Slightly ajar

Happy new year everyone. May 2008 be a year when there is great progress with web standards such as CSS3 and HTML5, where we make great strides with cross browser compatibility and getting authors to use accepted standards, and maybe even Opera upgrading to a new bug tracking system (ok, world peace may come before the last one ).

It's my aim to eradicate the best viewed in… message. A relic of the last browser wars, which lingers in ever some of the most high profile places. Google Docs was the latest high profile site to remove theirs. Hopefully Spreadsheets and Presently will give us a late Christmas gift, along with the full version of Microsoft Windows Live Hotmail (or whatever it is called these days).

2008 should be a great year for Opera. Mini is going from strength to strength as the most popular Mobile browser, even after all the competitors hype. Opera Mobile is looking exciting and should move over to Core 2 in '08. Kestrel (9.5) is coming along nicely and will no doubt be out some time in the not too distant future.

The advancement and maturation of Core 2 is looking very promising. It is only getting faster, leaner, more secure and more standards compliant. I truly believe it is industry leading in all those areas. I often think of it like a hand tuned sports engine, and the jewel in Opera's crown. I'm personally following the progress of CSS3 closely, and as these specs improve, I expect to see our support improve even further than it is now. Web Fonts is one such are that clearly interests our CTO. Our HTML5 support is also very good, and something that isn't noticed too much. I'd advise anyone that is interested in the future of the web to take some of our HTML5 features for a spin. Web Forms and Server-Sent Events are a couple of things I've mentioned before that don't need too much explanation before realising how useful they can be. I'm also looking forward to our Mac build of our labs release of Opera with Video and Audio support in both HTML and SVG.

It is no end of year message without a bold prediction. I predicted this year would be the year mobile took off, and that has been true to some extent. Opera mini has improved greatly, and its market take up, with very little promotion or advertising, has been remarkable. The was also a little Apple device that took the world (USA) by storm. I'll go out on a limb and say this year could be the one where SVG gets the push it needs and starts making inroads. Now for this to happen it needs industry wide implementation. Again, opera has industry leading support. Unfortunately we don't have the market share to push these things. Mozilla have support in their Firefox browser, but I'm nt sure how far they've advanced recently. Apple has support in Safari 3, and I don't think it will be too long before they follow Opera and have it working within CSS. The cog that is missing, is of course IE. I've no idea if they have added any sort of support in IE8, and this is one of the required pieces, especially with Adobe killing their plug-in once it wasn't strategically beneficial to them. One can probably implement SVG through Silverlight, although this wont help in the area which I find SVG the most useful; as a CSS background image. There is always ways to do rasterisation on the server though.

I don't think '08 will be a time when SVG rivals flash. The tools to create complex animated interfaces in SVG are just not there. And lets face it, most people won't want to do that by hand. But for vector style still images it is ideal. For simple shapes, symbols, gradients, translations and reflections it is ideal. Most of the aforementioned simple things, it is easy to do it by hand. I learnt those basics in a few hours hard study. For more complex images, the typical tool of graphic artists can be used, Adobe Illustrator. It doesn't produce the best output in the world, but at least it does export to SVG. From there the image can be kept as a vector for browsers that support it, and changed to a PNG for those that don't. There are great benefits, such as scriptibility via the DOM, scaleability (especially now we are slowly moving to resolution independence and browsers are catching up to Opera with the introduction of full page zooming instead of just text zoom), and page weight (Don't forget that SVG can be zipped and served as SVGZ for even further size reductions). page weight is getting less important due to the proliferation of broadband, but there are still many areas where dial up is relied on, saving server bandwidth is also still a great plus on your pocket. The mobilisation of the web also means we have to think about those on a slow connection, as anyone that has used AT&T Edge will testify.

I hope you all have a great new year, and have great celebrations over the next hour, or whenever it is your new year. The life of a web opener is never done, so I'm off to get some work done. I'll speak to you next year.