14 DAY TRIAL // IE9 leading in HTML5 compliance, in a test by the W3C standards body no less, makes for a compelling story, especially after Microsoft's IE6 has been the bane of web developers for close to a decade now. Unfortunately, it's simply not true, or, at least, that's not what the W3C is saying.
In fact, after all the attention the story got, the organization wanted to make it clear that its tests are far, far from complete and in no case should be used for any practical comparison.
The World Wide Web Consortium is working on a HTML5 compliance test suite which, when completed, should be useful in determining how well web browsers support and implement the various HTML5 specifications, which, as a side note, have not yet been finalized.
At the moment, the test suite is in the early stages and only consists of about 232 tests, not even close to the number needed for the suite to be relevant, the W3C says.
"One month ago, I wrote an article about our recent progress on testing. Among several items, I mentioned 'The HTML test suite only contains 97 approved tests for the moment so don't draw too many conclusion from the result table'," W3C's Philippe Le Hégaret, who oversees HTML5 and the other modern web technologies, writes on the W3C blog.
"135 tests later, it seems that people are trying to draw conclusions from the tests or from the results, including whether one browser or another is better," he says.
He says that the test suite needs at least a few tens of thousands of tests before it can be relevant. At this point, the results are pretty much meaningless. What's more, since this is a work in progress, there are known problems with the existing tests.
There are several issues with proclaiming a winner just yet. Apart from the fact that the test is largely incomplete, it also works with an, as of yet, ungratified set of standards.
While the HTML5 moniker has stuck, the name is used for a proposed standard one that is still being modified and completed.
What's more, several web technologies are grouped under the HTML5 umbrella despite the fact that they will not be part of the standard. These include the Scalable Vector Graphics format, Web Sockets, Web Workers, CSS3 and even the relatively new WebGL native 3D graphics APIs.
While all of these will play a crucial role in shaping the web as a platform, they are not part of the proposed HTML5 standard, for one, because they are not even HTML.
While browser makers will be quick to tout the latest improvements and Microsoft can't be blamed for wanting to highlight the fact that it has finally made a browser that attempts to respect web standards, no browser offers a complete HTML5 experience and all are constantly adding support of new features and improvements to existing ones. [via Cnet]