Hey WaSP Webmaster: How to Fix Acid2
December 19th, 2007 by Kelson. Posted in Web Design and tagged for Acid2, webstandardsWith internal builds of IE8 passing Acid2, a lot of people are looking at the Acid2 test with browsers that are supposed to comply… but don’t.
It looks like there’s a server error on www.webstandards.org, and I’m trying to report it—but emailing them is just kicking back “user unknown” errors, and the spam protection on their blog refuses to let me comment, claiming that my user-agent has changed since I read the post. Um, no, I may have looked at it with more than one browser, but the one that loaded it is the one that’s submitting it.
So, Web Standards People, you want to fix your test?
Fix your 404 page.
Rows 4-5 test nested <object> support. The intent of the spec is that if a remote object cannot be retrieved, the browser will instead display the content inside it, on the HTML page itself.
One of the objects is trying to load content from http://www.webstandards.org/404/. Normally this fails, and the browser displays the fallback content — the eyes on the happy face. Right now that page is returning an HTTP status code of “200 OK” instead of “404 Not Found” — so the browsers, including Opera 9, Safari 3, Konqueror 3 and Firefox 3 beta, are all dutifully showing the content of that page in a tiny rectangle with scrollbars.
Update: Thanks to several Slashdot posters for pointing out that the test author, Ian Hickson, has a second copy of the test that points to a different URL for the <object> fallback test, and currently works as expected.
[...] 3 beta, Safari, and Opera, browsers that were known to pass. And they were surprised to find it didn’t work. It turned out that the server config on http://www.webstandards.org had changed such that the file [...]