Acid3 Range Exception Test Fixed – WebKit hits 92/100

I’ve fixed Acid3 test 11, a test case of exception codes from Range.surroundContents. The fix involved changing the exception checking code at the start of the rather complex Range::surroundContents core DOM method. As you can see, this wasn’t a very complicated change.

This brings up another point about Acid3. Elsewhere on the interblag, some have argued that Acid3 is not an important test because a lot of what it tests are edge cases or obscure technologies. Our own Dave Hyatt downplayed the importance of the numeric score. It’s true that acid tests like this are not thorough standards compliance tests, and often enter the realm of very obscure standards details. But Acid 3 tests a lot of technologies that matter to everyday web development. While some tests are crazy edge cases, others are meat and potatoes interoperability issues that web developers have to work around today. Keep in mind that while the tests cover quirks of particular features, they also incidentally test much bigger gaps, for example the fact that some browsers are missing certain features entirely.

Some of you have also mentioned that you get slightly lower scores than the high score most are getting, or that some tests fail sporadically or on reload. I’m not entirely sure, but I think many of you are running into bug 17672, a timing issue that we’ll have to fix to fully pass the test. There are also a few remaining rendering issues we have to resolve, in addition to fixing the 8 remaining tests, to claim a full pass. Still, I’m pretty excited about the progress we have made so far.