Topic: The Acid2 Browser

[toasty0]

The Acid2 test is flawed. On the home page of the site { http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/ } the project state in part the following:
 
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.

It seems to me that it is possible the designers of this test might have knowingly or unknowingly skewed the CSS with non-compliant tags such that it will not render properly in IE5+. It is also plain silly to do a test this way; it is like taking a car out across the mojave desert to test how it performs on slick, black ice covered roads. There is no way to know but that it didn't do well in the desert--or in this case, the browser does not render bad code well.

[Bonk]

I'd say its more likely to publicise that IE will handle css that other browsers will not. I have seen more than one web application that includes separate IE-only css files. (mostly  to do with fancy tables and dhtml effects as I recall). Easy Toasty0, not everyone is out to get MS.  This is possibly an issue however as MS has the tendency to try and establish web standards as if it were the authority.

Note: both IE and Firefox fail miserably on my machine - neither even remotely resembles the reference rendering.

check the results of that test page here: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.webstandards.org%2Fact%2Facid2%2Ftest.html%23top&usermedium=all

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

http://www.w3.org/

Note, that the page also uses png images which IE has never handled properly and still refuses to even with the promised improvements in IE7 (will still only handle 256 colors in images with transparencies... as if it were a gif). This one irks the hell out of me as it applies directly to my webmap which must use a directx alpha filter to display pngs properly in IE which adds a huge load on the client machine... Mozilla handles pngs properly natively with reasonable resource use. I'm not sure what MS has against pngs, I cant figure out why they won't handle them properly - I cant immediately think of a competing MS technology...

[toasty0]

I haven't read the specs lately but I thought IE7 was supposed to handle png fully. Not so, or not so in the early beta?

[Bonk]

Pretty sure it will be only 256 colors with transparency, like gifs. Last I read anyway, but I forget where. I'd be quite pleased if IE7 will fully handle pngs, but as I recall, what they define as "fully" is only a small part of the png file definition. Hopefully I'm wrong...

This looks encouraging though:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/04/26/412263.aspx

The current state of pngs in IE:
http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngapbr.html#msie-win-unix