Some Assembly Required

Making a sidebar

By Charles McCathieNevile. Friday, 4. August 2006, 14:03:54

Someone here thought it was impressive that the webteam made a news sidebar for another browser. It is, but that is because some systems are pretty complex and it takes some impressive work to do something useful. So I thought I would finally get off my backside and make a panel (that's what we call them, because they can be at the top or bottom if you like, as well as the sides) for Opera.

It isn't very hard. The following code will do it

<a href="http://www.assembly.org/2006/sidebar" rel="sidebar">Here it is!</a>

And Here it is!. Click on that link in Opera, and OK the panel. It will appear in your sidebars (f4 to show/hide them, if you've never heard of them before. It will be called "ASM'06" and have the assembly favicon, of course).

(It's just a web page. No additional rights to any possible security risks)

There is one noticeable difference. Once you click on the link in Opera and confirm that you want it, it is installed. No need to restart. (Well, for the technical minded you'll be pleased by the lack of compatibility issues across major versions, but that's really getting into the detail).

Late, Early, and All the TimeSplat....

Comments

Eddie_Lopez # 4. August 2006, 17:44

That crashed my browser! 9.01.

After accepting the link to bookmark it and show it in the sidepanel, opera crashed.

chaals # 5. August 2006, 03:49

Huh?

Wierd. I even tested it on most of the machines we had here first. Since their page isn't that complex, I wonder if you had something odd running in the background. I hate bugs that can't be reliably reproduced

attet # 5. August 2006, 08:42

Great, but you can't change the encoding for the sidebar? I can choose correct encoding (UTF-8) from menu when the sidebar is focused, but it doesn't change anything.

Using 9.01 Linux

attet # 5. August 2006, 11:06

Oh well, they fixed content-type on server side but still I think the encoding should be changeable.

chaals # 13. August 2006, 22:39

Attet, I have noted your request for more options on the sidebar ("panels" in formal Operaspeak, since they don't have to appear at the side

) as part of the process of what people would like to see in Opera. But since there are so many features, and so many people who just want their particular favourite feature tweaked a little bit, there is a long list, so I can't make promises...