Eclectic Brain Salad

Hi folks, hope you are all well, and not too bored that this next blog post has taken so long. The title is a bit contrived, and is actually an amalgamation of the two things I was going to tell you about. Things have been pretty busy at Opera lately!

First of all, we've got another exciting new beta release of Kestrel, the new Opera desktop browser - beta 2, to be exact. It's got some exciting new additions, such as support for full CSS3 selectors and hsl, support for MathML, further speed optimizations, support for HTML5's getElementsByClassName, and improved synchronization of bookmarks speed dial sites and other settings through Opera Link. Download it and play around.

Next, I've published a very interesting article on dev.opera.com written by the delectable Brothercake, called Stop using Ajax! This article comments on how Ajax can do amazing things, but is often used gratuitously and unnecessarily, at the expense of accessibility. Cake makes a great argument here, and I think this should act as a wake up call to any developer to just think about what they are doing a bit more carefully, and take care that their application functionality doesn't end up locking out significant parts of their target audience.

With Future of Mobile and a trip to the land of the Opera vikings behind me, I focused (in a zen, Yoda meets Gandhi kind of style) on my next prize - Patrick Griffiths and co's new Ajax focussed conference. It was interesting to see this, as I was kind of under the impression that the Ajax craze had died and gone to heaven a little while ago, and people were now focusing on actual real functionality as opposed to just buzzwords...but it seems I was wrong - I should have guessed after reading uncov ardently for the last few weeks.* ;-)

*Ok, I was feeling in a cynical mood today, and I'd just like to state that this should in no way reflect on the actual conference itself - it was really cool, and it is good to see some people really concentrating on fixing the issues we have with Ajax...but there are still some people that care more about the buzzwords and the zippy effects than the actual functionality and usability.

There was a lot of great content in this conference, and it seemed very nicely organized - what follows is a round up of the talks.

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