Wikipedia:Today's featured article/April 29, 2009

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. It was developed in the spirit of Acid1, a relatively narrow test of compliance with the Cascading Style Sheets 1.0 (CSS1) standard, and was released on April 13, 2005. Like Acid1, an application passes the test if the way it displays the test page matches a reference image. Acid2 tests aspects of HTML markup, CSS 2.1 styling, PNG images, and data URIs. The Acid2 test page will be displayed correctly in any application that follows the World Wide Web Consortium and Internet Engineering Task Force specifications for these technologies. These specifications are known as web standards because they describe how technologies used on the web are expected to function. While at the time of Acid2's release no web browser passed the test, Acid2 was designed with Microsoft Internet Explorer particularly in mind. The creators of Acid2 were dismayed that Internet Explorer did not follow web standards and, consequently, Internet Explorer was prone to display web pages differently from other browsers. Acid2 represented a challenge to Microsoft to bring Internet Explorer in line with web standards, making it easier to design web pages that work as intended in any web browser. (more...)

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