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March 28, 2008
Will that be on the test?
Will that be on the test? Eric Meyer has an interesting piece here, on how browser makers may be focusing too strongly on the Acid 3 test itself, rather than on conformance with the entire set of specifications from which the Acid test derives: "The Acid3 test isn't a broad-spectrum standards-support test. It's a showpiece, and something of a Potemkin village at that. Which is a shame, because what's really needed right now is exhaustive test suites for specifications -- XHTML, CSS, DOM, SVG, you name it. We've been seeing more of these emerge recently, but they're not enough. I'd have been much more firmly in the cheering section had the effort that went into Acid3 had gone into, say, an obsessively thorough DOM test suite." There's incentive for each browser-building company to be popular, because Google pays for shuttling users to search, and to ad revenue. Make a test, and there's incentive to focus on the test itself. Mozilla's Mike Shaver agrees that the test shouldn't matter as much (possibly because their scores aren't as high), but includes this prejudicial line: "I can easily imagine the developers of the web's proprietary competitors chuckling about the hundreds of developer-hours that have gone into adding another way to iterate over nodes, or twiddling internal APIs to special case a testing font." Nobody likes wasted time, you ninny, but you're dealing with an intrinsic problem with development which starts with overly-complex specs developed by multiple competing corporations and then which has zero conformance testing applied to their varying implementations... and that "proprietary" name-calling is very 1990s, and Adobe Flash Player is not "competitor to [my] web", and it's pretty insulting to be lumped in with Microsoft and their history of diverging the use of HTML, JS, CSS, and now cross-browser media engines. Anyway, Mozilla's casual Flash-bashing aside, Mike and Eric raise a valid point here: if all you have are simple tests, and the financial rewards are great enough, then you will get players focusing on the test, and not on what the test is supposed to measure. Students who ask "Will that be on the test?" are looking at the finger, not the moon.
Posted by JohnDowdell at March 28, 2008 2:36 PM