Today I nearly broke down in tears (with annoyance)…

The past week has provided us with some interesting news.

First off, there’s been a hype of activity from both Webkit and Opera – Webkit’s blog kept us informed that it’s Acid3 DOM test score was increasing, it seemed every day, which ultimately led to it announcing on Wednesday that it had released a public build of a successful Acid3 rendering pass (but not an animation pass). This announcement came very soon (on the same day, in fact) after David announced that Opera’s latest internal build had passed all 100 DOM tests- it was just very unfortunate that some people misinterpreted this information and started accusing the Opera team of pulling stunts and deliberately trying to mislead – a sad state of affairs, especially because it came a result of this great news.

However this is not why I felt tearful.

MS decided to publish an article which details planned CSS support in the final release of IE8, which put a complete dampener on the day that I read it.

As I thought right from the start of talk of it’s release, CSS3 support is extremely disappointing, which is guaranteed to slow the adoption of features of CSS3. Well done Dean and the rest of the IE team- you’ve come up with yet another inferior browser.

which is guaranteed to slow the adoption of the fundamental layout-specific features of CSS3.

I’ve written a basic overview of the article. It mentions:-

• NO planned support for CSS3 pseudo classes
• NO planned support for CSS3 pseudo elements
• NO planned support for CSS3 features in Backgrounds and Borders module (no multiple backgrounds, background-size etc)
• NO planned support for CSS3 features in Color module (no RGBA, opacity etc)
• SOME support for Level 3 of Text module
• MINOR support for Basic UI module. Hardly surprising as the module currently has no owner, and there is no test suite Nice though to see that they’ve implemented box-sizing even though it’s with their own prefix.
• NO support for Multi-Column module.
• NO Media Query support

Before the announcement went public, I took it as a given that IE would HAVE to pass Acid2; looking back, it would have been simply astonishing if it hadn’t. But, now vendors are focusing on Acid3, which makes its predecessor completely redundant- with this in mind, there was absolutely no reason why the IE8 Acid2 pass story should have been as big as it was.