Raphael's Blog

After looking around the several settings Opera offers I found an interesting one: "Rendering Mode":

Set rendering mode to use at startup
0 = Normal
1 = SSR
2 = CSSR
3 = AMSR
4 = MSR
-1 = Fit to width

I first though "wow, I can make 'fit to width' mode the default, cool", but as I was intrigued by the meaning of the other rendering modes I did a little research and found the following information:

The rendering technologies that ERA utilizes are Medium Screen Rendering (MSR), Aggressive MSR (AMSR), Small Screen Rendering (SSR), Color SSR (CSSR), Television Rendering (TVR), and normal screen rendering.

MSR is generally suited to smaller computer monitors, AMSR is generally suited to PDAs, CSSR is suited to mobile phones and low-resolution PDAs, and SSR is suited to low-resolution mobile phones. Each of these applies more aggressive reformatting and scaling, restructuring pages to remove the minimum widths enforced by tables or fluid designs. TVR is suited to most televisions, where problems caused by small fonts, interlaced displays, and high contrasts can also be avoided.

After reading the documentation of "ERA" I wanted to give MSR mode a try.

So I made the change, restarted opera, opened my DDPO page which usually requires an ugly horizontal scroll bar and immediately noticed the difference: all the content was adjusted to fit in the screen.
Although the effect is quite similar (if not identical) to the "fit to width" option, it is a great improvement over normal web browsing in a "small" screen (1024x600).

I am not completely satisfied by the results, but at least happy. I hope this technology is going to be improved, and that even other browsers start developing such kind of technology.

Secunia is currently running a poll with the question

What browser do you trust the most?

. I say Opera 9, and you? (notes: link isn't direct to the poll, there's no direct link to the poll, but that page should display the poll on the right side).

Read more...

I just saw the news about SSE support on Opera 9 and wrote this small class:

<?php

/**
 * SSE
 * @author Raphael G < atomo64+removethis@.gmail.com >
 * @copyright Raphael G 2006
 * @version 0.1
 *
 * This class is released under the GNU GPL licence.
 */
class SSE
{
function sendEvent($event,$data,$return=false)
{
$raw="Event: ".($event)."\n";
foreach ($data as $d)
{
$raw.=$d."\n";
}
$raw.="\n";
if($return)
return $raw;

echo $raw;
}

function startCommunication()
{
header("Content-Type: application/x-dom-event-stream");
}

function createData($value,$data_block,$charset='UTF-8')
{
return SSE::_createProperty("data",$value,$data_block,$charset);
}

function _createProperty($name,$value,$data_block,$charset='UTF-8')
{
if($charset!="UTF-8")
{
$name=mb_convert_encoding($name,"UTF-8",$charset);
$value=mb_convert_encoding($value,"UTF-8",$charset);
}
$data_block[]=($name).": ".($value);
return $data_block;
}
}

?>

That's the first of two classes I'm developing.
For those who are interested in using that class, it is released under the GNU GPL licence.

I'm also writing a windows jokes SSE backend for Opera widgets (I haven't written any Opera widget, so don't expect me to be me who will create it).

A package including the class and a simple example displaying the server's load can be downloaded: SSE-PHP.zip

I know it is a very simple example but I hope it helps somebody to write a great widget.