23 Musings

Good news in the browser standards war. Thins are really hotting up now as Opera has announced that their latest beta (or maybe even alpha) has passed the Acid3 test.

Let's see the responses from Mozilla and Microsoft as they try to get IE and Firefox up to speed...

Finally Internet Explorer is going to come of age (or perhaps reach puberty). Microsoft have announced that, by default, the rendering engine in IE8 will support all the current web standards (yes those ones IE7 has such problems with).

This is a great day for web designers. Could this be the end of workarounds to get your site browser compatible? Maybe, for a short time, but then as standards move on I'm sure one of the major browsers will lag behind again.

The Web Standards Project never stands still it seems. Hot on the heels of Microsoft announcing that IE8 could comply with Acid2 the standards gurus are preparing the next generation browser standard compliance test.

You can read some more about Acid3 here and even try it here (it won't work on any browser yet). They're also asking for suggestions of tests to add to Acid3 so if you have any ideas go here.

This is inconsequential to anyone who isn't either a developer or a standards junkie but it's newsworthy none the less. Microsoft have announced that Internet Explorer 8 (the next incarnation of the famous browser) has succesfully passed the acid test and rendered the well known face correctly.

This is a fantastic milestone in browser development! About a year ago Firefox 3.0 Alpha passed the same test (yet to hear about the beta), Safari and Opera are already there, so things really are moving forwards nicely in the web standards arena with Microsoft joining the party.

Now, please just make it more easy to use, lighter on the processor and less memory hungry (all this goes for Firefox too) and we'll really be getting somewhere!

Really good interview with Jeffrey Zeldman who is one of the gurus of web standards in my eyes. Having been an 'A List Apart' reader for a long time I've always taken an interest in his opinions and ideas.