The Acid3 test is practically useless for determining wether a browser supports the current standard. Half of the reason for this might be because that wasn't what the test was for; the other half might be because it tests what the designers thought was going to be important 2 years ago.
1st: Acid3 tests The performance of a browser on a few edge case tests.
2nd: some of the tested items weren't even a standard yet when the test was conceived, and some of them have been removed.
To pass the test the browser must also display a generic favicon in the browser toolbar, not the favicon image from the Acid3 web server. The Acid3 server when asked for favicon.ico gives a 404 response code but with image data in the body. This tests that the web browser correctly handles the 404 error code when fetching the favicon, by treating this as a failure and displaying the generic icon instead.
This is utterly stupid. Like I said, it's testing edge cases for no good reason. This isn't even really a behaviour that is actually documented as having to be implemented this way, they just unilaterally decided that this way was the "right" way. No doubt they came to this decision by assuming that whatever Internet Explorer was doing at the time was the wrong way.
Whatever the case may be, Acid3 is useless when it comes to determining how good a browser is for web browsing. So I guess the question is, what is the Acid3 test good for?
Additionally MS had an explicit aim NOT to try to satisfy the acid3 test with IE9. This was for several reasons, not the least of which was every time they went on a limb and supported a draft standard the W3C chainsawed the branch they were on, leaving them dangling with their "proprietary" implementation of what was in the draft spec, and because they added it there were pages using it and they had to keep supporting it.
Draft standards aren't standards. But whenever they crop up or there are ambiguities in the specification (and there are, all over the damned place, or more likely many details are left up to the implementator) then suddenly at the next revision the W3C, in a totally unbiassed decision (/sarcasm), has decided that whatever way IE implemented the feature was "wrong" and all the others were right, and if there were named elements that were chosen for each implementation they go with some other browsers choice. Usually firefox, which seems to be a W3C favourite.
The thing is, despite my ravings above about IE9, I still think IE is handed the short end of the stick on a lot of things. IE6 didn't support a lot of features of modern browsing, but considering those features weren't even conceived in 2001 when it was released I don't see what people expect. is MS supposed to get a damned time machine and go back and fix them?
Either way, ALL browsers need workarounds for a number of things. Firefox is no exception. Chrome has at least 3 blatant DOM bugs, and I say blatant because they clearly do what they aren't supposed to do, or don't do what they are supposed to do. The excuse is of course that Chrome's "script compiler" or whatever they use "changes the behaviour" but that's not an excuse, it's a reason. Fix the damned bug, don't just close the bug with "do not fix" as if it's a non-issue.
Personally, Standards Nazi's piss me off. Of course there aren't any in this thread and I don't mean to imply that there are; but basically there is this overridding mindset that "browsers that support the standard are better". They aren't. Think about it. Browser compatibility is really only marginally better now then it was in the days of Internet Exploder 4 and Nutscrape Communicator; the only difference is that now there is some whimsical uncommunicable entity now called the "standard" that they are striving for, and somehow the browsers that fall under this flag more clearly are "better". This despite the fact that half of the standards themselves are ill-defined or leave the actual definition of a lot of the standard to the implementor, so there really is no hard and fast way to actually test the standard or it's implementation, all it(acid3) tests is wether the implementation of the standard approximates what the implementor of the tests thinks it should. I have never met a skilled software developer who worked on medium or large-scale web apps with hundreds of thousands or even millions of users who didn't come to realize how horrible the W3C standards are. You come to realize that every browser has major bugs, even bugs between different versions of the same browser (Safari). You also realize that IE is the vast, vast majority of your market and that catering to IE is the single most important thing you can do. IE is a defacto standard and making sure your site works flawlessly with IE is priority #1. After that it's usually Safari and then Firefox (which holds a much smaller share of the market than most people seem to think). Trying to show some pictures of some test that really doesn't test what it claims to doesn't really change that.
To be fair, IE definitely has room for improvement -- all the browsers do -- but the attitude that IE with its ridiculous market share should conform to standards that aren't particularly better than the ones already established by IE is silly. Just because a "standards body" dictated a particular way for the web to function does not mean that it is sensible for this mandate to take precedence over reality. What's more, I do not believe that any innovation of significance will come from a standards body like the W3C. The best the W3C can do is come in after the hard work has been done and document the whole thing and maybe whine a bit when the actually innovator is unwilling to expend the resources to conform to this new, documented standard, which they often change seemingly just so they can do that whining.
In any case, the basic problem comes down to this; HTML and CSS are good for basic, text-rich documents and nothing else. And lately The problem is that we've been building more complicated, interactive web-based applications with this mess. Basically it's no different then how Microsoft Word is primarily a text editor but- for whatever reason- you can insert Controls and textboxes and buttons and stuff into a document, and even make your own "mini-application" using VBA. Yoy can add Ajax, JQuery, Javascript, and ten layers of stylesheets, but it isn't going to change the fact that HTML and CSS were not originally designed for what they are being used for today. The fact that "tests" like acid3 even exist is a good illustration of that.
And lastly, Yes my last few posts have been long. I've been holding back for the last month or so and I have a lot of spare letters lying around to use up...
