
Mozilla: Acid3 is basically worthless - nickb
http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2008/03/26/acid3-is-basically-worthless/
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ROFISH
I've seen this at the top of reddit too. While somethings might seem
worthless, others really have to be done. Especially CSS3. Have you ever had
to programmatically handle odd/even classes? :odd, :even, and :nth-child
selectors are a god send!

The problem is that everybody has their own things they want from the ACID3
test. I know a lot of friends who would kill for better SVN support. The
reason it has a lot of weird crap is so that everybody can move forward. AJAX
originated as a hack to IE's XMLHttpRequest, who knows what weird technology
might be next?

------
nickb
We just spent close to a full week just on getting IE6/7 working and
displaying properly. It was a hell week. Things would break, you'd see errors
that you have no idea where to even start fixing. You'd get frustrated, start
cursing, start disliking everything and it would drain the energy right out of
you. We spent hours and hours sometimes just blindly debugging by inserting
all kinds of pieces of debug code (red lines, red backgrounds etc). We still
have an IE7 bug that we have no way of fixing... we simply can't figure out
how to fix it... and it's still pissing me off.

I always take advice from the standards people with a gigantic grain of salt.
The reality is so much different from what people are presenting in their
books and blogs. Many of these standards cheerleaders are designing simplistic
pages and are ignoring IE almost completely. They show you screenshots of
their designs in either FF or Safari on a Mac and assume this is how the World
will see their designs (don't get me wrong, I do most of my browsing in Safari
on a Mac as well). Some promote 'best practices' that are simply not suited
for the real world and if you follow them, you will add weeks of work to your
schedules.

Real world is so much different from what many pundits are telling you. If you
plan on being successful and run a site that will be accessible to everyone,
you have to deal with the reality. The reality is that about 35% of people are
still using IE6 and 30% of people are using IE7. Reality is that most of the
people upgrade browsers when they upgrade PCs. For a very long time MS
required WGA for upgrade to IE7 so IE7 has been VERY slow in overcoming IE6.
Another reality is that people from big enterprises (and also from the third
World since many use last-successfully-cracked copy of WinXP which comes with
IE6) still use IE6. Big enterprises are extremely slow to upgrade since many
big-corp apps (like SAP) only work well with IE6. Enterprises also seem to
dislike Vista so the hope that Vista upgrade with default IE7 will displace
IE6 anytime soon is not based in reality.

In today's web development, you can push the limits of what a web browser can
do very far, indeed. But, that's only the case if you use "modern" browsers
like Firefox and Safari. However, you should realize that about 70% of your
visitors will not have that browser and will have much worse web experience
than what you intended them to have.

So if I can offer anyone some advice it's this: forget about FF/Safari/Opera
etc. Concentrate on getting IE6/7 support right from the start. Don't wait.
Don't put it off! You will have much tougher time trying to get it working
properly later on than if you start supporting it from the start. We lost few
weeks due to IE6/7 issues, at the very least, we missed our launch date
because of it... don't make the same mistake. Supporting other browsers will
be easy if you hammer out IE support early. Also, consider using IE6 as the
default browser and see what your customers will see. Consider IE6 and its
limitations and capabilities as the maximum to which you can push your
innovation. If something doesn't work on IE, kill it for now. Throttle down
your features so they work well with IE. You can offer them later on as
premium features or nice extras. Finally, think about creating a process to
deal with browser-specific issues. We created one and it's working well.

This is why I think that Acid2/3 will is a moot point. Browsers, on the
internet, have an extremely long lifespan. IE6 is seven years old. It will be
a browser that we will have to support until at least 2010 when Windows7 comes
out and enterprises maybe decide to upgrade to it and skip over Vista. So the
webdev innovation will be very slow for the next few years.

And finally, just to give you another dose or reality, more people use IE 5.X
than Safari... and IE5.5 is about 9 years old.

~~~
falsestprophet
"So if I can offer anyone some advice it's this: forget about FF/Safari/Opera
etc. Concentrate on getting IE6/7 support right from the start. Don't wait."

I think everyone would still recommend using a standard compliant browser to
shape your early drafts.

