Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 is the most HTML5 compliant browser

Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 was ranked as the top browser that passed the HTML5 conformance tests. The Worldwide Web Consortium has released the results of its first tests which showed the IE9 as the browser that most closely adheres to the latest set of web standards.

While the HTML5 specification is yet to be finalized and these tests cover only a portion of the spec, still the top position of the IE9 is a sign of a big job made by Microsoft.

The W3C tests place IE9 beta release 6 at the top of the HTML5 conformance table, followed by Google Chrome 7, the Firefox 4 beta 6, Opera 10.6, and Safari 5.0. The tests cover seven aspects of the spec: "attributes", "audio", "video", "canvas", "getElementsByClassName", "foreigncontent," and "xhtml5":

The tests do not yet cover web workers, the file API, local storage, or other aspects of the spec.

Interestingly, while these tests also do not cover CSS or other standards that have nothing to do with HTML5 they were somehow lumped under HTML5 by the likes of Apple, Google, and Microsoft. As Mozilla man Asa Dotzler pointed out, when Microsoft released its IE9 platform preview 6, it said that its "HTML5 features include CSS3 2D Transforms."

"WTF, Microsoft? Are you trying to add more confusion to the conversation?" Dotzler wrote.

"HTML5 features include CSS3? That's seriously confused. Please stop this. HTML5 is HTML. CSS3 is CSS. They two are not the same thing."