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?

New Scientist recently published a special issue, The Folly of Growth, ostensibly an expose of flawed economic theory.

As you can deduce from this blog and writings elsewhere, New Scientist is my favourite magazine, and I have read practically every issue the last twenty years. While generally of quality there have been some duds among the articles and issues. This issue is among the worst.

New Scientist has changed through generations of editors, but retaining many of the strengths and weaknesses. It has never done economy well, and most of the time it has been weak in information technology, doing better these days.

Whatever your viewpoints this issue was bad economics, anyone reading it would not learn anything about economy from it, and whatever they learned would be more likely to be wrong than right. Through a Global warming thread in the forums I was pointed to a rebuttal from The Register (of all places), as the errors were basic and numerous that saves me some time.

What dismayed me more with this issue was bad science. I would love to see a scientific outlook on the “dismal science”, where you can find much folly indeed. New Scientist here wasted a good opportunity. I know how hard it is to make a special issue work well, you depend greatly on the contributors and the editors to turn the disparate articles into a coherent whole, and reject the articles that can’t be improved. I don’t know who declined to participate, but of the contributions several articles should never have been published in New Scientist.

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For anyone in Prague with an interest in Internet standards, it pays to look up the PROWAS site for the next event.

Which happens to be today. The topic is HTML5 is happening, the speaker is Martin Hassman, and the talk will be held in Czech, with discussion in any language you like. The place is the Chinese restaurant Dobrý Den nearby the Flora metro station, the time is 18:00.