Archive for August 5th, 2010
IE 9 Preview 4 – How much HTML 5 support? Should it?
I’ve been wondering how to get thru the hype of Html 5 support in IE 9. That’s not to say that the improvements they have made aren’t welcome – they very much are. But Html 5 is larger spec than just audio, video and canvas – and I’ve been wondering how broad Html 5 support goes.
I found a site called http://html5test.com/ that will test your browser for HTML 5 support. How does IE 9 preview 4 fare?
That’s right – 96 out of 300? You say you want details? Here you go:
- Parsing rules1 Bonus point1/11
<!DOCTYPE html>triggers standards mode
Yes ✔HTML5 tokenizer
No ✘HTML5 tree building
No ✘HTML5 defines rules for embedding SVG and MathML inside a regular HTML document. Support for SVG and MathML is not required though, so bonus points are awarded if your browser supports embedding these two technologies.
SVG in
text/html
Yes ✔MathML in
text/html
No ✘ - Canvas20
canvaselement
Yes ✔2D context
Yes ✔Text
Yes ✔ - Video22/27
videoelement
Yes ✔Subtitle support
No ✘Poster image support
Yes ✔The following tests go beyond the requirements of the HTML5 specification and are not counted towards the total score. If a browser supports one or more video codecs, two bonus points are awarded for each codec.
MPEG-4 support
No ✘H.264 support
No ✘Ogg Theora support
No ✘WebM support
No ✘ - Audio2 Bonus points20
audioelement
Yes ✔The following tests go beyond the requirements of the HTML5 specification and are not counted towards the total score. If a browser supports one or more audio codecs, one bonus point is awarded for each codec.
PCM audio support
No ✘MP3 support
Yes ✔AAC support
Yes ✔Ogg Vorbis support
No ✘WebM support
No ✘ - Local devices0/20
deviceelement
No ✘ - Elements13/30
Embedding custom non-visible data
No ✘Section elements
No ✘sectionelement
No ✘navelement
No ✘articleelement
No ✘asideelement
No ✘hgroupelement
No ✘headerelement
No ✘footerelement
No ✘Grouping content elements
No ✘figureelement
No ✘figcaptionelement
No ✘Text-level semantic elements
2 out of 5markelement
No ✘rubyelement
Yes ✔rtelement
Yes ✔rpelement
No ✘timeelement
No ✘hiddenattribute
No ✘Scroll into view
Yes ✔ - Forms0/38
inputelement types
No ✘searchtype state
No ✘teltype state
No ✘urltype state
No ✘emailtype state
No ✘datetimetype state
No ✘datetype state
No ✘monthtype state
No ✘weektype state
No ✘timetype state
No ✘datetime-localtype state
No ✘numbertype state
No ✘rangetype state
No ✘colortype state
No ✘inputelement attributes
No ✘autofocusattribute
No ✘listattribute
No ✘maxattribute
No ✘minattribute
No ✘multipleattribute
No ✘patternattribute
No ✘requiredattribute
No ✘stepattribute
No ✘Other form elements
No ✘datalistelement
No ✘keygenelement
No ✘outputelement
No ✘progresselement
No ✘meterelement
No ✘Form validation
No ✘ - User interaction5/25
Drag and drop
No ✘Undo history
No ✘Session history
No ✘Text selection
Yes ✔ - Microdata0/10
Microdata
No ✘ - Web applications0/14
Application Cache
No ✘
Related specifications
- Geolocation0/10
Geolocation
No ✘ - WebGL0/10
3D context
No ✘ - Communication5/25
Cross-document messaging
Yes ✔WebSocket
No ✘Server-Sent Events
No ✘ - Files0/10
FileReader API
No ✘ - Storage10/20
Session Storage
Yes ✔Local Storage
Yes ✔IndexedDB
No ✘The Web SQL Database specification is no longer being updated and has been replaced by IndexedDB. Because at least 3 vendors have shipped implementations of this specification we still include it in this test.
Web SQL Database
No ✘ - Workers0/10
Web Workers
No ✘
Clearly, while the IE team has done great work in bring IE forward with the IE 9 previews, clearly there is a lot more HTML left unsupported then currently in the latest preview. But should IE 9 have full HTML 5 support? Good question. If you take a look at the HTML 5 document at the W3C you’ll notice it’s “working draft” – the proposal in still flux. I would guess that MS is just expanding “de facto” standards support and hitting the highlights, where other features such as IndexDB, Web Applications, Html 5 Forms and other elements will come – eventually. But will they come in IE 9? Only MS knows the answer to that one. Let’s just hope we don’t have to wait three years until IE 10 to find out.
