Slightly ajar

My second @Media is now over, and I'm back at Opera HQ. As always, it was fun to meet old and new friends that we always bump into at these events. There was many familiar faces at @Media, although with there now being a @Media in San Francisco, it felt like the crowd was maybe a bit less cosmopolitan. When Andy Clarke asked in his session who was from the UK then Europe it seemed to be most of the room, while last year I felt like I met a few more Americans and such.

Thoughts on the event

Our CTO, Håkon Wium Lie gave an interesting speach, and a call to arms to adopt the video element using none patented codecs such as Ogg Theora. I've heard good feedback from the talk, such as from Peter Gasston of CSS3.info, and I think it was one of the best presentations I've seen him give. He presented in Opera Show, which is using the projection mode of CSS in Opera to make the browser used paged media. With CSS, HTML, Javascript, SVG, plug-ins and potentially the video and audio elements from HTML5 at your disposal, the browser can be a powserful presentational platform. As the slideshow is basically a web page, the slides are available to anyone with a browser.

My name came up in the Hot Topics session, in regards to how browsers are listening and designers can report issues to me. I'd like to re-enforce this as I think it is an important point. We want to create as little problems as possible for designers and developers, so if there are any major (or minor) bugs in Opera that are causing you problems, please come to me and we'll look into fixing them. If you have a test case for the issue that is even better. The IE team get a lot of suggestions on what fixes developers want, and it would be helpful for us if we get the same.

I was talking to Andy Budd at the conference party, and his idea of a CSS 2.2 came up in the questions to Håkon. I personally think it is a good idea and it is getting some traction. I'm not sure it should be called CSS2.2 as CSS3 is already very modularised, but the naming is irrelevant. I'd like to see the CSS3 that has been implemented, such as all the selectors and the things Dave Hyatt has been working on adding to Safari (border-radius, multiple background images etc.) and making them into a common baseline that all browsers such concentrate on adding in the near term.

Another thing Andy mentioned, and a few others such as Dan Cederholm (whom i also had an interesting conversation with) brought up, was being worried by HTML5 due to adding the Font element back to the spec, and how this is a bad message to send out to developers. I agree here, but I understand why it is there. When we are working on compatibility at Opera, we see sites that still use these elements that shouldn't be used today, and when there are errors the fallbacks are often different between browsers. The people writing the spec are trying to define the error conditions of all these elements, so that user agent implementers know how to behave in a cross browser compatible way. Now this is great for browser implementers as we can hold a spec us and say things should behave as it says and we will behave just like the other browsers, but it is bad for designers reading the spec, as it pollutes it with bad mark-up that shouldn't be used and makes the spec more complex to read. It is more work, but I think there should probably be two specs. A full version for the browser manufacturers, and an abridged version for developers, that only contains the recommended elements and doesn't include all the error conditions. That way both sides will win.

Somewhat related, on the compatibility front, my third name drop of the conference was when Molly mentioned the work we were looking to do in regards to sharing test cases between browsers through a trusted third party. If we can pull this off then it will be another strong weapon to enabling browsers to be as compatible with each other as possible, and removing the frustration developers have when browsers act differently. It is time that browsers compete on quality and features and not on standards.

Dan Cederholm's talk was very interesting, and inspiring, and the the topic of Microformats came up again. Opera recently added Microformats to some of its sites, and it is something we are very interested in. Andy Clarke's talk was as inspiring and funny as usual. The topic was related to web design around the globe, and as I work with web sites from every corner of the web. He mentioned web sites in the far east having more cartoony feel, and that is certainly something I've noticed while working on Korean sites. Our Japanese site is translated in house at the Japanese office, so it is certainly something we could look into localising the style and interaction to see if it makes sense. We have over forty nationalities working for Opera, so we have the local experience to look into this more closely.

On thing Joe Clark hi-lighted in his session was the use of text resizing and zooming in different browsers, mentioning Opera as having one of the best implementations. It was good to see our accessibility support getting noticed, and we are hard at work improving our accessibility across the board for future versions. working with screen readers is an important part of this. Opera takes accessibility very seriously. A couple of developments could make our zooming support even better in the future. The first, which I've mentioned previously on this blog, is that internal versions of Opera (and the Nintendo Wii) support SVG as a background image in CSS. This allows scaleable decorative images to be added to a design, which look great no matter how much the user zooms in. The second is the ability to import fonts through CSS. Håkon predicted that we would see support for this with-in a year. If this comes true, then there will be less need to use images instead of real text for headlines and such. Text of course scales much better than bitmap images.

There was a presentation by Jeremy Keith on Bullet Proof Ajax. It was very clear that much of what he talked about that is primarily for accessibility reasons, is also perfect for the mobile web. I think this is a message that should be put across more, and can be an area that people in the accessibly field can take their skill sets across to. One good example of this is Opera Mini, which uses the Opera rendering engine, but due to the client server architecture where everything is rendered on the server and sent as a compressed binary, it can't handle Ajax or some JavaScript like it's big brother Opera Mobile. It isn't a binary choice as it does support some JavaScript, just as screen readers also do. Using Hijax means that Opera Mini will get the fallbacks that enable it to work. Twitter was an example of a site that broke in Mini due to using Ajax to submit posts. We asked them to do capability detection to send a regular form post if xmlHttpRequest isn't supported, and now it works brilliantly in Mini.

@Media was the last major none MS specific conference that Molly will be presenting at. She pre-announced this, but it was more of a shock that Joe Clark also announced he would retire from working in the web accessibility field. I'm not fully sure if this means he will stop presenting at conferences on web standards in general. Of course, both will be sorely missed. The web conference world may be a little less contriversial without them both. It seems like it is a time of change on the circuit. But as they say, the Queen is dead, long live the Queen. It is maybe an exciting time, where some fresh faces can make a name for themselves, and the mantle can be passed. I really wanted to see Jeremy Keith's presentation, so I sadly missed Hannah Donovan's session with Simon Willison, but by all accounts it was fantastic. It's great to see new people stepping up to the mike and sharing their knowledge. Simon of course has been around for a while now, but I haven't seen him prsent a session too many times in the past. His OpenID presentation at XTech was fantastic as well. John Hicks also marked his session speaking debut at @Media. A speaker I'd like to see more of is Ian Forrester of BBC Backstage, who I've never seen give a full presentation, but was fantastic and very witty when doing the 20x20 lightning talks at XTech.