Out of the way

I've been on a travel-meeting-travel-talk-travel jag for what seems like forever (but it was really only three weeks).

While I was away, a whole lot of cool Opera things came out. MathML, Mini 4, A video build with 3D canvas, ...

So in roughly chronological order...

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Or should that be damning? I really like the fact that Opera supports BitTorrent. I use it about once in a blue moon, for some big thing like installing neoOffice, but then I appreciate it. It doesn't let me watch each packet fly around, it just oves files. That's fine. I have work to do, but I appreciate being able to move files while I am working.

Recently I had to explain to someone setting up a computer that while it makes sense to get Opera and then get a handful of useful applications as torrents, you probably need to remember to turn them off after a while. And then that it isn't some terrible security risk, or a sign that you are a criminal. It is a way of moving files around the net - something that we do more and more. And if you don't want to hand over all the things you have to someone else in order to share them, it's quite useful.

It is amazing the FUD that is out there, and most of it is total rubbish. Yes, if you run a torrent you are sharing with people. So you should watch how much you share, and make sure you know that your bandwidth is being used.

That's it. I am not a criminal, I am not violating copyright laws or anything else. I am using the internet to get and give files to people - what it was made for in the first place.

Of course, since in many places you pay good money for bad bandwidth, there are still people who want to disable Opera's BitTorrent support either for themselves or for their users, or to use some other application for torrents. And of course, you ca do that if you want to. I think it is a shame that organisations use such blanket rules, instead of thinking about what their members are trying to achieve and the best ways to do that. But there you go...

Security is an interesting area. Despite having published actual papers on security at real security conferences, I wouldn't class myself as an expert in the area. But I do think it is important, and very interesting. Occasionally I get in trouble for saying that "security on the Web is pretty primitive" or something like that - maybe I should write a bit more about why I think the Web doesn't have a very powerful security system one day, and why that isn't necesasrily a bug, but a feature request.

Still, it is nice to see when an improvement of some sort occurs anywhere in this area - and another one is on the way...

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Err, that's meant to be Bangalore, the first place I have ever been in India.

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Bookmarks are handy - especially if you remember what they are...

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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 )

As everyone probably knows already, Opera 9 launched on Tuesday in Seattle. I was there. For a while it seemed like a close-run thing - I was in New York the day before, and had to be back the day after, for W3C meetings. I got a red-eye flight each way.

On the way there we were delayed 5 hours - first by a weather problem, then, when we got in the plane and were taxiing to the runway, the engine flared as they started it. Passengers in the back saw the flames and freaked out, to the point that we had to go back to the terminal and change from one perfectly good plane to another. So I was extremely tired when I got there.

I presented widgets. Being extremely tired, I had them on a USB stick rather than copying across to the machine we were presenting on - a Mac, also using Parallels to show windows. Big mistake. First, the USB stick was taken out of the machine so I couldn't find my cool in-development previews at the crucial moment When I did get going, Parallels had done something wierd and we had no keyboard (I was using keyboard-controlled widgets) so I switched to the Mac native. In the end it worked out ok.

So I left the party and went back to New York. Well, to the airport, where the flight was delayed and I didn't have a seat In the end I got a bump. Which meant I was very late into New York, but that I got upgraded so slept on the plane a bit, which was nice.

And Opera 9 is out. I like it - I have been using it for quite a while aready. My favourite things are standards improvements - XSLT, good SVG, the WHAT WG-specified Audio() thing and a handful of other minor stuff, plus widgets, BitTorrent, the source editor, and the error console (which provides debug information for all knds of things).

Liking the source editor surprised me. I don't normally like to edit source (I prefer to use Amaya for HTML and SVG since it makes nice clean code and leaves me to think about content) but being able to test quick stuff easily is nice.

It's been a hard week. I'm looking forward to relaxing a little (in part by working on some of the cool stuff for Opera 10 )

We have been working on the accesskey implementation in Opera. Accesskeys are nice things for people who find it hard to drive the computer - for example people with various kinds of "motor disabilities". Parkinsons's disease, cerebral palsy, various types of paralysis, repetitive strain injuries, etc.

The way people use them in a web page is to declare an accesskey for a link or control. For example

<a href="http://my.opera.com/chaals" accesskey="c">My Blog</a>

is a bit of HTML that makes a link to my blog, and gives it the accesskey "c". Somehow, this is then supposed to help you get to that link extra quickly - instead of having to go through the entire list of links using q/a keys (or tab, and also have to stop at form controls and other stuff, if you use another browser), you can get straight there.

The problem is that Internet Explorer followed a "helpful" suggestion added in the W3C specification, to use "alt" plus the character as a way of getting there, and "cmd" (the squiggly thing also called apple) on macintosh. Netscape followed them, and Mozilla followed Netscape.

Any mac user will tell you that cmd-c is copy, on any mac application in any situation any time. Except (perhaps) on my page. Similarly, if I used the accesskey "f", anyone knows that on windows alt-f opens the file menu - one of the most basic functions of the Windows user interface.

Well, Opera solved that some years ago. Instead of having to guess whether standard shortcuts were being overridden, there is a key to trigger accesskey mode. You press it, and the next key is treated as the accesskey. By default it is shift-esc which is perhaps not the easiest one, but I remap it (preferences -> advanced -> keyboard shortcuts) to "." since I don't use that.

