Clashing Scores In the HTML5 Compatibility Test Wars

Andreas(R) writes "Microsoft has published a set of HTML5 tests comparing Internet Explorer 9 to other web browsers. In Microsoft's own tests, IE9 performs 100% on all tests. However, the Internet Explorer 9 HTML5 Canvas Campaign has published results that show that Internet Explorer gets 0% on all their tests." The results reported here are selected with tongue in cheek: "Therefore, we'll also present shameless results from tests which have been carefully selected to give the results that the PR department has demanded."

Re:IE has 100% compatability...

[Fluffeh]

Wouldn't this be a great opportunity for one of the internet watchdogs to make a suit against MS here? HTML5 hasn't been agreed to yet, here is an advertisement saying that IE9 is 100% compliant.

That's obvious false advertising isn't it?

Re:Build Your Own Test

[petermgreen]

You can assume they will have a high likelyhood of working fine but just because two browsers use gecko or webkit doesn't mean the version of browsers you have promised to support are using the same version of it. And afaict at least with webkit based browsers some of them have done things like swapping out the JS engine which has the potential to break stuff.

The IE engine is an unusual case as afaict the version of it used depends on the version of IE installed rather than the version of the "browser" the user is using.

Re:Do we have any *real* test?

[koiransuklaa]

1) Why can't the tests be created with a random generator? Create webpage, internal logic calculates image which should be generated, test image generated with screenshot (or better, pull the image from the drawing cache).

"internal logic", huh? Do you realize that means a complete implementation of all the relevant standards with no faults. If we could do that, maybe we should put it in a browser...

Microsoft needs to do one thing only

[foniksonik]

MS needs to fuully separate the render engine fron the browser in a way so that they can be updated individually. There are features in the browser which users may like or dislike, may require or not. Let the browser handle things like plugins just provide hooks for compositing in the render engine. Let the browser handle security, etc. Let the render "render".

Re:Here's how to solve the impasse

[Simetrical]

There isn't full agreement but most of it is pretty complete. The only non nitpicking issue that people cant agree on is video/audio. Microsoft and Apple want push h.264 into their browsers and push h.264 as a de-facto standard so they advocate against defining a codec in HTML5 (an open standard). Of course they dont support anything else in IE and Safari(for HTML5 video tags)

If you think audio and video codecs are the only part of the spec that's controversial, you clearly don't follow the HTMLWG mailing list. There are 29 open issues [w3.org], and many of them have been hotly debated. So have lots of other issues that weren't formally raised to the tracker.

The video codec issue actually was resolved long ago – the spec just doesn't say what codecs are required, and no one is really objecting to that. Mozilla, Opera, and Google support open codecs, but none has suggested that they actually be required by the spec when other major browsers refuse to implement them.