In IE8 standards mode, it passes - sometimes - the Acid test 2 (not consistently : 2 passes for 4 fails... go figure) and fails the Acid3 test with up to 17/100.

Worse, it completely screws up the display of the El Reg website, running fullpage (no margins) and superimposing Google Ads over the thrid (right) column of news until you mouseover them and they reformat...

Well, hopefully, this is why it's only a beta!

"But Wilson played the limited resources card and indicated IE 8 will not provide SVG capabilities."

Please. M$ already has a larger budget than most developing countries. They have already figured out how to put a vector display language into a browser (the proprietary VML). SVG is a well-established standard that has been around for years (1.1 was out in January 2003!). Many other smaller companies and organisations (e.g. Mozilla, Adobe, Nokia) have somehow managed to scrape enough resources together to fund implementations. In the worst case (?) scenario, all they have to do is buy the existing SVG plug-in from Adobe, along with a couple of their developers, and ship it. Total cost? Probably less than a golf day.

Why not just be honest and say "we really, really don't like to support open standards unless are we absolutely forced to"?

I think you might be confused - it's Opera that's been putting the development time into HTML5.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_layout_engines_(HTML_5)

It's also Opera that's been working on producing the best native SVG rendering, with the added bonus that it supports SVG images as img tags, backgrounds and bullet points, things you can't do with a plugin.

http://www.codedread.com/svg-support.php

http://files.myopera.com/dstorey/experiments/iTunesTable.html

"Why not just be honest and say "we really, really don't like to support open standards unless are we absolutely forced to"?"

Because MS is dragging their heels on SVG until they get everyone using Silverlight. This is the same reason they're porting Silverlight to S60 so quickly, despite what they say about waiting until mainstream implementations are complete. They don't want SVG to get a further foothold in mobile.

are not something that you pick from. They are what you adhere to or not. Simple really.

whilst it may be true that all standards should be supported... that is impleied...

they have already said that they intend for IE8 to support all the current standards and are now working on a way to implement standards that are pencilled in for future release as a standard.

they can pick and choose these standards because as they said, these are not standards, they are looking for what are the most promising to actually get standardised, and looking at what people will want to use and getting those out.

arguably IE has a much slower development cycle than other browsers,

are ou suggesting that they should only implement current standards and then be behind until the release of IE9, or would you actually support the current proactive view that they are taken at looking at new and emerging standards and looking to include those so that they will be supported in the browser from the word go?

I guess to sum it up.

yes you're right they should adhere to all standards,

but you are wrong (or didn't read the article properly).

they don't have to adhere to non-standards and can indeed pick and choose what to support (until they are standards) then they should support them.

But SVG *is* a standard. It's blindingly obvious that the only reason MS is not including it in IE8 is political.

Just what we need, another set of browsers each of which support a slightly different subset of the (upcoming) standards. Because you know that's what'll happen.

"Ooh, I like the look of that new 'coffee-strength:' CSS2.1 attribute. Sadly only Opera 12 supports it properly. Firefox 3.5 interprets it wrongly and makes tea, and IE8: 2010 edition doesn't support it at all."

I guess I must have accidentally set the DeLorean for 1997 this morning while switching radio stations on the way to work, this sounds like BLINK (Netscape) and MARQUEE (IE) just waiting to happen again, only there's a half chance some of the semi-supported stuff could have been *useful*.