A Prague Opera

— Posted inUncategorized — 5 min read

And so it begins… On the circuitous route from the outskirts of Europe to the centre, going from Oslo through Linköping and Wrocław, Opera has finally reached Prague. …

December 12 was the day we were connected to the Internet, January 2 the first day of regular work, and the first employee that wasn’t an Oslo transplant, but January 31 was really the date when we had arrived. And the place we arrived at was the New Town Brewery (and pub), as has been told elsewhere. As usual the Mozilla guys have the best circulation, but the people from Opera český got in some shots as well (you might have to sharpen up your Czech for some of these links, a dictionary might help, but there is a far-out one in English as well).

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The Year in Browsing: The Little Engine That Could

— Posted inUncategorized — 2 min read

By the end of last year one long-standing competitor to Opera ceased to develop its browsing engine. No, I am not thinking of Netscape, that browser was dead when it was bought by AOL, but an old Opera favourite, iCab. From now on iCab will use WebKit as the engine, in effect turning it into a WebKit skin, like OmniWeb before it. This is more sad and nostalgic, OmniWeb was always about the UI anyway, while iCab showed that two skilled and dedicated programmers could compete in making a browser that (some) people actually wanted to use.

This is not to say that it wasn’t a sensible, rational, and reasonable business decision. iCab can prosper more easily now that as tiny team can focus on the one thing closest to their users, and leave site compatibility to the much larger group of WebKit developers and evangelists. My next :beer: will be on them. However, this leaves the choice on the Mac platform to three, WebKit (Safari, OmniWeb, and now iCab), Gecko (primarily Firefox, but also Camino and others), and Presto (Opera). In general the trend on any operating system is less choice, not more, and this trend is likely to continue. There is unlikely to be a radical new browsing engine in 2008 or in 2009, the choice is instead going to be among the existing ones.

2nd Annual Street Conversion Design Contest

— Posted inUncategorized — 3 min read

I wonder how cities will change in the 21st century, and believe that it will generally be for the better. That is a good thing given that most people will be city dwellers. One problem which I expect to be solved is traffic as an environmental problem. As travel becomes relatively cheaper and more convenient (which I think it will in the long run) people will travel longer and more often, so the time spent travelling won’t decrease even though the injury caused by it hopefully will.

Assuming that the car will retreat from ever-larger parts of our cities, that gives us an interesting problem, what shall we do with the spaces thus liberated? If you go to a city like Copenhagen many central streets seem curiously overdimensioned when the cars are largely gone. Of course there were streets long before there were cars, but in the middle part of last century the city plans were often designed for the car. What can best be done with streets like this when vacated by cars? The traffic and pollution might be gone, but the street is still not an integrated part of the city, and cities abhor empty spaces.

That makes some rationale for a design competion.

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Cruelly Slow Slog

— Posted inUncategorized — 4 min read

The CSS 2.1 specification was recently refused entry into the (almost) safe harbour of Candidate Recommendation (CR) status again (for what is it? the fourth time?). This means that the spec is still in a you-can’t-believe-a-word-of-this Working Draft state, just like it was seven years ago. This can be summed up in the word frustrating.

To be fair the goalposts have not only been shifted from when Tantek Çelik originally suggested CSS 2.1 one Sunday afternoon, but completely replaced. Originally the idea was just to remove the parts of CSS 2 that nobody wanted to implement. This could have been done in months. It would essentially be a profile of CSS 2, “CSS 2—The useful bits”.

Instead CSS 2 was fully rewritten in tedious detail, the goal was now the interoperable CSS 2. This in itself was a good thing. It is much better that the spec is unambiguous than having incompatible implementations of the same, vague, spec. The ones having already implemented CSS 2 would need to adjust their products, but for new CSS 2.1 user agents getting it right the first time is much cheaper, not to speak of the millions of web designers that don’t have to make specific hacks for every browser in existence.

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