Acid2 is a test page published and promoted by the Web Standards Project to expose web page rendering flaws in web browsers and other applications that render HTML. It was developed in the spirit of Acid1, a relatively narrow test of compliance with the Cascading Style Sheets 1.0 (CSS1) standard, and was released on April 13, 2005. Like Acid1, an application passes the test if the way it displays the test page matches a reference image. Acid2 tests aspects of HTML markup, CSS 2.1 styling, PNG images, and data URIs. The Acid2 test page will be displayed correctly in any application that follows the World Wide Web Consortium and Internet Engineering Task Force specifications for these technologies. These specifications are known as web standards because they describe how technologies used on the web are expected to function. While at the time of Acid2's release no web browser passed the test, Acid2 was designed with Microsoft Internet Explorer particularly in mind. The creators of Acid2 were dismayed that Internet Explorer did not follow web standards and because of this Internet Explorer was prone to display web pages differently from other browsers. Acid2 represented a challenge to Microsoft to bring Internet Explorer in line with web standards, making it easier to design web pages that work as intended in any web browser.

Read the rest of this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid2

_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:

1770:

British explorer James Cook and the crew of HM Endeavour made their first landfall on Australia on the coast of Botany Bay near present-day Sydney. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Endeavour

1882:

German inventor Ernst Werner von Siemens began operating his Elektromote, the world's first trolleybus, in a Berlin suburb. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/trolleybus

1916:

World War I: Khalil Pasha of the Ottoman Army accepted the surrender of Major-General Charles Townshend and the British Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force, ending the Siege of Kut. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Kut

1968:

The controversial musical Hair, a product of the hippie counter-culture and sexual revolution of the 1960s, opened at the Biltmore Theatre on Broadway, with its songs becoming anthems of the anti-Vietnam War movement. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hair_%28musical%29

1992:

The acquittal of policemen who had beaten motorist Rodney King sparked civil unrest in Los Angeles that lasted for six days and killed over 50 people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_King

_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:

crotchety (adj): Cranky, disagreeable, or stubborn, especially if prone to odd whims or fancies http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/crotchety

___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:

The advance of science is not comparable to the changes of a city, where old edifices are pitilessly torn down to give place to new, but to the continuous evolution of zoologic types which develop ceaselessly and end by becoming unrecognizable to the common sight, but where an expert eye finds always traces of the prior work of the centuries past. --Henri Poincaré http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henri_Poincar%C3%A9