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Wandering by mistake

2 in 1: multiple incarnations of a single Opera feature

Sunday, 11. February 2007, 20:29:17

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OK, the "feature" word is quite an exaggeration in the case described below. :wink: Have you noticed that Opera offers two kinds of blank pages?

Blank page of the first kind
If you select "File" >> "New Tab", or click the "New Tab" on the Tab Bar, you'll see the more "common" Opera blank page, which in current versions is not treated as a real page. You can't display its source, and the Info panel does not offer any info about it.

So maybe it should rather be called an "empty tab"?

Blank page of the second kind
But… Type opera:blank in the address field. A "blank page" will be displayed again, but this time you may see that it's a real Web page. Press Ctrl+F3 to see its source:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<html dir="ltr" lang="en">
<head>
 <title>Blank Page</title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
</code>

And the info panel looks like this:


Do you know any other examples of similar redundancy in Opera user interface? Or maybe it's not a redundancy, and both of the kinds of the emty pages are needed?

Other bugs related to empty tabs
When exploring these incarnations of a single Opera feature, I've noticed some other (probably not so new) bugs.
  • Cycling through tabs using the "1" and "2" keys is disturbed if any of the tabs is empty. In case of an empty tab, the address field is being automatically focused, which breaks the cycling procedure, and "1"s and "2"s are simply typed into the address field.
  • The empty page of the second kind does not validate.
  • Opera offers some options for the emty pages of the first kind, while these options should be disabled. The "Reload every", "Copy address", "Send link by mail", "Validate" and "Edit site preferences" options do not work on the emty page of the first kind. In case of the empty page of the second kind the "Edit site preferences" is actually disabled.

Developer Console menu item name - bug or feature?Opera stats in Poland

Comments

_Grey_ 12. February 2007, 03:51

Or maybe it's not a redundancy, and both of the kinds of the emty pages are needed?


Personally, don't need the "first" kind which is actually the traditional "second" kind.

I use about:blank (same as opera:blank, imho) nearly every day. I usually use it to test/execute self-written javascript urls (try that in the other kind! Often a disaster...).
I also use it to test some html/css code (I edit the source). It's one of the urls that work even when you are offline. Also, it's pretty minimized, so there's not much bloat in there I'd have to delete (that's why it doesn't validate).

Now that I think of it I could actually use a "third" kind... one thats always treated as "application/xhtml+xml" (though this one would have to have some more bloat because it ought to validate).

Is there any use for the "empty tab" I can't think of? I think it's pretty useless...

nafmo 13. February 2007, 16:34

The first one is the “there is no page” page. When you open a new tab without opening a page, it does not have anything to show. It is empty.

The second one is a base document that scripts can use to build new pages from, by opening an about:blank and add DOM objects to.

The first one is not entered into the window (tab) history. The second one is.

andol 13. February 2007, 20:09

Short, but great answer. Thanks. :smile: Such answers sometimes work wonders. It was you who almost 6 years ago have answered my question regarding the cyrillic.bin file format, which lead me to create an ISO 8859-2 patch for Opera 5. This made Opera usable in Poland and made good starting point for Opera 6. :smile:

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