Early mistakes are the hardest ones to fix. From the start HTML supported semantic markup, which is one of its selling points and in the same tradition as SGML. The early HTML had markup typical for its use of the day (code, dir, samp, kbd…). Today elements more like byline or nav might have been picked instead. But formatting elements like i, b, or u were of lesser value, because they gave information of what the phrases looked like, not what they were.

Co-founder of Opera Software, Geir Ivarsøy, died of cancer last Thursday.

The first time I met Geir Ivarsøy was in 1998 installing Opera 3.5, when Opera got CSS support. What I didn’t know then was that this very first good CSS implementation had been Geir’s work in few months, but it made CSS geeks worldwide pay attention to the Opera browser. A couple years later many of us ended up as Opera employees.

When I started in Opera I was charmed by that people worked regular hours, the atmosphere was as far removed from the life of a microserf as could be. Geir, our lead developer, went to the office in the morning and home to his family in the afternoon. But what happened in between was pure gold. Dozens of newly employed Opera programmers lined up at his door whenever they had a problem they couldn’t fix. Geir would pinpoint the problem and the solution within minutes.

Attended the W3C Technical Plenary, in Cannes, France. W3C has played the United Nations of Web standards for a decade now. In that period they have created 85 recommendations (finished specifications). In the works are 2 proposed recommendations, 28 candidate recommendations, and 111 working drafts, 25 of which are in last call (actually a few more, but I dropped some of the more process-oriented documents from the list).

The World Wide Web comprised three standards initially, URL, HTTP, and HTML. The URL, the location of a resource, was the crucial one. It created one standardised way of describing an address. The HTTP transport protocol allowed any machine to pick up or send to that resource, and HTML like this included the URLs as hypertext links. WWW built upon existing Internet standards as well as predecessors like Gopher, FTP, and Enriched Text.

Going from the usefully useless spacer to the false start of HTML 3.0. HTML 3.0 never made it to a final specification, but it contained many interesting if half-baked ideas. One of these was the fig element. Like spacer the element had many attributes now obsoleted by CSS.

Also like spacer or the logo and photo types in vCard, but unlike img, object, or canvas elements fig tells what kind of image is shown, here a figure. In addition the figure had associated content, the caption and credit elements, as well as content fallback like for object in HTML4. caption reappears in XHTML2, while credit has yet to reappear.

Two other properties were unique for this version of HTML, the overlay, an image positioned on top of the figure, handy for sprite animations, but here ostensibly to save bandwidth. The images could have a checksum so that when leeching an image the owner of the site would not be able to swap the image with an inappropriate one without the browser detecting that the image had been tampered with.

Berlin may be my most bypassed city. In the old days I would either take bus or train the Oslo-Göteborg-Malmö-Sassnitz-Berlin-Dresden-Prague route. Apart from train change I rarely spent much time in Berlin, and the bus wisely took a huge circle around it. So it is now when I’m mostly flying over the city that I seek it out, and this time I did it the old-fashioned way, taking the Budapest-Hamburg train from Prague. The web site had warned me the train was running 18 minutes late so I could leave later than I otherwise would have to. The 350km train ride might have costed more than the 900km airfare from Oslo but that is fair since the ride lasted more than twice as long, passing through the pretty but depressed landscape of the Czech-German hinterlands.

From our QA department we’ve been told that Opera Mini is the first browser not merely to pass the Acid2 test, but to surpass it. If you haven’t downloaded Opera Mini yet, you should do so now, or try the Opera Mini™ simulator.

Still in Prague. Had I blogged using Opera Mobile or Mini I would have been at the airport in time (maybe a posting on battery life on mobile devices at a later time), but as the trip was almost a stopover in Oslo before going to Berlin a couple days later, and Berlin is just north of here, missing it was no disaster.

Quick note from a hotel reception in Prague, a couple hours before after the second preview of Opera 9 and labs.opera.com launched and a couple hours before my flight to Oslo will do the same. The preview offer all the goodies like native search editors, BitTorrent, and of course Widgets. But I wanted to point out an Opera 7 feature that we knew wasn’t yet up to its full potential, namely User Style Sheets. We are not quite there yet, but we are closing in on it (as will undoubtedly the airport gates if I don’t get going).

Since the late 1980s I have been among those predicting the end of the Personal Computer, and that end is now in sight. The PC is going the way of the typewriter, but not overnight. It took the PC about 15 years to completely replace the typewriter, and we can expect a similar interval before it finally disappear, possibly ending up among the same hobbyists where it started.

This transformation is less fundamental than the replacement of the typewriter was. It is like the T-Ford replacing the horse carriage, and modern cars replacing the T-Ford. Apple may score points for experimenting with the “Any color you like as long as it is beige” formula, but the Mac is still a T-Ford.

I came across the yearly survey over Norwegian vacation habits. The City Weekend is becoming a fixture, every other Norwegian do two and a half such trips on average. This is a direct consequence of low-fare airlines making direct travel cheap and convenient, and that the European cities are close by when travelling by plane. Australia and Africa are where people would like to go but don’t, while USA has become dramatically less popular as a tourist destination.

Weekends are popular as you use up at most a couple vacation days, while I like the short trips for not having to bring a full set of clothes, thus lugging closer to the ideal nothing. The most desirable city in Europe according to this survey is Prague, edging out Rome, the previous favourite. Outed. I was in Rome last week and I am in Prague right now. Rome and Prague have much in common. Both are friendly cities to ease in to, you adapt to them as you arrive. Rome with its layering of time, place, and food, Prague with its architecture of hospitality, both merging an intricate past with a live presence, unafflicted by the monoculture of lesser cities.