Opera News

This week we grabbed David Storey for a talk about SVG, HTML5 and Opera

Choose Opera: Hi, David! Thanks for letting us grab you for a few minutes. Who is David Storey, and what does he do at Opera?

David: Hi there. I have a number of roles at Opera. I head up the Open the Web project, which is tasked with improving Web site and application compatibility for standards based browsers, with a particular focus on Opera of course. This means I go out talking to Web developers and companies, helping them fix issues that we are seeing. This can involve visiting the big brand names such as Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo!, to chatting with the local fishmongers in Plaquemine, Louisiana. There is a lot of travel involved going to conferences and the like, which is a great way to see the world – when I'm not stuck in a airport, hotel or conference hall.

Other than Open the Web, I'm in the Opera Developer Relations team. This is a team of Web Evangelists that promote Web standards and developer education. As part of this, I'm the Product Manager of Opera Dragonfly, our flagship developer tool, and I'm involved in two W3C Working Groups; the SVG Interest Group and the Mobile Web Best Practices.

Choose Opera: What sparked your interest in computers and the Web?

David: I guess my interest in computers came from the same place as many kids of my generation. I received a Commodore 64 one Christmas, and was totally absorbed by it, saving up my pocket money to buy the latest games cassettes. Unlike the consoles, there were only about 3 pounds a go, which was about affordable on 1 pound a week pocket money. It evolved from there and I went to college and University to study Computer Science.

Through that I was invited to apply for a internship at CERN (home of the World Wide Web), and managed to get the position. Before that I'd not done any web development; it was all C, C++, AI, Databases and the like. Being at CERN, I got to regularly talk and have lunch with the likes of Robert Cailliau, who was the co-founder of the Web itself. As well as helping me get the Web bug, Robert was the person that got me interested in the Mac. OS X was just coming out in beta at that time, and seeing a UNIX OS, that had a first class Object Orientated framework in Cocoa (based off NeXTStep - the OS that the first Web Browser was made for at Cern), and not only that but actually looked good and was useable by mere mortals , was like a light bulb going off in my head. Sure, there was not as many apps, but at Cern we made all our apps as Web apps due to the prevalence of Windows, Solaris, Linux and Mac. That was a glimpse of the future direction of computing, where native apps availability would become less important.

Choose Opera: What is your favorite feature in any Opera product?

David: From a development point of view I love being able to edit the source and reload from cache. This makes testing quick changes very easy.

Feature-wise, I have to say that would be the URL field. Without that I wouldn't get very far. Other than that Opera Link is great, as I'm always switching between different version of Opera, and Opera Mini and Mobile.

Choose Opera: And the feature you most recently discovered?

David: I'm not really a power user–even though I have a technical background, so I don't use too many features. I recently discovered in an internal build that I could switch the visual tabs to being on the side, which is incredibly useful with widescreen laptops. I guess this is cheating a bit as it was only just implemented and released in Opera 10 beta 3.

Choose Opera: We know you are one of the most passionate SVG people out there, care to explain what it is and how it will affect us?

David: I’m not sure I’m one of the most passionate people out there–you just have to look at some of the crazy things people managed to do with SVG at SVG Open but sure. SVG stands for Scaleable Vector Graphics. When we see regular images on the Web they are made up of individual pixels. You may have noticed if you zoom into image it becomes pixelated or blocky. This is because when you increase the size of the image it makes the pixels bigger. With SVG images are made up of vectors, where points are drawn via mathematics. When you zoom into the image the points are recalculated so the image is always sharp. Bitmap image formats are more suited for photographs where the image is captured in pixels, while SVG and other vector formats are more suited for things like illustrations, maps and charts.

As well as being able to draw still images using SVG, it is also possible to include animations. As such, it is often seen as the open competitor to vendor specific technologies like Flash or Silverlight. One advantage SVG has is that it can be integrated with the whole Open Web stack, such as styling it with CSS, adding behaviour with JavaScript, incorporating (X)HTML, or transforming it with XSLT for example. A developer can reuse a lot of skills they already have, and you can use specific technologies for what they are good at.

SVG is already affecting us somewhat, in that it is used in a surprising number of places. A lot of map solutions use it such as Google and Bing Maps, and Google use it in a number of their sites, such as the drawing tool in Google Docs. One issue SVG has with reaching mainstream acceptance is the lack of support in Internet Explorer. However mainstream sites like the Washington Post are already using SVG via JavaScript libraries like RaphaëlJS. Brad Neuberg from Google also recently announced SVGWeb which brings SVG to IE via a Flash shim. A developer just needs to add one JavaScript link into their page and can then use SVG as if it was natively supported. There was also some IE representatives at SVG Open, so who knows, maybe we will have some sort of SVG support in IE9.

One benefit end users will see when SVG takes off is that graphics will scale and zoom. This is becoming more important as we move to mobile and devices such as TV with high resolution screens and zoom based interfaces. SVG also allows much more fancy effects than we are used to with HTML pages, such as animations, text on a path, rotated text, filters and so on. The Web can potentially become a more interactive experience. There can of course be dangers if designers and developers over do it, like can often be seen on full Flash based sites, where it slows the users down as the navigation animates onto the screen for instance. There should also be increased availability as a it is a part of the core of the browser, so can exist everywhere that the browser is used. With plug-ins it depends if the plug-in vendor has ported the plug-in to the hardware the browser runs on, and if there is a licence agreement in place.

Choose Opera: What about HTML 5? When will we see <audio> and <video> in Opera?

David: Opera is committed to both Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis for video and audio respectively. These will not only work in HTML 5 but also SVG 1.2, which also includes video and audio elements. We chose Ogg as they are open codecs that don't require a licence fee to deliver to the range of platforms Opera ships on. Mozilla and Google put their stake in the ground with Ogg. Work is on going at Opera and we hope to ship it in the next public version of Opera desktop that includes a Presto upgrade. This will be Presto 2.4, and includes a lot of other niceties such as CSS 3 Backgrounds and Borders (yes, finally border-radius or rounded corners!), CSS transitions and transforms, and a lot more. Its shaping up to be a really nice release as far as developers are concerned. I can't comment on when this will be released but expect a Labs or Alpha/Beta release for developers to test the new features out before it goes final.