Greg's Head

For several years the bar that is used to measure web-browsers has been the Acid Test. This test is a measure of standards compliance with HTML, CSS. Unfortunatly the test is somewhat useless. Some would have you believe that passing this test means that your web-browser meets some level of quality. While passing the test does mean that the browser adheres to aspects of the W3C standards it also means that your browser is unable to render quality designs because the standards are woefully poor to express designer intent. Just because IE8 will pass the acid test doesn’t mean that browser hell has frozen over.

Here are the things needed for a web designer acid test. One that’s based on how designs should look on screen, not parsing, css selectors or semantic markup.

Holiday Web Design Wishlist:

• Fonts – Please give me the ability to specify any font as part of the design of a page. Witout needing some Flash or substitution hack.
• Rotation – Let me rotate box level elements, logos, fonts and other elements don’t always belong horizontal.
• Vector graphics – (SVG please)
• Masking – Give me the ability to obscure part of the page or part of an image with a masking element
• Additional controls – Every website doesn’t need to re-invent the calendar control, the menu and tabs. These should be standard. This is good for accessibility and semantic markup.
• Columns – Give me the ability to layout and display multiple columns without using a custom Javascript function.
• Effects -All those nice things I can do in Photoshop… Shadow, Reflections, Flips, Gradients, Bevels… on and on.
• Aliased content – When an image is scaled it gets pixelated because most browsers use nearest neighbor scaling. I’d like my images and text to be anti-alised for a smoother look and feel.

Happy Holidays.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 21st, 2007 at 3:31 pm and is filed under Browsers, Design, HTML/CSS. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.