Working together for standards The Web Standards Project

Yesterday Dave Hyatt posted news that Safari now passes the Acid2 test, making it the first browser to do so.

Patches to enable Acid2 related support have been made available in Hyatt’s announce post, linked above.

Under the circumstances, I thought it would be unfair to simply announce the news, so I sent off a few questions and received the following in reply.

BH: When will the patches you released yesterday be merged into a general release?

DH: I’m sorry, but I really couldn’ even guess. At the moment we’re just concentrating on an update that fixes regressions/crashes. I don’t know yet what the update situation is going to be like.

BH: Do you expect that the Konqueror team will merge your changes into their product anytime soon?

DH: Yes, they expressed interest already in seeing the patches. I wouldn’t be surprised if theirs is the first browser to ship a version that passes the test. :)

BH: Looking at the Acid2 test from a software engineer’s perspective, what were your biggest challenges in getting Safari to pass?

DH: Well, the great thing about KHTML is that nothing in the test was that hard to implement. Safari was actually already really close (despite the rendering in 1.3). The bugs were either just missing minor features, like <object> support and min-/max- -width/-height on positioned elements, or minor details, such as slightly better handling of percentage values that end up not being used.

BH: More broadly, what are the biggest engineering challenges you see with moving onto CSS3 support in future browsers?

DH: I think doing vertical text could be incredibly difficult, since KHTML is not designed for that at all.

BH: How useful is the feedback you’ve gotten from web developers and Safari end users, and how can that feedback be made still more useful?

DH: …Immensely useful. Web developers catch some of the most important bugs and write very clear and concise reductions of the problems. That makes the bugs really easy to fix quickly.

We want to extend a thank-you to Hyatt and the Safari team for jumping on the test so quickly, and another to the web developers who have helped to make this first success happen.

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