Even after the death-of-XHTML2, syntax debate still dominates the day. Here is my contribution.

The XML story

In the beginning was SGML. There is a lot to be said about SGML so I won't. HTML was specified to be an application of SGML, but that never happened in practice. Among browsers Opera kept the pretence of supporting SGML for the longest time, causing us a lot of trouble because Opera behaved differently from every other browser. DocBook is another known SGML application, but in general SGML was no success.

About a decade ago a small group of people started a reformulation of the old SGML standard, First they did it outside of the W3C and later, when the success became apparent, within the W3C. The story of this simplified SGML, now known as XML, may be best told via the annotated XML, by Tim Bray, one of the principal authors. Essentially XML is angle brackets and a number of production rules on top of Unicode (for a fuller description see Comparison of SGML and XML). …

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Raster graphics (PNG, JPEG, and the rest) are used in a variety of contexts and a variety of resolutions, but most are come from a small number of sources, above all the digital cameras. Since the digital cameras still are marketed by the megapixel, and the lazy option is to publish the oversized photos unedited. This leads to unnecessary bits clogging up the Internet, slow downloads and excessive memory use.

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Should-read article: Accessible drag and drop using WAI-ARIA

The keyboard-friendly design of Opera was one of the things that attracted me to the browser in the first place, and one I am disappointed with the slow progress with. Keyboard-wise Opera today isn’t substantially better today than Opera 3, or at least Opera 7. In some cases it is better (like spatial navigation when it works), in other cases it is worse (I still haven’t found how to recover the Alt+Z history view, one of Opera’s greatest inventions). I don’t think Opera does any keyboard-only or keyboard-augmented usability testing.

Opera’s lack of progress is one thing, but in the Web sphere things are actually getting worse. Early on you could do keyboard-only browsing most of the time. If the site used frames it was very awkward and it was better to use any mousing device available, and you had the occasional idiot who used ‘onclick’ functionality to recreate actual links, either because he didn’t like the colour or underline of links or simply because he could.

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Before the weekend W3C announced that the XHTML2 Working Group would be discontinued. That hardly came as any surprise, and mixed with that feeling of relief and melancholy the death of a terminally ill patient may elicit. To me XHTML2 was the next HTML3, another ill-fated W3C spec discontinued at an early stage and superceded by a browser-supported spec, HTML 3.2. The difference was that I had an inside view of XHTML2. …

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This was a comment on a New Scientist piece, Linking genes to geography could revive race myth.

The concept of human races that most of us have grown up with has been shown to be at best simplified or misleading and at worst completely false. That hasn’t and won’t make racism go away. Furthermore this racial theory we have inherited is founded on Victorian science, and an enlightened project to classify and make sense of the world as they knew it then. The racial theory we know is far better founded than the theories at their time, but that wasn’t good enough.

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The most revolutionary new feature in Opera 10 is also among the oldest. In this case, while the teaser promising a reinvented Web may have been over the top, the hype is factual. Opera Unite is a revolution, among other wheels in motion.

My favourite headline has been El Reg’s Opera to take web back to the old days.

For decades Web intellectuals have railed against the client-server model, argued that it is too stale and authoritarian, had the server point of failure and couldn’t scale with the exponentially growing Web. Power to the distributed systems. Then Google came along and showed you can build a bigger server. The bigger the problem, the bigger the server park. Problem, any problem, solved. But way back in the CERN pioneering days the client was the server, the consumer was the producer. This grass root idealism didn’t survive the Web’s brush with success in the mid-90s, and when the revolutionaries no longer had scale on their side the revolution faltered, ending up with SETI searchers and UFO fanatics.

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J. G. Ballard

I held a CSS talk at CVUT a week or so ago.

It doesn’t really matter much these days which browser you are using. On the whole I find Opera less annoying to use than Firefox, and Opera additionally has some nice perks like better keyboard access and Opera Link.

Once in a while there are things that really makes a difference. On top of my list is that a browser should never lose my data. On the whole Opera is pretty good in this regard, but it has a huge gaping hole in its armour. If you type in text and the window is closed, you can restore the window but the text is lost. This is almost adding insult to injury, as you can see the empty space where the text you worked so hard at used to be. This excruciatingly horrible bug has a name, 155102, and has been known for a while now, but for a number of reasons it has taken time to fix.

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During the last few months I have gotten myself another permanent residence (especially after they got WiFi), a Chinese restaurant here in Prague. I spend more waking hours there than I do at home.

Eating, drinking, socialising, and being on the Internet has occupied large parts of my life anyway, but I enjoy organising as well. Today the first major event I’ve helped with, a night at the Opera, will be live this night. For Opera employees in Oslo this may be familiar, the Underwater pub nearby the Opera HQ has opera nights Tuesdays and Thursdays, and have had it for years, and it is a favourite Opera hangout.

Still, the Chinese-Czech musical connection is fascinating and appealing, we’ll see how it works out tonight. See you there?