Tag Archives: Acid Tests
Video: Browser Comparison Test
Posted on 08. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 
1 Comments
Ah, so what is the best browser? If you look at this through the lense of Ian Hickson’s Acid Tests, which gives you a score based on how compliant your browser is with today’s web standards, one can get a good sense of what is good today and what isn’t. Plus, what is a Monday morning without a good video clip to keep you going:
I don’t have much to say about this, other than how horribly Internet Explorer 8 failed the test, but what are you gonna do?
Interview: HTML5 Standards Author Ian Hickson
Posted on 05. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments
Ian Hickson has worked as a proponent of web standards for years. He is the maintainer of the Acid Tests website, which is a tool for browsers to make sure that they are fully compliant with today’s web standards. The most recent revision, Acid3, was developed to help browsers follow standards compliance with web 2.0 technologies.
Ian has been employed by Netscape, Opera Software, and now works for Google. He also was the lead on authoring the standards for HTML5. While he couldn’t talk about anything related to Chrome or Google with us, he answered our questions so that we can better understand this new web standard a bit better.
Tell us about yourself and how you got involed in HTML 5.
I was at Opera in 2003, working half in QA and half in their standards group, when the W3C called for a member vote on XForms (at that time the next generation of web forms, see here). Opera and some other companies — Apple and Mozilla in particular, though we were supported by some others also — tried to make the point that abandoning HTML wasn’t such a hot idea, and so we decided to write a proof of concept to show that it was possible to add many of the features of XForms to HTML. I happened to have some free time so I was volunteered to write it. We called it XForms Basic or something like that, and it wasn’t very popular at the W3C, so we lost the vote. However, it convinced us that it was the right direction to go in, so we worked on it a bit more, and renamed it to Web Forms 2.0 to avoid confusion with XForms.
In 2004 there was a big workshop organised by the W3C to Make a Decision about how we were going to move forward on the Web, and the W3C staff and many of the members voted for continuing down the path of XHTML2 and XForms, and said that if we wanted to work on HTML we should do so elsewhere, because the W3C had decided it was done with that.
So we opened a mailing list called the WHATWG to continue work on Web Forms 2.0 in public, and later that year started a new draft called Web Applications 1.0 into which we put many features aimed at writing Web apps, including a new version of HTML that we jokingly called HTML5, and a bunch of other features that later became Web Storage, Web Sockets, Server-Sent Events, and a variety of other specs.
Around 2005 I moved from Opera to Google, so that I could focus specifically on the spec work — Opera still wanted me to work 50% on QA, but Google were willing to let me work 100% on the specs.
Later, around 2006 or 2007, the W3C basically realised they had made a mistake, and they asked if they could work on HTML5 as well, so we renamed Web Applications 1.0 to HTML5, and the WHATWG and the W3C started working together. Web Forms 2.0 got merged into HTML5, and most of the bits of HTML5 that weren’t really HTML got split out into separate specs.
How far along is this technology? As in, when can users expect to see this on a regular basis?
Many parts of it were done before we started, because we took existing proprietary features and just specified them. For example, XMLHttpRequest was first specified in Web Applications 1.0, years after Microsoft invented it and all the other browsers copied it. It was later spun off into its own spec at the W3C. Other parts are brand new, and haven’t been implemented anywhere yet. Some parts might never get implemented, and we’ll throw them out when that becomes clear.
People are starting to use parts of HTML5 today. It depends really on what fraction of browsers you want to target. If you only care about Opera, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, you can use the “canvas” element today without any trouble… but IE doesn’t support it. If you only care about IE, you can use onhashchange… but the other browsers don’t support it. I would give it a few years before the majority of the features are implemented everywhere, but who knows. After all, not everything in HTML_4_ is implemented everywhere yet, and people use that without even thinking about it!
How significant is the canvas tag and svg for HTML 5? Do you know of any good examples of this on the web right now?
IE doesn’t support this either, so it’s hard to find widely deployed uses of those, but there are some. Yahoo! Pipes has used it for some time. Dreamhost uses it in their hosting panel.
Talk a bit about how offline storage will work. Many users are concerned about being able to work offline.
The Offline Application Cache feature is actually pretty straight-forward. If you design your application such that it can work without contacting the server, then you just list all the files it uses (HTML pages, CSS, JS, images, etc) in a manifest using a simple format, and it works offline. The way it works is the first time you visit the page, it gets the manifest, downloads all the files, and the next time you visit the page, it just uses the downloaded files, regardless of whether you’re online or not – it then downloads the new files in the background, in case they have been updated. This makes things faster as well as making them work offline. If your application uses online data, though, like a Web mail application, you will have to do extra work to actually maintain an offline copy of the mail for the user, that’s not handled by the page.
Have you heard anything about 3D on the web? Will HTML 5 support this?
The Khronos Group is working on a 3D canvas context, but I don’t know much about it. Canvas is a part of HTML5.
Lastly, what is in store for the future when talking about HTML 5 on the web?
From the point of view of standards, HTML5 is old hat now! The WHATWG is already moving on to the next generation of HTML. One of the changes we’re making is that we’re no longer numbering the versions… in practice it hasn’t made much sense. Browsers started implementing HTML”5″ stuff before all the HTML”4″ stuff was implemented, and they ship whatever they have at the time they ship… it’s not like the version numbers really mean anything useful. So there’s just “HTML”, and we keep improving it.
One of the ideas we’re looking at is video-conferencing, but it needs a common codec even more than , so we’re kinda stuck with that. It’s also not clear how we should do the networking — there are lots of standards like SIP and Jingle that we could use, but they’re all really complicated, and not a good fit for what we’re doing.
On the nearer term, we’re going through all the feedback we’ve been getting on HTML5, and fixing bugs. There’s lots of work still to be done.
