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.

well as said a while back, I wanted to do some stuff with the page design. and finally I did. Didn't change it a whole lot, but it's different. The base theme is "The Dark One". I changed the background, the header and also the background of the text. This also required to change the frames around the pictures, because they were made for a clear black background. You can see an ilustration of the problem, and the solved version in the pistures on the right.

If you are interested in doing something like this, it's not hard, you don't even have to change the images, you can just change the size of the frame, and "move" the background position thru css.

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