Acid1
Encyclopedia
Cascading Style Sheets
Cascading Style Sheets is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics of a document written in a markup language...
1.0 specification. As with acid tests
Acid test (gold)
An acid test is any qualitative chemical or metallurgical assay which uses acid; most commonly, and historically, the use of a strong acid to distinguish gold from base metals. Figuratively, acid test is any definitive test for some attribute, e.g...
for gold which produce a quick and obvious assessment of the quality of a piece of metal, the web acid tests were designed to produce a clear indication of a browser's compliance to web standards
Web standards
Web standards is a general term for the formal standards and other technical specifications that define and describe aspects of the World Wide Web. In recent years, the term has been more frequently associated with the trend of endorsing a set of standardized best practices for building web sites,...
.
History
Acid1 tests many features on one page against a reference image. All major browsers pass the Acid1 test. Acid1 was developed by Todd Fahrner, who was frustrated with the lack of stringent tests to improve browser interoperability. After looking at tests developed by Braden McDaniel that used reference renderings to clarify the intended result, Fahrner developed a comprehensive test that resulted in a quirky-looking graphic. In 1999, the test was incorporated into the CSS1 test suite. The text used in Acid1 is an allusion to T. S. Eliot'sT. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
poem The Hollow Men
The Hollow Men
The Hollow Men is a major poem by T. S. Eliot. Its themes are, like many of Eliot's poems, overlapping and fragmentary, but it is recognised to be concerned most with post-World War I Europe under the Treaty of Versailles , the difficulty of hope and religious conversion, and, as some critics...
. Acid1 is included as an offline Easter egg
Easter egg (media)
Image:Carl Oswald Rostosky - Zwei Kaninchen und ein Igel 1861.jpg|250px|thumb|right|Example of Easter egg hidden within imagerect 467 383 539 434 desc none...
, accessible by typing 'about:
About: URI scheme
about is an internal URI scheme in various web browsers to display certain built-in functions...
tasman
Tasman (layout engine)
Tasman was a layout engine developed by Microsoft for inclusion in the Macintosh version of Internet Explorer 5. Tasman was an attempt to improve support for web standards, as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium. At the time of its release, Tasman was seen as the layout engine with the best...
', in Internet Explorer 5 for Mac OS
Internet Explorer for Mac
Internet Explorer for Mac was a proprietary web browser developed by Microsoft for the Macintosh platform. Initial versions were developed from the same code base as Internet Explorer for Windows...
with the text replaced by the names of the developers.
Acid1 has served as inspiration for Acid2
Acid2
Acid2 is a test page published and promoted by the Web Standards Project to expose web page rendering flaws in web browsers and other applications that render HTML. Named after the acid test for gold, it was developed in the spirit of Acid1, a relatively narrow test of compliance with the Cascading...
and Acid3
Acid3
Acid3 test is a web test page from the Web Standards Project that checks a web browser's compliance with elements of various web standards, particularly the Document Object Model and JavaScript....
.