David Storey - A great win for standards

A great win for standards

Wednesday, 19. December 2007, 22:56:05

I've been silent on the whole Opera complaint (note: not a lawsuit, so please stop calling it that) against Microsoft so far. I was as surprised as everyone when it happened. However, I want to take a quick break from the silence to congratulate the IE team on the fantastic work they've done on passing the ACID 2 test. This must have taken a lot of work and Microsoft have some very talented people in Chris Wilson, Markus Mielke and the rest of the team. My main question is if this is regular standards mode, or a special IE flag that puts IE8 into a stricter standards mode?

Does this mean the end of Opera's complaint about Microsoft's commitment to standards? I'd hazard a guess at no, as ACID2 isn't a full test of standards, and it is only one step on the way. There are many things that are important that it doesn't test, and doesn't even touch on DOM, JavaScript, SVG, CSS3 and the like. It is certainly a huge step in the right direction however. I personally hope they are fixing issues in their regular standards mode, as even if it breaks sites in IE (and I more than anyone would understand why that is bad, and how hard it is to get sites to fix issues), leaving the bugs as they are means many sites, built by people that don't care about standards, design for the broken IE behaviour and break in Opera (and other standards based browsers) without any way for us to fix the sites ,except for to beg and prey to the sites for them to fix it. This is obviously even harder for us to convince them than MS as we have less market share. Korea is a perfect example of a country that almost solely designs for IE bugs and Active-X.

Speaking of Active-X, it would make my day even more if IE8 drops support for this technology. That is a perfect example of why the browser wars that some designers are calling for is a bad thing. That would truly be something to smile about . With all Microsoft's know how in building Silverlight, I'm also looking forward to see if there will be announcement about SVG support. more transparency is always a good thing.

Lets raise our glasses to the IE team, and hope they continue on this promise. I'm looking forward to the next ACID test

Introducing a new buzz wordSlightly broken, but not beyond repair

Comments

coxy # 19. December 2007, 23:06

I found it quite funny how everyone was referencing Opera's 'complaint' against Microsoft as a 'lawsuit'.

And yeah, I never thought I'd see the day Internet Explorer passes the ACID2 test... or any test, for that matter.

garethr # 20. December 2007, 00:29

Good point regarding the DOM, JavaScript, SVG, CSS3. Would similar one up- man-ship tests work for these standards as well I wonder?

Their are the odd test suite around (and people on the standards side of the CSS discussion seems to saying that test suites are a good place for people to jump in to help with standards) but nothing of the single simplicity of ACID 2.

grafio # 20. December 2007, 02:28

This is a very good news!

Question to the expert(s): what is the exact subset of Web standards, which make a Web browser officialy "Standards compliant"?

I ask because Mr Håkon Wium Lie, whom I truly respect, said that IE doesn't support the standards fully. But from my knowledge there is no browser which would support the standards fully. So I wonder where is the borderline? Is there some European regulation about this?

Anyway, I also think getting rid of Active-X would be a good move. There must be some bad Web developers in Korea...

dstorey # 20. December 2007, 02:51

Grafio: There is no waterline of features which would declare something to be standards compliant. I think there is desperate need for some baselines of standards support that all browser vendors agree to work to. Having each browser vendor implementing different things doesn't help developers, and creates an advantage for one vendor only none-open standards such as Flash and Silverlight. I think people like Molly agree with me that baselines are important.

I would argue that since CSS2.1 is more or less finished, that full support is a worthy baseline to aim for. Even Opera currently doesn't do this yet, but we are one property value away (bugs excluded). Then there is the matter of (x)html, ECMAScript and the DOM. You could argue that SVG should also be included in any baseline. Many developers possibly would find as much need for SVG, but if it is included in IE the technology would finally become viable.

There is no European regulation about what is standards compliant, and I don't think Opera is aiming for there to be one.

grafio # 20. December 2007, 04:18

Here is an interesting movie with IE developers talking how hard it was to make IE Acid2 compliant

To be honest they don't look like some evil guys who deliberately break Web standards (like some people claim). It must have been some other MS department...

The size of the MS building is kinda scary though...

haavard # 20. December 2007, 08:34

I'm sure there are lots of great people at Microsoft, but ultimately it's the management which determines the direction of the company. And as Daniel Glazman pointed out regarding representatives of companies involved in the standards process:

"They do their best to represent their company's interests"

We can hope that Acid2 signals a change in attitude among the managers at Microsoft, but there are still many unanswered questions - even regarding IE8 and Acid2.

To quote Mozilla's Asa Dotzler:

I wonder what "IE8 standards mode" means. Is that "IE8's 'standards mode'" or "IE8 standards mode"?

grafio # 20. December 2007, 09:46

I suppose IE "standards mode" is exactly the same as Opera "standards mode" - a mode where a browser shows a web site rendered as compliant/close to the web standards as it can.

olli # 20. December 2007, 14:13

grafio: That's not what they have hinted in the HTML working group sadly..

Anonymous # 21. December 2007, 00:43

Alcator writes:

The problem with MS is that it repeatedly intentionally made their programs "understand" or "describe" standards differently. When you save a document in MS Word as RTF, it's not the "standardized RTF"; it's "MS-RTF", which basically means that if there is some more complex structuring etc. in it, those who don't use MS Word to open RTFs will not see the document the way the original maker made it. This creates a pressure "well get Word, if you can't see it properly!", and damages the market.

There is, after all, a reason why TANKS are not allowed to drive on roads - their tracks damage the road so that it is no longer good for normal cars; Microsoft does have some tank-like behavior: It runs on roads (documents, webpages) and changes them (shows them differently, or re-saves them differently), so that after its passage through that road, those not riding the Microsoft tanks suddenly get a bumpy ride.

That's the main problem - the fact that microsoft uses violation and twisting of standards to force others to use microsoft as well, without there being any justifiable reason for using it (why should I have to use Word to view an RTF document??)

Anonymous # 15. October 2008, 07:08

frustrating writes:

I do find it a bit tiresome to try to code pages to be seen in all browsers the same way, or even remotely the same way. And it seems always to be IE that gives the reasons to add yet another "if" sentence in the code. AND they keep on changing that freaking browser all the time so that nothing that you got working in the last one won´t ever work in the next one...
But I guess that´s always been the way MS works. We´ve seen it in all of their products. When you just learned to use things effectively and know where to find them they´ll change everything to the next release and there you are again spending your next lifetime learning the new places and names for all actions all over again.