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It’s a (while not thorough) detailed test case for HTML DOM and CSS rendering.
It doesn’t cover everything in the specs, but if a browser can render it correctly, it’s seen as better than not.

The point of the test is to see if they are compliant with W3C HTML and CSS 2.0 specifications.

As for your points about accessibility, there are other tools for that, such as screen magnification (hey, I use the Compiz Fusion screen zoom all the time, and I'm not even visually impaired...). As for legible fonts and good contrast for text on a web page, these should always be a priority anyway.

You know there are options in most browsers to over-ride fonts and colors of text.

The point is, that sites are "designed" ie they are made too "look" a certain way. Much like a picture. You don't go to the Museum with a bucket of finger paints to make every picture look the way you want it to... This is not a freedom of choice issue, the user has the freedom to choose not to ever return to that site or even look at it. As a designer it is "MY" choice on how that site looks and if "I" make bad choices and no one wants to look at it performs like crap on other people's machines, then that is on "ME".

See how that works? Your choice to or not to visit the site, My choice, how it looks because I made it.

I believe you are missing the point. I think the GP was referring to a time where HTML was just for content and people didn't futz around with making it "look" a certain way. After all, all academic papers look the same. It's about making it about the written content with HTML only being used to help mark out which part of the text files are what.

Now while I empathise with the GP's position, I concede that it is your site and you can (sadly) do whatever you want with it and that's your right. But please don't misrepresent their point.

As an aside: I hate how when people want to "learn to make webpages" they mean all that glitzy shit and formatting and animations and flash and want to skip over semantic mark-up which (arguably) is what HTML is really about. And because of the over-abundance of crap and under-abundance of semantic information, scrubbing HTML for data is much harder than it should be.

To see how seriously I take this just have a gander if you will at these notes I made myself just for class http://tiny.cc/0AL0T . Have a gander at the HTML and think would you rather write a Perl script to search that or a Dream Weaver mess.

Edited 2007-12-19 23:38

And you, sir, represent the antithesis of the web. The entire premise behind it is to be inter-operable between different hardware architectures, operating systems and client output capabilities.

If you're so concerned about how it looks --going back to the picture in a museum analogy--, just present a giant raster graphic. It'll be inefficient and lack any semantic information, but it doesn't seem like you care about any of that.

It's not an issue of whether or not you have a right to design a site that is completely flashy, barely usable garbage, it's a matter of whether or not such sites are crap.

Sites which utilize, for example, Flash-only animation, or have text over-running and overlapping borders and other text because I don't run at some ridiculous short bus 1995 era resolution that can make use of tiny fonts (and therefore have to increase the minimum allowable font size in my browser settings), just *suck*. And this happens to a fair number of sites I visit - the sites are designed with inelastic widths, ridiculously miniscule text sizes (clearly designed with a "recommended resolution" - or worse yet, the resolution the designer happens by sheer chance to be running on their own workstation), so that they look like utter crap on my monitor.

Maybe some people like women with tons of makeup, music videos, advertising, and other such forms of flashy form-before-function "expression," but I don't. You have every right to design that kind of pretentious stuff, but we're just discussing whether this is something good or not, and I say that it absolutely is not.

If with the flick of a switch right now I could basically revert the whole Web back to flexible HTML which displays properly on almost any browser or device but has no bling and requires few or no plugins, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

No offense and nothing personal.

On a semi-related note, I run this "Noscript" plug-in in Firefox. It's fascinating. Basically I have it set to disable all scripts, and then I manually allow scripts to run as needed. On the sites I browse, on average one out of every four scripts that web pages try to run is actually required for the page to display properly. I've had a good time watching scripts *not* run as they were intended. So much web design displays nothing so much as the egos and excesses of web designers and the suits (who clearly don't use the internet much) that they pander to.

I'm not opposed to the judicious use of CSS, javascript, and other such things, but I swear sometimes I think people use them just to use them.

Function before form. Substance before style. Information before flash. It's not a matter of rights; it's a matter of wankery vs. usability.

You know what looks great on my monitor? Wikipedia. More of that. Less allmusic.com.

The Acid2 test is a test for CSS 2.0 rendering compatibility: if a browser does not render it correctly it might render other websites utilizing CSS incorrectly and even render some of the content there unreadable. CSS can be used to make websites not only more attractive but also to _enhance_ readability. So, if a certain website is clear and attractive on a CSS-compliant site it may even be completely unusable on a non-CSS-compliant one. That's why it's good to pass tests such as Acid2: it ensures your browser does indeed render CSS content properly. I hope you realize that CSS is not about rendering fancy pictures, it's about enhancing overall experience of a website.

Oh, and as a side note: how dull and boring would websites be if you only used HTML and nothing else?

Oh, and as a side note: how dull and boring would websites be if you only used HTML and nothing else?

Boring, maybe, but they would be clean, readable, accessible, universal, etc..

Oh, and as a side note: how dull and boring would websites be if you only used HTML and nothing else?

About as boring as most video games today that rely too heavily on graphics/presentation and have nothing else of value to offer.

In the old days, having a website with great content used to be enough. Then, Generation iPod came along, and you know the rest.

Actually, better CSS support will help push things back toward that original idea of HTML - being a content markup language. HTML has been abused into the role of page layout language (misuse of tables mostly) because there was nothing like CSS to allow HTML authors the page layout control they needed.

Supporting CSS means HTML authors can separate the style (CSS) from the content (HTML). That means that we can better achieve the original intention for HTML that you talk about. A web page that uses CSS for its styling allows you to apply YOUR OWN css to the page for easier reading. For an example of this in action, visit www.csszengarden.com

CSS is NOT enough to make a semantic web. It is too inflexible, and too focused on stylistic details rather than overall formatting. XSLT and XSL-FO are (together) one option for creating a semantic web. Everything could be in XML + DTDs and then it could be converted to non-semantic HTML+CSS+JavaScript when viewed in a browser, but search engines would only see the XML. There could be other options. At the very least, CSS isn't enough. You often have to add extra markup to the HTML to get the appearance you want because CSS has no way of adding additional content to the HTML. That's where all these nested div's and extraneous div's come from. People also end up using lists for menus, tables for layout, etc. CSS is not up to the job.

The point is to see how well the browser handles abuse. Apart from that I fail to see any relevance of the Acid2 test, but hey! It gives all of them a new term to use in marketing.

XYZ Browser v. XXIII - now Acid2 compatible with accelerators and reduced CO2 emission (or what ever the marketing dudes come up with).

This is a CSS test, not a HTML test.

If a website is well-written, all the design rules are inside CSS, while the HTML itself only provides the topological information (this is a headline, this text is emphasized).

IE, if you use a "typical" browser like Firefox or IE, you want the website to be shown according to the CSS rules and you want that to be done right, how it is meant to be.
If you don't want this, you can disable CSS or use a browser who doesn't understand it, like lynx, and have the website "your way".


The problem is, many web developers don't really get it with the seperation of content+structure and design. That said, tests like ACID still make sense.