Out of the way

I decided to try a New Year's resolution...

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About a year ago, the Web Standards Project published a piece of work made largely by Opera employees, called the Acid 2 test. The idea was to test a whole range of HTML and CSS features in complex combination - and at the time no browser passed.

At Opera, we of course hoped to be the first. As it turned out, we weren't - congratulations are due and have been made to the KHTML/Safari developers who did it. But still, we sat down with all these wierd edge cases, and one by one chased the bugs out until we did pass.

(One of the test features, SGML comment parsing, proved to be a huge edge case. In order to fix it we introduced and had to solve a whole range of new problems, because it turned out that practically nobody had relied on the standard as written, while a number of important sites relied on the buggy behaviour that applied in every browser. Eventually the test author agreed that it was wrong to have included it, and just removed it from the test).

With Opera 9 we released the first cross-platform browser that passed the Acid2 test - and the first Windows browser to do so. (We have now got it working in Symbian phone browsers, although not in released versions yet). We thought that was moderately cool - it isn't the most important test in the universe, and probably not even the best, but the fact that there are now half a dozen or so browsers that do pass, and more working on it, is good for interoperability of the web.

Which really means that it helps authors to know that they can use standards without testing whether the p and h1 elements really work in every browser. That's the important bit.

Since, a handful of people have said that

Opera 9 is not passing Acid2 under certain unique scenarios

Unfortunately, the people who have made these reports are wrong about us not passing the test. One of the limitations of Acid2 is that it relies on a "normal" rendering setup. Scrolling, zooming, resizing, setting minimum font size, choosing your own styles for things that are important to you, and various other things, will all break the rendering of the test. It is written that way. It is designed to test basic capabilities, and makes assumptions about what browsers (and by extension, users) will do. If you introduce these variables, you move into a world where the standards being tested cannot apply if you want the rendering to look right. In other words, the test becomes invalid, so it is not possible to pass or fail.

The strangest suggestion, to my mind, is that disabling zoom is better than allowing it, since zoom (implemented according to CSS standards) causes some funny marks to appear. Why a user is better off with something they can't read, than something they can read although it looks funny, has always been beyond me. But it must appear to make sense to people (presumably those who don't need to zoom anything) because a lot of content is designed that way. The more we do to make it possible for users to get what they need, the more a small number of designers do to frustrate that. But I digress.

I guess what we should be doing is working on Acid3, something that uses real world conditions and variability, that works when people do the things they need to so they can use the web too, and get that sorted. And perhaps there are some more small changes to the standards that should be made.

It's disappointing, after the hard work that went into making the test, and the further hard work that went into meeting its conditions, to read people suggesting that maybe we have cheated.

At its worst, that's called dog-whistling in Australian politics, and used deliberately it is a particularly nasty way to slander. I don't think that in this case people are deliberately dog-whistling, I think that they just don't understand some of the finer details in the discussion. I don't think the whole thing is, in the real world, more than a virtual tempest in an invisible teacup. And I wish that things that small didn't disappoint me.

Because if they didn't I would have written something much cooler about villages and mountains, but that has to wait until I have done some more work now.

(Thanks for letting me vent. We return you to the normal meanderings and reflections on nothing much that make up the staples in this blog )

The nice thing about a blog is that I get to control exactly what is in it. I also take the blame for anything stupid I say, which makes sense. I resisted writing a blog for a long time. I tried it briefly a couple of times in the late 90's, when there were no real tools, but then spent so much of my time writing for work that I stopped doing it for pleasure. But it's nice to write things when I feel like it. Sadly, I often don't for a lack of time (too many oother things to do) or because I am far away from the computer. I guess that means that people aren't overburdened by reading it.

I'm trying to write some articles. It takes time, which is why I am still doing it late on Saturday night. They're fun, but hard work. And then I hand them in and they get edited. On rare occasions something I write gets published where other people read it. Most recently an article on the mobile web was published by .Net, an english magazine that the general public can actually read.

I got a copy from a friend who had seen it. Naturally, it had been edited a little by the magazine. It may have contained a spelling error, or some tortured sentece they wanted to simplify. Mostly they did a good job, actually improving the way things were said. But a couple of the changes rankled a bit with me. One of them was a question of style - I had written about a scruffy guy looking for a cheap bed on his mobile, which they left alone, and then

the girl with the heavy make-up and the cute little phone could actually be cursing the Web site that won't let her change her river cruise ticket for a Trabant hire-car in Budapest.

It came through the editing process as a girl looking at celebrity gossip in some magazine. It might be true that English readers weren't going to know what a Trabant is, or that the example seemed crazy. But the net effect was to drive a stereotype that I actively tried to avoid. My writing is not free of stereotypes, But I try to avoid some of them for one reason or another.

The other was more serious, and the sense of the edited version was almost directly opposite to what I had written, and something I was very unhappy to see. I immediately asked for a correction, and was told that they would indeed provide one in issue 150, for which I am grateful.

