hellorobot.org

Microsoft’s holiday present to developers: Internet Explorer 8 passes the Acid2 test.

This is great news for anyone who’s struggled with IE6 and, to a lesser degree, IE7 rendering quirks. The Acid2 test evaluates the capabilities of a browser to render HTML and CSS – mostly CSS – according to W3C standards. Safari and Opera currently pass; Firefox 3 is expected to pass. That IE, too, will pass could mean that cross-browser development will be greatly simplified, saving front-end developers a huge amount of time and work.

There is a caveat. Of course. IE8 only passes the test in “Standards mode,” which is turned off by default. In other words, by default, IE8 will not parse CSS according to W3C standards, but according to its own backward-looking quirks. But I don’t think this is the bad news it appears to be: if the past browsers are any indication, triggering standards mode will be as simple as inserting an up-to-date doctype declaration or meta tag.

It’s too soon to truly know, but a world where IE6 is fading into obscurity and IE8 is W3C-compliant… well, that’s a good world.