Shortly before Opera Software was founded, Håkon Lie wrote what was to become the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) specification. I read this paper a few months later when working for the government and was thrilled. A decade later, with CSS finally mainstream, the promise of what CSS can do is still exciting.

The usefulness of separating presentation from content should be known by now. But even more revolutionary was the cascade, the idea that the user had a say in how a document was presented, not just the author. Intriguingly the initial proposal had the concept of a compromise for numeric values. So if you had a preference for 16px text and I for 12px, the page might be displayed as 14px. How Scandinavian, how TeX, and how scrapped it was by the final spec. In the current cascade a rule either applies or it doesn’t, but there is a priority hierarchy with the user ultimately on top.

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There is something bombastic about round numbers. Opera Software just celebrated 10, a long time in Internet years. Half that time I have been working here, while Opera in turn has been around almost half my Internet life, which has been close to half the fifty-sixty years lifetime I expect the Internet to have as a project. It will garner as much interest to speak about the Net in the 2020s as it would be to speak of electricity today.

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With a weekly release of some Opera product I have almost stopped paying attention to ourselves. But once in a great while something huge happens. Yesterday was one such time. I do of course refer to the limited release of Opera Mini, limited to Norwegians that is, not limited in scope.

This is huge for a number of reasons. It affect a huge number of devices, the hugest number really except for TV sets, of which there are twice as many in the world.

The download size is great too. A standing idle question we have had since the beginning is: How small can we make Opera? And the answer is: The size of a normal MMS message, at around 55 KB. That is way smaller than the floppy disk Opera 3 fit into.

It also introduced our first TV campaign ever, featuring a quirky set of ads from where this title is stolen.

What I really liked about this release is that the distribution was the way I would want it to be. All you do is send a SMS (Opera to 1984) and you’re an Opera user. In theory at least, as different operators, different handsets with different telephony integration and versions of Java, different settings for WAP or web have conspired to make the process not quite as transparent. But compared to the normal discovery and installation process this is a huge improvement. You have a phone, you want the Internet, you got it.

As Olli mentioned, Chris Wilson has expounded on important interoperability bug fixes in the future IE7. This list of bug fixes will remove a lot of cross-browser headaches, but ironically fixing them will also add some new ones.

CSS can to a large degree adapt to browsers with a wide range of capabilities by virtue of its compatibility rules. Even proprietary extensions like IE’s filters cause no problem with other browsers, they just ignore them. Unfortunately implementation bugs can ruin this cross-browser harmony. Netscape 4 had some notorious bugs, including crashes, that set back the uptake of CSS for years. It can also be hard do design around the lack of some crucial features like CSS selectors.

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Opera phones, including my Sony-Ericsson P800, use the handheld media type allowing the page designer to make a customised style sheet for phones. If there is no handheld style sheet Small-screen rendering is used instead.

But what if a handheld style sheet is provided, but it is bad for you? On this phone, using the fairly old 6.31 version, you are stuck with what you have got. There aren’t many sites yet that make handheld versions, but we do. www.opera.com has an excellent style sheet, while the My Opera forums have a bad one (this will change) including setting display:none on information you need.

And here is the tip: Toggle the Edit > Fit to screen option. The first time SSR is overridden by the handheld style sheet, but the second time the handheld style sheet is ignored and SSR is applied. This was not intended but has proven fortuitous.

As is stated in Tor Åge Bringsværd‘s Den som har begge beina på jorda står stille (He who has both feet firmly planted on the ground stands still) — tilfeldighetene er våre venner (coincidences are our friends). Shortly after writing about car-free cities, car-free Budapest in particular, I came across a conference in Budapest that will be in a couple weeks time, and it was organised by the World Carfree Network that happened to be within walking distance from me.

I am usually a little stand-offish for classic green groups. They may be more often right than wrong and the issues are important, but they tend to be wrapped in a moralistic and often apocalyptic language. The message that comes across is “We know what is best for you and if you don’t do what we say the world is going to end.” As a rule I would say that green groups are better at identifying problems than at prescribing solutions.

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The Mobile Web Initiative went public this week, with a public mailing list each for best practices and device description. It went public in the sense that it really has been a continuation of a workshop in Barcelona this fall. Further back a W3C impetus would be the .mobi top level domain for mobile devices, something I don’t think is a particularly good idea and neither did Tim Berners-Lee.

The workshop and its papers was a “You are here” point of the Mobile Web, where the participants presented their diverging view on what the mobile web was and how it would be won.

Revisiting Budapest was a reminder of what damage the automobile, the scourge of the 20th century, has caused human society. The same century started a departure from cities built to a human scale to cities built to suit the the car.

This is likely to change in the 21th century. While an immediate car ban in urban areas is unlikely, economic savvy will move us there anyway. It is no accident that Venezia is the most attractive city in Europe. It may be an open sewer, the buildings are dilapidated, it suffers from chronic floods, the commotion and the prices are high, but this is a city where you find no cars and the tourists love it.

The same can be seen in other cites as well. Where there are zones with high traffic and zones with no traffic, tourists, and the locals as well, gravitate towards the no traffic zones. While tourism is important in itself as the largest economic activity in Europe, they are also an eye-opener. Tourists have the privilege to choose where they want to go and you don’t see them flock to traffic junctions.

The car belongs to the country-side and not in the city. In less densely populated areas it is a symbol of freedom, each individual can go where he wants to go when he wants to go there. In the city the car is the symbol of gridlock. More people live in cities than anywhere else, for them the city is their home not just a place of work or entertainment. If the citizen had a direct say in whether their own street was pedestrian or allowed cars to drive through it the changeover would happen sooner, but they do have a say indirectly.

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I finally got around to watch Der Untergang (or “The fall of the third realm” in the uninspired Czech translation, the English title “Downfall” is considerably better) a few days ago. Set in the fast imploding Nazi universe in the days before the ultimate collapse, this is a refreshingly real and honest account of madness set upon itself. Real as a story that is, not an arbiter of historical truth. Unsurprisingly, given its subject, the European debate has been on its instrumental role. Will it prevent a rise of neo-nazism? No, certainly not. Neither will it be their The Birth of A Nation.

I rarely visit the cinemas, but this film ought to be seen in one and not just watched on DVD. Partly to reinforce its claustrophobic nature and partly to feel, and not just look at, the shells ripping Berlin and its tattered defenders apart. Meanwhile, down in the bunker, Adolf weds Eva even though the required paperwork that the couple are of proper mateable Aryan descent is waived.

There was an unsettling idea to stage the Nazis’ final downfall not in Berlin, but in the fairly impenetrable Festung Norwegen. The several hundred thousand German soldiers stationed there had a relative comfortable and safe existence by the northern bunkers, far away from both the west and east fronts. There was less comfort in the labour camps for the largely Russian prisoners that managed to survive the arctic winters.

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