So now I just press ". c" to get to my page. But wait! How do I know?

Well, in all browsers except iCab, until recently, there is no way to find out. The site might mark the keys it uses, or might not.

So now we have a popup that tells you what the options are. Grab a weekly build, find a page which uses accesskeys (they are very common in UK pages such as the BBC) and press shift-escape (or whatever you configured it to).

And give us feedback. We realise that this isn't perfect yet, but I think it is now best-of-breed. (Sadly, that hasn't been a hard point to reach, which doesn't reflect well on any browser). There's more to be done on it, but a start is good.

I trust that my good friend John Foliot will have somethign to say about this by and by (he andd I have been discussing accesskeys for many years already), and maybe others. Many thanks to Petter and others for getting it going.

Opera 9 includes support for BitTorrent, a file-sharing protocol.

No, it isn't a piracy tool, except in the sense that any other technology (disc drives, photocopiers, pencil and paper) is. It's a way of moving large popular files around the Web that is more efficient than the traditional HTTP. (For small files, that only one or two people are interested, it isn't more efficient. Using the right tool for the job is a big part of technology).

The rough idea is this. You have a very large file, and thousands of people are going to want it. So you split it into bits, and as soon as someone gets a bit they share it, so you don't have to be the primary source for that bit any more.

In traditional HTTP, they each connect to your server, and get the whole file from you. If you have a limited bandwidth, or a limited nummber of connections available (and in general, you do), this means people have to wait until others are finished.

Imagine that you have a thousand page manuscript you're trying to sow to a dozen friends, and you have to photocopy the whole thing, page 1-1000, in a single copy, and take it to the first person before you can start again. And that they can't share any of it, either.

In BitTorrent, you hand out a bit to each of the people on the list, and they can re-copy that bit, hand it to others on the list, so the strain on your photocopier is reduced massively. And because people can be getting a dozen pieces at once from different places, they get it faster.

The nice thing is that a connection doesn't have the same maintenance cost as a photocopier. The cost to any person of sharing a bit of their connection is usually trivial, if any, and the processor power (you don't have to think about anything to make this happen, the machine does it for you ) really is almost free.

Obviously for a small web page, or something that only one person wants, the extra effort of splitting it up and reassembling it isn't worthwhile.

So where do you find torrents? Well, you can get one from Opera that's a video of a talk I gave recently. But if that doesn't sound very interesting (other people say it's good, but to be honest I only got it to test torrents ) you might like to look at the music and trailers from SXSW this year - lots of music and film trailers, made available by the artists.

Warning: These are big files. the film is 557MB - a CD full, one of the biggest downloads I have attempted.

On the other hand, I will be sharing it too, when I am connected.

http://torrent.ibiblio.org/ is another source for a variety of legal downloads - an efficient way to share software and other large popular files.

Like photocopiers, people probably use this to share stuff that isn't theirs, in breach of copyright. Like photocopying, please don't. If you think copyright laws suck, vote. If you think somebody should give away their copyright material, ask them too. Same goes for their car - the fact that you find their keys on their desk doesn't mean you have discoverer's rights to take their car...

One of the questions we get from time to time at Opera is "when are you going to go open source". The common answer Jon (the CEO) gives is along the lines of "when it clearly makes business sense". Which is not surprising - his legal obligation is to make sure that Opera makes money.

I don't see it happening in the next few weeks, anyway. And fundamentally it isn't a question that concerns me personally - more of a "second glass of wine after lunch on a Sunday" question. (Except this sunday I am mostly working - not even a first glass... )

But a lot of stuff at Opera is about being Open. The userJS extension mechanism, adding toolbars and menus, and many other facets of Opera are completely open, and development happens both within Opera and in the larger Opera community that was the reason my.opera began...

A couple of recent things struck me as pretty cool. The newest is weekly builds. In the run-up to launching the final release version of Opera 9 ("Merlin" as we still call it internally) we have been releasing a weekly build for windows, mac, and unix. These are not technical previews, they are not betas, they are whatever came out of the build machine on friday evening. So they might have some crashers introduced because we are testing something new and cool, they might have some normal thing disabled, or some other test. They might not be stable, but they will be the latest and greatest bleeding edge insight into what we're doing inside, as well as a quick glimpse into the life of a tester, who has to get such a build, find out what it does, and figure out a lot of things about it before the next one comes along - within a few hours, or a few days at most. So, if you have no fear, and have good backup habits, maybe you'll find the weekly builds fun.

The other cool thing is "Open the Web". We have had browser.js for a while - it's a feature that includes patches in javascript for sites whose code is bad enough that it won't normally work in a standards-compliant browser like Opera. Hallvord has written about how cool it is when people fix their sites, and he can take the patches out of browser.js, but it is a useful way to help me, the user, work on the web.

Alongside that effort, David Storey sits quietly in the office day in, day out, doing nothing but working with developers of sites that have problems, and helping them find the best fix. Users can email about broken sites or fill in a bug report on the web (for the technically minded), and they get on the list of things to be looked at, as we try and make a practical difference to the Web by helping the people who build it deal with things that cause real problems for real users.

Oh, and we have a few guys like me working on open standards, too. But that's another story...