4 ms·

Acid tests are not strict standards test suites. You should not be looking to adhere to them.

bastawhiz 4y ago
No, but they're good signals for the capabilities of a browser engine. Passing Acid3 means you've got a browser that would have been pretty damn good in 2010 or so. It's a good mark of progress for any three month old browser engine.
- asddubs 4y ago
  two years and 3 months
coldtea 4y ago
They're better than strict standard test suites, because they exercize real world useful stuff AND give a fun visual representation of the maturity. Wish we had such "acid test" for later CSS features like Flexbox too...
- andrewmcwatters 4y ago
  No, they're immediately provably worse. If you started work on a CSS rasterizer today, there are zero test suites you can use for reference comparison. I'm talking about easy stuff, too, like normal flow, margin, border, padding box alignment. The existing official test suites are entirely manual. Edit: What you're describing requires you to make the entire world first, then finally test something. Here's an example: I want to test the white-space property. How do I test that? Oh also, font rasterizers are all different and standards don't dictate what happens after box layout. It's acceptable that glyphs render with different dimensions. How do I test that? A casual HN reader isn't going to care. Someone actually writing this stuff, will.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    Sure, but I think you have a misconception: that those are like compliance tests for developers or have that role. Rather, those acid tests were tests that test the rendering engine (in multiple aspects at the same time), and are meant for the end users: to give them a nice visual representation of the browser's progress, or lack thereof, and to push browser developers to fix issues that cause visual glitches (with features drawing the test image selected to be nice for layout writers to have) and have them race each other to pass them...
    - andrewmcwatters 4y ago
      I don't have any misconceptions about the state of web technology testing, or how WaSP made an impact on the miserable state of the industry at the time. I work on browser technology.
  - tannhaeuser 4y ago
    > there are zero test suites you can use for reference comparison. What about W3C's web-platform-tests suite [1]? [1]: https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt/tree/master/css https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt/tree/master/css
  - dillondoyle 4y ago
    To test white space, quick thought have not tried, perhaps render some text that hits a chunk of the differences. Start default/normal. like perhaps text has a lot of tabs. JS measure offsetWidth. Or maybe use canvas export image see if base64 is same Do it again with different CSS settings.

No, but they're good signals for the capabilities of a browser engine. Passing Acid3 means you've got a browser that would have been pretty damn good in 2010 or so. It's a good mark of progress for any three month old browser engine.

asddubs 4y ago
two years and 3 months

coldtea 4y ago

They're better than strict standard test suites, because they exercize real world useful stuff AND give a fun visual representation of the maturity. Wish we had such "acid test" for later CSS features like Flexbox too...

andrewmcwatters 4y ago
No, they're immediately provably worse. If you started work on a CSS rasterizer today, there are zero test suites you can use for reference comparison. I'm talking about easy stuff, too, like normal flow, margin, border, padding box alignment. The existing official test suites are entirely manual. Edit: What you're describing requires you to make the entire world first, then finally test something. Here's an example: I want to test the white-space property. How do I test that? Oh also, font rasterizers are all different and standards don't dictate what happens after box layout. It's acceptable that glyphs render with different dimensions. How do I test that? A casual HN reader isn't going to care. Someone actually writing this stuff, will.
- coldtea 4y ago
  Sure, but I think you have a misconception: that those are like compliance tests for developers or have that role. Rather, those acid tests were tests that test the rendering engine (in multiple aspects at the same time), and are meant for the end users: to give them a nice visual representation of the browser's progress, or lack thereof, and to push browser developers to fix issues that cause visual glitches (with features drawing the test image selected to be nice for layout writers to have) and have them race each other to pass them...
  - andrewmcwatters 4y ago
    I don't have any misconceptions about the state of web technology testing, or how WaSP made an impact on the miserable state of the industry at the time. I work on browser technology.
- tannhaeuser 4y ago
  > there are zero test suites you can use for reference comparison. What about W3C's web-platform-tests suite [1]? [1]: https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt/tree/master/css https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt/tree/master/css
- dillondoyle 4y ago
  To test white space, quick thought have not tried, perhaps render some text that hits a chunk of the differences. Start default/normal. like perhaps text has a lot of tabs. JS measure offsetWidth. Or maybe use canvas export image see if base64 is same Do it again with different CSS settings.