Internet Explorer is standards-compliant
With the recent release of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1, everyone’s talking about web standards again (or rather, they’re still talking about them, but more loudly now). Is IE8 standards-compliant? Will Firefox 3 be standards-compliant? What does it really mean to be standards-compliant?
One of the more popular ways of evaluating standards-compliance is with the Acid 2 Test, which IE now passes. Or does it?
Although we said that IE8 Beta 1 passes the ACID2 test, some of you may be seeing results like the image above; we thought we should explain what’s going on. IE8 passes the official ACID2 test hosted on http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html. (Note, this seems to be a popular destination at the moment. You may have trouble reaching the site.)There are also a number of copies of this test around the net. One popular copy that I’ve seen of late is http://acid2.acidtests.org/
IE8 fails the copies of ACID2 due to the cross domain security checks IE performs for ActiveX controls.
What I don’t get about all this is why anyone cares whether an arbitrary set of HTML and CSS renders the way an arbitrary group of people say it should. The Web Standards Project and the W3C do not set standards. The browser makers do. More specifically, the popular browsers do. So right now, Microsoft sets the standards and by definition, anything that works in both IE6 and IE7 is standards-compliant. That’s what a standard is: “an object that is regarded as the usual or most common size or form of its kind”. If it’s not implemented by most browsers, it can’t be a standard. And right now, IE6 and IE7 make up “most browsers”:
| Source | Date | IE | Firefox | Opera | Safari |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TheCounter.com | Q4 2007 | 81.14 | 13.81 | 0.67 | 3.21 |
| OneStat.com | Feb 2008 | 83.27 | 13.76 | 0.55 | 2.18 |
| ADTECH | July 2007 | 77.5 | 15.5 | 0.9 | 1.6 |
| Net Applications | Q4 2007 | 77.37 | 15.84 | 0.62 | 5.24 |
| W3 Counter | Jan 31 2008 | 61.79 | 28.39 | 1.02 | 2.42 |
| Averages | 76.21 | 17.46 | 0.75 | 2.93 |
Designing a web page around “standards” that don’t work in IE your site will be broken for about 3/4 of your viewers. When writing and testing your HTML and CSS, you should do it in this order:
1. Make it work in the most popular brower.
2. Make it work in other browsers, to the point where the extra effort isn’t worth it.
3. Make it adhere to the suggestions of the Web Standards Project.
So some sites, IE6 and IE7 aren’t the most popular browsers. For a lot of “tech” sites, Firefox is just as popular. For Apple-focused sites, Safari probably is. If that’s the case, then go ahead and ignore IE. You may have trouble attracting new readers though.
As for IE8, there’s one site I’ve found that works in IE7, Firefox 2, and Opera, but not IE8: my raycaster.
