ODIN Blog

I had the pleasure of speaking to a really savvy crowd at Surrey University last night on "Tomorrow's web standards today".  It was a fun session with lots of really good questions at the end - just the way I like it.

Below are my slides written in HTML. They're best viewed in Opera on full screen (View > Full screen) but of course work in any browser.Demos for <video>, <canvas>, SVG, web forms, widgets and media queries are all either linked from the presentation or bundled together in the download.

Opera is not a open source company, although we have contributed in some ways, such as releasing Opera Dragonfly under a BSD licence. The thought of sharing with the open source community what we are doing crossed my mind. The opportunity came when Azizat, the coordinator or the MYOSS, contacted me. Finally, I got the chance to talk (to the open source guys) about another kind of openess: Open Standards.

Taking que from David's wonderful OpenWeb presentation slides from Japan, I decided to talk about the Open Standards, the OpenWeb platform and Opera's work in Open the Web.

The audience was very informed with many of the things that I presented, such as SVG and SMIL. I enjoyed seeing head nods while I was presenting. The Malaysian audience was also very participative, especially when it comes to OpenWeb challenges. The audience were quick to ask that despite all the good effort, how do we achieve a massive uptake of these technologies?

Browsers have the responsibility to bring native support to many of the open standard technologies, but it will also depend on things such as good authoring tools, proper branding and closer collaboration for these open standards to go beyond just standards. A point taken home from the audience regarding the proprietary platform Flash is that even though SVG might be equally up to the task, it is Adobe who has been able to come up with a good authoring tool for people who want to use is. Will tools like Inkscape enjoy wider usage as a strong authoring tool that we see more SVG in the future? We certainly hope so.

Since someone forgot to bring the projector, we had about 30 odd people sharing two laptops. During the demo time, we had 20 people sharing each laptop. The demos we looked at included HMTL 5, Canvas, SVG, CSS 3 and the video element. The audience were particularly interested in CSS 3 and its ability to style stuff simply by a line of code, such as text-shadow and opacity. An audience member asked if they should start coding to HTML 5 now. It is possible now, if you want to try out new things.

Next up, we looked at why sites break. We took a peek at challenges faced by South Korea and India. South Korea is battling to be more open since if you are not a Windows user you can’t bank online. This has to do with encryption relying on an ActiveX control. As for India, some Indian sites require downloading EOT fonts to view the page. EOT is only supported in Windows. These are legacy issues that are complicated to change. Yet, change we need to achieve. The bottom line is, users should be able to see the same Web regardless of their browser, platform and device of choice.

The question and answer session was certainly entertaining. Questions asked includes When will HTML 5 be finalised? and how does the engineering cycle works in Opera?. The audience was certainly an active lot and it was a very two-way session. People also shared their thoughts on Opera’s latest earth-shattering release on 1st April; they are loving Facial Gestures.

Here is the OpenWeb Slides in PDF and Open Standards demos. To run the video examples, you'll need to use Opera's video build. You'll probably like to use the Opera Show feature to play the demos in presentation mode. You can do this by viewing the index.html in fullscreen mode.

Last Wednesday, Opera held a Web Seminar at Tsukuba University in Japan. This is one of the best technical universities in Japan, and fittingly has the slogan Innovation for the Future. Design wise it has a really nice Japanese-style flower symbol for its logo. In the short time I’ve been in Japan I’ve noticed that Japan is very strong with symbolism, with many great examples on Shinto shrines throughout Tokyo.

From the developer relations team, Andreas and myself presented along with Keiki and Go from the Japanese marketing team. My presentation was in three main parts; the value of Web Standards, Open the Web and innovation in standards. Andreas followed my 40 minute talk with demos of many of the new features in Opera’s rendering engine, Opera Dragonfly and cross-device design. We did a live demo of using Opera Dragonfly to remote debug, including the new DOM editing functionality. We were also able to show off the new Nintendo DSi that we managed to beat the queues to get our hands on a couple of days before.

All in all we had around 30-40 students attend, many of who were aware of and used Opera. We received a lot of interesting questions at the end of the presentations, although being in Japanese I didn't understand many of them, unless they were directed at me, and Andreas acted as my interpreter. The level was quite high, as expected from a university of the reputation of Tsukuba, and included PHD students. It was my third presentation where I was being translated, after two at iCamp in Russia earlier this year. It takes a bit of the pressure off as the audience are mainly listening to the translator (I don't think my faux-Geordie accent is too understandable for a Japanese audience), but it is quite hard to get into the flow when stopping after each slide.

Afterwards we headed off for a blogging dinner, which included many of the who's who of the Japanese blogging circuit, including people from Sony, Adobe Dreamweaver, MS and Mozilla, to a guy that dresses up as a storm trooper (I kid you not) and has Anime characters on his business card. Disappointingly he wasn't dressed that way for this dinner.

Download Tsukuba slides: Open the Web, by David Storey. [PDF]