But they could have shown me the text before publishing it. As I said when I submitted the article, I would have liked to review any changes - precisely for this reason. Instead, some number of people will see my name (and picture) next to something that I regard as a stupid thing for anyone to say, and of those people I suspect a good number won't actualy read the correction. If I didn't know that there is quite a lot of confusing or even sloppy journalism around, and people are used to it happening, I would be more upset. But there is not a lot I can do about it.

In theory I can take legal action, pointing out that associating some statement with me is detrimental to my reputation. Since they published text that made it seem like I think Internet Explorer is a good browser, it is probably an easy enough case to make. But it probably isn't that important, and a published correction given rapidly and in good grace is probably better than arguing about it. And arguing about things in court that don't have some clear material importance is only good for lawyers.

So, back to writing some more pieces. One is on the mobile web, again. But they ask for camera-ready copy, in other words presumably all errors are my fault, and they aren't planning to sub-edit it. The other one will probably get sub-edited - I hope that if they make changes I get to see them this time.

In recent discussions on how the Semantic Web might happen people have suggested that exposing a lot of data was one of the things that is necessary. I have for a long time claimed that this in turn is held up by the lack of a common trust/security infrastructure, since a lot of data is somewhat private and people aren't prepared to simply turn it over to the universe.

On the other hand, there is a lot of public data. Kjetil Kjernsmo has been working on My.Opera, and thanks to him Opera recently launched the My.Opera SPARQL interface which I believe is the first public SPARQL interface to a commercially-backed datastore - the information that people publish on my.opera. With a quarter of a million (or so) registered users, whose data ranges from only a made-up name to a substantial profile, this is a pretty big set. At the moment the data gets updated weekly, although hopefully that will change as the service is developed.

So what is this actually good for? Well, you can link information to other RDF information. You can write a query to find out who writes about your favourite topic and claims to be based in Oslo (or Atlantis...). You can link your travel itinerary to people whose interest includes "meeting RDF geeks" and who live somewhere you have to stop over for the day. You can find out whether someone who speaks your language has written about widgets.

It also means that the people who put the data there in the first place can get it and do whatever they want with it, rather than only allowing them to use it locked up inside our software - something that most other community sites don't really get yet.

(And it got Arve blogging on RDF, which is a nice thing to see Maybe he'll get motivated to learn even more about it...)

Like the Web in general, the exciting thing about the Semantic Web is not when there are a few collections of data, but when there are a few collections of stuff that you can link together. Earlier hypertext systems generally didn't provide the glue for linking to different stuff that made the Web, once the critical mass appeared, such an amazing resource (and drove the development of search engines - something that SPARQL is a key part of for the Semantic Web).

It's an experimental service that we launched. We hope it will help the development of the Web in general, providing real test cases to anyone that wants to develop something cool. It's nice to do something first, especially when we are not (yet, anyway ;-) ) one of the more famous Semantic Web development groups. If it takes off, there is more we could do to make it easy for people to develop new applications - stuff for Opera platform or wanting data to feed to existing applications like htmlnaut, or whatever the collective minds of humanity can come up with. And it's fun stuff to play around with...

Mediumgeek wrote a little while ago about being able to hide in the middle of a party by being busy playing with her phone. It seemed like a terrible thing to do - I understand the idea because I am often feeling shy at parties, but I try to avoid doing stuff like that, and talk to people anyway. I like talking to people, but I feel funny walking up to strangers. Which is ironic for someone who ends up talking to strangers so often.

Tonight my laptop is borken, so I only have Opera mini... It works!

Mediumgeek wrote about a brave person speaking out - Rania al-Baz was beaten by her husband in a society where people don't talk about it, and did, very publicly. The reaction, which I guess she could have predicted, was pretty horrible.

It's bad that this happens. And it's bad that it isn't really something far away in a strange place, but something that happens everywhere. It might be generally considered unacceptable in Norway, or Australia. A lot of people do consider it unacceptable even in the deepest darkest reaches of the wide world, but how to react to it is a different question. It makes me uncomfortable, because I am not sure what I can do, but I am sure that whatever I do will be not quite right, will miss part of the problem, and will probably salve my conscience long before I have done as much as I can. It makes me uncomfortable because it should force me to consider how I behave, and do better. The fact that I don't hit people, let alone put them in hospital, is nice, but there are many things I do that are probably not that nice.

Rania al-Baz, I admire you for speaking out. A virtual support hug from a total stranger seems odd, but sometimes knowing that people believe in something you do is good whoever they are. I hope that you can encourage other people to speak a bit louder when things are wrong. Loud enough that people listen, and think about what they are doing, and do better. It will be nice if the problem is solved right now. History suggests that it won't be, but every time this doesn't happen is a little step towards a better world, and some progress on the long path is a start.

Maybe the people who want blogging to change the world are right, that it will. I think it might be able to help us to change ourselves, at least. Changing me for the better is a good thing. There ought to be more of it. (I realise that I am the one who ought to be doing more of it...)

They say that Farsi is one of the big blogging languages. They say that Brazil is one of the big countries for social networking stuff. And then they say that you need to learn english. odd really.

Hvis jeg lærer nok norsk, kanskje skal jeg har en blog på norsk. Men jeg tror det ikke - fordi jeg vil alltid skriver for venner som leser ikke norsk.