Buzz Archive: October 2005

We love to see you smile

Just ten days ago, Dean wrote here about Acid2:

there has been no officially released browser that passes the test

I'm thrilled to say that that's no longer the case — we have a winner!

With today's release of Mac OS X 10.4.3, Apple's Safari RSS (version 2.0.2/416.12) is the first (publicly-released, non-beta, non-preview) browser to successfully pass the Acid2 test.

On behalf of the Web Standards Project, congratulations to everyone who contributed to Safari and WebKit, and thanks for the hard work! We look forward to the day when Safari isn't the only browser that can make this claim.

Opera 9, Acid2 and Web Forms 2.0

It seems the latest preview release of Opera comes pretty close to passing the Acid2 test. Apparently there is only one bug left to fix.

After the initial announcement of the second acid test, a race began to become the first browser to pass it. Safari won by a streak and was followed by iCab* and Konqueror. However, these were internal builds only and since then there has been no officially released browser that passes the test.

Also included in this release of Opera is support for some of the Web Forms 2.0 extensions. I’m sorry to report that this is one ugly implementation. Worse than that, the new controls (date pickers etc) are completely inaccessible unusable by keyboard. I assume that this will be sorted out by the time this release is final.

*Now in public beta.

IEBlog: Clean up your CSS hacks

The IEBlog today issued a call to action, asking developers to help "clean up" CSS hacks that are failing in strict mode in IE7.

Whether you're interested in helping the IE development team or not, consider this: a review of your code could help to clean out some bad CSS hacks, and to identify where good CSS hacks could be used instead. A code review (and maybe some documentation?) could also help you if:

  • you have code that you haven't looked at in a while,
  • you're working with code that was written by someone else,
  • you've added some hacks as bug fixes without planning a backout strategy, or
  • you're in need of something to do at work that qualifies as training/self-development.

Knowing what hacks you have in your code now will make your life a little easier later, when it's time to start addressing issues in IE7!

Web Essentials 05

The Web Essentials 05 event has made available several audio and slide presentations of last week's keynote (by our own group leader Molly) and sessions at the WE05 PodCasts link. Links to other presentations may also be found listed at the program link. Session topics cover standards, CSS, accessibility, semantics, SVG, user experience, workflow, microformats, and web applications.