Ian Hickson, the Google Employee was assigned the job of working on the next generation Acid test has completed his work and the Acid3 test is live at its new home http://acid3.acidtests.org/. The Acid test is a test which we all use to measure a Web Browser’s adherence to standards. Read more about Acid tests on this wikipedia page.

Unlike the first acid test, which focused on the box model, and the second acid test, which covered a broad variety of basic HTML and CSS features, Acid3 covers 100 of the nooks and crannies of HTTP, HTML, CSS, ECMAScript, SVG and XML, all through the medium of DOM scripting, a critical requirement for any modern web application.

Ian Hickson wrote 90 tests while the other 10 tests were written by web developers and browser vendors. The Acid3 test assumes much importance after the team behind IE8 recently allowed that it clears the Acid2 test. The IE team has said that a special HTTP header will be required for the browser to clear the Acid2 test. Whether or not, such HTTP headers are required for the Acid3 test remains a big question..

I have begin my preliminary testing on all the popular browsers operating in default settings, and I will update this post with the results sometime tomorrow. Until then I suggest you perform the Acid3 test yourself and see how you fare…

Via CSS3.INFO

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.