Ian Hickson, the Google employee tasked with creating the next generation of acid test, has completed his work, which is now available for public consumption at its new home, acidtests.org. Unlike the first acid test, which focused on the box model, and the second acid test, which covered a broad variety of basic HTML and CSS features, Acid3 covers 100 of the nooks and crannies of HTTP, HTML, CSS, ECMAScript, SVG and XML, all through the medium of DOM scripting, a critical requirement for any modern web application. Ian Hickson is also the primary author of the HTML5 specification, which started life as a spec. called ‘Web Apps 1.0’, and as such has lots of application‐related features such as client‐side storage and enhanced forms. Ian wrote 64 of the tests, with the remaining 36 being submitted by both browser vendors and interested web developers.

Work started on the new acid test almost as soon as the IE developer team posted notification that IE8 passes Acid2. As was widely criticised around the ’net recently, it was revealed Internet Explorer 8 would now only pass the test if the server was modified to output a special HTTP header. It is not known to css3.info at this time whether the header would be required for IE8 to achieve compliance in the new test.