A Blog With No Name

Since installing the Opera 9.5, some pages looked different, mainly there was a lot of "Courier New" (monospace, typewrriter) font around. For instance most of the text over at http://acm.timus.ru/default.aspx , was written with this font, when it was a serif font before. At first I thought that they changed the design, since some other things changed at the site at the same time. But checking it out in Firefox showed the same old fonts, so it was obviously something to do with the new Opera.

At first I thought that maybe they changed the default font when none is specified. Some testing showed that this is not the case with pages in "Quirks" mode (without a DOCTYPE), and then I thought about many not well designed pages that depend on the fact that the defaults are this and that, since they don't change anything and they specify everything in pixels. But further testing showed that for pages in "Standards" mode withouth specified fonts it does supply the monospace font.

I have overriden this by making a custom stylesheet for Opera and specifing:

html{ font-family:serif; }

You can specify the custom stylesheet in the preferences (ctrl+f12) -> advanced -> content -> style options.

After a restart it looked the same as in firefox.

Note sure if this qualifies as a bug, since as there are no default fonts in the CSS 2.1 specification (the initial value is "depends on user agent"), but it sure is a bit of a weird decision in the new version.

It seems now that Imdb.com is not available at the moment. It also had problems yesterday. It is more likely that it is a DNS problem than the actual servers beign down.

This bothered me more than usual, because I had DNS problems two days ago and many pages wouldn't load without any pattern. On other computers in the network those sites worked fine. Finaly I realized that I had explicitly configured the DNS in my connection settings, and that server was probably down. I changed it so that my router is the primary DNS server, as it should be anyway.

So while I was investigating, I found this site: http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/, that helps cheking is your pc, dns, ip, or whatever the problem, or is it at the site end. For instance you can directly check for imdb like this http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/imdb.com