Opera, Microsoft, the EU
By glazou on Thursday 21 February 2008, 09:12 - Standards - Permalink
Håkon Lie sent me an email yesterday to ask me to react to his 5 proposals. I'll keep my precise comments private but my conclusion was rather simple : no, that's not the way to go to increase standards-compliance in the browser world. Here's my take about it:
- form something called BTA : the Browser Testing Association, testing EVERY single standard-based feature of a modern browser, based on open-source tests contributions by the community reviewed and published by a restricted set of super-reviewers. We have hundreds of sites testing browsers features or listing if a given feature is implemented or not, but we miss a focal point, a unique and reliable source of information for all that stuff. These tests could reuse the W3C tests released with their specs, extend them, or implement totally new and different test.
- publish online scores for every available browser against these tests
- issue an official report twice a year, sent to tech news media like CNet and others, summarizing the state of the art
- for each new major feature Opera implements, explain publically how this is easy or difficult to implement ; if Opera shows it's easy, other browser vendors have no reason not to implement it...