Development and Impact
Google employee Ian Hickson started working on the test in April 2007, but development progressed slowly. In December 2007, work restarted and the project received public attention on 10 January 2008, when it was mentioned in blogs by Anne van Kesteren. At the time the project resided at a URL clearly showing its experimental nature: "http://www.hixie.ch/tests/evil/acid/003/NOT_READY_PLEASE_DO_NOT_USE.html" Despite the notice in the URL, the test received widespread attention in the web-development community. At that time only 84 subtests had been done, and on 14 January Ian Hickson announced a competition to fill in the missing 16.
The following developers contributed to the final test through this competition:
- Sylvain Pasche: subtests 66 and 67: DOM.
- David Chan: subtest 68: UTF-16/UCS-2.
- Simon Pieters (Opera) and Anne van Kesteren (Opera): subtest 71: HTML parsing.
- Jonas Sicking (Mozilla) and Garrett Smith: subtest 72: dynamic modification of style blocks' text nodes.
- Jonas Sicking (Mozilla): subtest 73: Nested events.
- Erik Dahlström (Opera): subtests 74 to 78: SVG and SMIL.
- Cameron McCormack (Batik SVG library): subtest 79: SVG fonts.
Even before its official release, Acid3's impact on browser development was dramatic. In particular, WebKit's score rose from 60 to 87 in less than a month.
The test was officially released on 3 March 2008. A guide and commentary was expected to follow within a few months, but, as of March 2011, only the commentary had been released. The announcement that the test is complete means only that it is to be considered "stable enough" for actual use. A few problems and bugs were found with the test, and it was modified to fix them. On 26 March 2008—the day both Opera and WebKit teams announced a 100/100 score—developers of WebKit contacted Hickson about a critical bug in Acid3 that presumably allowed a violation of the SVG 1.1 standard to pass. Hickson fixed the bug with the help of Cameron McCormack, a member of W3C's SVG Working Group.
Read more about this topic: Acid3
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