The next revision to the web document creation language has generated a lot of excitement in web circles, the most headline-grabbing change of course being the option for creators to choose how audio and video are delivered to a user's computer. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has just announced the results of a browser test where all of the top players were pitted against each other to see how well they cope with HTML5. And the winner is...
The W3C put the very latest builds of Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer through a barrage of over 200 tests to determine HTML5 compatibility. While none of the browsers managed 100 per cent support for the whole of the forthcoming web specification, one of them did better than any of the others – Internet Explorer.
Internet Explorer 9 Platform Review 6 managed full marks in all but a couple of the main feature tests, with only Opera notching up a zero in the foreigncontent department. Chrome scored full marks in four of the seven feature categories, Firefox and Opera managed three and Safari just two.
The test suite consists of challenges agreed to by the HTML Working Group, and testing is ongoing. Current results can be viewed at the HTML5 test suite conformance page.
So, it's a "well done" to Microsoft and a "must do better" to the others. There's still a bit of time to work on problem areas, though, as the specification is still in working draft format.
