Introducing The Acid Test Series

There are a a lot of talks about the Web browsers available on the market and their compatibility with Web standards, and after reading various articles related to this subject, I decided to run the Acid2 test on my own computer and see if my results match those obtained by others. I will only use final versions of various browsers, but we'll talk about this a bit later. First, let's take a look at the Acid2 test, shall we?


Published and promoted by the Web Standards Project, Acid2 is a test suite that checks how well browsers and authoring tools render web pages. Released back in April, 2005, Acid2 checks the compliance of the browser or authoring program used to view its page with the W3C HTML and CSS 2.0 specs.

Acid2 tests the following standards:
- Alpha transparency on PNG images
- The object element
- Absolute, relative and fixed positioning using CSS
- The CSS box model
- CSS tables
- CSS margins
- CSS generated content
- CSS parsing – Acid2 includes a number of illegal CSS statements to test error handling
- Paint order
- CSS line heights
- Hovering effects

In the next 3 days, we'll check a bunch of browsers based on the most widely used layout engines, and the scores they achieve in this test, as well as the results they manage to pull out in Acid3, currently under development, especially related to testing DOM and JavaScript capabilities...

Basically, we'll talk about Microsoft's Trident rendering engine, used in Internet Explorer, Opera's Presto, and Mozilla's Gecko, so get ready, because this was only the warmup!

Just as a hint, if you want to make it easier to grab each of the 3 next articles remaining to be published in this "Acid Test Series", just remember to subscribe to our RSS by email, and you'll get them as soon as they popup on the site!