG 1.1 since Opera 9, and SMIL Animation since Opera 8.5.
The tests I wrote for ACID3 are probably easier to pass than the test Cameron submitted, and I agree with Maciej that they are indeed not as stringent. It would have been possible to create a far more advanced SMIL test. Time was in short supply though, that's the only excuse for the somewhat simplistic SMIL test. Really I would have liked to have a few visual tests for SVG there instead, but the rules of the contest weren't such that it allowed that unless it had verifiable results using scripting. There could have been one or more tests for SVG filters for example. The SVG 1.1 testsuite has a number of tests for all of this though, so I would recommend using that to accurately judge how a particular implementation fares with regards to SVG.
Eric Meyer writes:
For SVG there are no less than two quite extensive public testsuites, one for SVG 1.1 and one for SVG 1.2 Tiny. These are still being actively worked on, with or without the help of ACID tests. The CDF WG also has a testsuite covering integration aspects of XHTML and SVG. Of course, exhaustive test suites take time to create, which is why the W3C is researching how to allow people to submit tests more easily. In general it seems the W3C is changing to become more open to the public, which IMHO is a good thing.
In closing, congrats to Webkit, and congrats to all the people involved at Opera for releasing a public Opera build that gets a pixel-perfect 100/100 pass rate on ACID3. Umm, what's that? An SVG-only Acid test? Naah, that's just preposterous.
Maciej Stachowiak wrote up a nice piece on the struggles to pass the ACID3 test. We too had to fix a number of things to get the test 79, submitted by Cameron McCormack, to work, though the other SVG tests were of course easy for us since Opera has supported most of SVG 1.1 since Opera 9, and SMIL Animation since Opera 8.5.
The tests I wrote for ACID3 are probably easier to pass than the test Cameron submitted, and I agree with Maciej that they are indeed not as stringent. It would have been possible to create a far more advanced SMIL test. Time was in short supply though, that's the only excuse for the somewhat simplistic SMIL test. Really I would have liked to have a few visual tests for SVG there instead, but the rules of the contest weren't such that it allowed that unless it had verifiable results using scripting. There could have been one or more tests for SVG filters for example. The SVG 1.1 testsuite has a number of tests for all of this though, so I would recommend using that to accurately judge how a particular implementation fares with regards to SVG.
Eric Meyer writes:
...what’s really needed right now is exhaustive test suites for specifications– XHTML, CSS, DOM, SVG, you name it.
For SVG there are no less than two quite extensive public testsuites, one for SVG 1.1 and one for SVG 1.2 Tiny. These are still being actively worked on, with or without the help of ACID tests. The CDF WG also has a testsuite covering integration aspects of XHTML and SVG. Of course, exhaustive test suites take time to create, which is why the W3C is researching how to allow people to submit tests more easily. In general it seems the W3C is changing to become more open to the public, which IMHO is a good thing.
In closing, congrats to Webkit, and congrats to all the people involved at Opera for releasing a public Opera build that gets a pixel-perfect 100/100 pass rate on ACID3. Umm, what's that? An SVG-only Acid test? Naah, that's just preposterous.
WIDGETIZE
jeff_schiller # 28. March 2008, 20:29
Hopefully your winking smiley is an indication that you, Doug, Cam are still working on something SVG-only...
MacDev_ed # 2. April 2008, 10:44
It would have been easy for an implementation to report that the SVG Animation featurestring was supported even if that wasn't true, so I'm not sure that would have been such a useful test anyway.
A more complex testcase using the various interpolation methods might have been a better test, or something that tested priorities and handling of the animation elements in more combinations.