It was an accident that may cause some damage to the wildlife, but a white river looks nice. While I would prefer the river au naturel most of the time, a white river/black lights event once in a great while wouldn’t be too bad.
Milky way
Free as in competition
Now that Opera is feeling free, inevitably the question of open source comes up. There is nothing wrong with open source, even if I sometimes wonder about some of its evangelists, but still we have opted for having the Opera source code closed.
Could Opera benefit from being open source? Yes. Does it benefit from not being open source? Yes. To us the benefits from being open source are small, the benefits from not being open source large. For other products, maybe one of ours if we had any, the bottom line might be different. This is a commercial decision and not one of ideology. Maybe we are netheads with a cause but fundamentally we are in it for the money, and not to promote purity of thought. If we don’t make money from producing a browser, we will do something else.
One reason an open source Opera wouldn’t be such a good idea is that there are already two healthy open source browser projects out there, based on the Gecko and KHTML layout engines, and three would be a crowd. If we all were the same browser under different names, there would be no variety or competition left except for the respective marketing departments. It is real, open competition we need (something that has been hard to get on the Windows platform).
(more…)Circle-squaring standards
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.
(more…)Opera Software: 10 Axelsson: 31
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.
(more…)Du store verden så liten den har blitt
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.
Conditionally IE7 and @opera rules
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.
(more…)Tip of the phone: Overriding the override
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.
Towards Carfree Cities V
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.
(more…)Om hundre år er allting glemt
On June 7 1905 with the most flimsy pretext the Norwegian parliament staged what ultimately turned out to be a peaceful nationalistic coup. In the twentieth century this was very much the exception, only two more cases followed. Iceland seceded from Denmark in 1944. As Denmark was occupied by Nazi Germany at the time the Danish government was not in a state to protest. The Czechoslovakian split in 1992 could be considered a mutual coup. The collapse of Soviet Union in 1991 on the other hand was made possible by a coup that failed instead, and was not quite as peaceful.
The nineteenth century invented nationalism and the twentieth century put it into practice, usually to horrific casualties. While the map of Europe started out as one of great empires, by the end of the century it had ended up as a collection of nation states instead.
Though Europe of 2005 is a Europe of nation states, the nation state is likely to have culminated and will have a lesser role in any future year than it has right now.
Mobile Web Initiative
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.