Internet Explorer 8 Clears Acid2.. Really??

Well the Whole Blogosphere has been talking about IE8 Clearing the Acid2 test. Lets hear to what the IE8 team has to say about the milestone :

As a team, we’ve spent the last year heads down working hard on IE8. Last week, we achieved an important milestone that should interest web developers. IE8 now renders the “Acid2 Face” correctly in IE8 standards mode.

Before I answer the question that I raised in the title of this post, let me tell you what the Acid2 test is all about :

Acid2 is designed to determine how compliant a given web browser is with published HTML. A fully compliant browser displays a smiling yellow face. However, non-compliant browsers show varying degrees of garbage.

Now coming to the announcement regarding IE8 clearing the Acid2 test. Let me tell you IE8 cleared the test when all other standards compliant browsers like Firefox 3, Opera, Safari failed to clear the test. Yes doesn’t that sound suspicious enough.. Yes it does, the Web Standards team has made some changes to Acid2 Test Page, that has made the test to fail for most Standards compliant browsers.

• What changed that broke the test?

It looks like an object element that’s pointing to a non-existent page (http://webstandards.org/404/) should be falling through, but that page is now returning a response status of 200 (success) instead of 404. Was it previously correctly returning a 404 response?

Perhaps this test should be hosted on a separate server, instead of coexisting with a live site like WebStandards.org, so that future mishaps like this don’t happen.

Well that is it, the Acid2 test page is broken at the moment, so I’m not entirely sure if the Microsoft team was a little too early with the announcement. They’d probably try out the alternate test page over at http://www.hixie.ch/tests/evil/acid/002/ and see if IE8 passes the test.

Right now, I’m not entirely convinced about the announcement from the IE8 team. While adherence to Web Standards is a good thing, it wouldn’t be nice if Microsoft announced now that IE8 clears Acid2 only to later discover that it doesn’t.

While Microsoft lovers will hate me for writing this. But I’d love IE8 to stick to Web Standards when it is released. All the best to the Microsoft team with the IE8 project, atleast I’m sticking out with Firefox so I’ve nothing to worry.

For more details see the discussion over at BugZilla.