Just a few months after the announcement that Internet Explorer 8 successfully passed the Acid2 standards compliance test, the Web Standards Project (WaSP) announced last Monday that it unleashed Acid2"s successor, Acid3. Created to identify flaws in the way a browser renders its web pages, WaSP"s Acid tests throw down the gauntlet with difficult-to-display graphics written to accentuate browsers" quirks. When the original Acid test was released in 1998, it helped reign in browser inconsistencies and insured that Internet Explorer, Netscape, and others handled HTML code according to specification – making web designers" lives easier and ensuring the web rendered consistently in the future.
Currently, no known browser is able to correctly render the Acid3 test, which displays an animated, incrementing score counter and a series of colored boxes with some description text. Bloggers have already assembled galleries of browsers" failing test results, with most of today"s browsers scoring between 40 and 60 on the test"s 100-point scale. The results shouldn"t be too alarming as the Acid tests have always been forward-looking in nature, and are designed to measure standards to aspire to, as opposed to what"s current. Also note that more than six months lapsed between Acid2"s release and Safari 2.02"s announcement that it was the first to pass Acid2.