Hallvord R. M. Steen

Opera given cold shoulder by CSS guru

Thursday, 28. July 2005, 23:52:06

This is just sad. Eric Meyer is a person I have tons of respect for, I have admired his CSS as well as his writing for years. Though I think I never commented on his blog and he most likely never heard of me I have been sad for his mother's death and happy for his baby's birth. Such one-way, long-distance, yet personal relationships with someone who writes to share his skills and emotions is a core feature of the web.

So I'm very sad that version 1.1 of his S5 slideshow toolset still uses browser sniffing to exclude Opera from some of the widgets he enhances the slideshow with for other browsers.

if (!isOp) createControls();

Oh sure, that is the JavaScript equivalent of a cold shoulder.

As for calling OperaShow "highly browser centric", well is it somehow Opera's fault that Mozilla coders not yet have gotten around to implementing the media: projection goodies from the CSS spec? Eric makes it sound like a proprietary thing though it is all about supporting some of the rarely implemented parts of the open CSS specification. Go vote for some Bugzilla bugs if you want cross-browser compatibility...

document.all offers another IE quirkWhat to do if you find a security problem in your browser

Comments

Lee_Harvey # 28. July 2005, 23:52

That makes one of his Summary statements highly suspect...

"With minimal scripting, we have recreated and improved upon a (currently) browser-specific technology, making it cross-browser in the process"

We can take issue with the phrases "improved upon" and "making it cross-browser", since the presentation clearly wasn't superior to some Opera[-centric] Show presentations I've seen,nor did it behave the same across multiple browsers -- far from it.

However, giving Eric the benefit of the doubt, he may have simply been pressed for time, and perhaps slapped the S5 slideshow together without much feedback from others. Let's just hope an updated version appears in the future.

Of course, we could sprinkle a nice dose of User JavaScript now to fix some of his misguided codings. Oh well...

matija # 28. July 2005, 23:52

There really is no reason for intentionally discriminating Opera and blatantly lying about S5 being cross-browser-compatible.

MarkSchenk # 28. July 2005, 23:52

I would like to add something in defense of Eric Meyer's decision. Although I disagree with his complete disabling of the new features in S5, it is trickier than one might think at first glance to combine scripting and Opera's in-built OperaShow features. So, some of his new features will not work properly in Opera anyway.

He has also made sure that the presentation format falls back to an Opera Show compatible file. So, the presentation will work in Opera as well, but without some of the new features.

Some of his additions are also available in the Opera Show Generator. And oh yeah, because he uses the metadata, you can also use UserJS to enable the new features in Opera if one would wish to do so.

matija # 28. July 2005, 23:52

... it doesn't look to me that way.

When I clicked on the demo tutorial, I got just a bunch of almost-unstyled HTML in Opera.

"OK," I thought, "this is just a description. There's surely a real link somewhere."

Read. Scroll. Nothing. Go back.

Am I an idiot?

Let's try another browser; oh, right, it works. I need to press F11 in Opera, which I won't, because that puts me in full-screen mode.

MarkSchenk # 28. July 2005, 23:52

Well, that's the entire point of it: Opera's full-screen mode is projection mode, so if you want to see a presentation in Opera you will have to press F11.

Opera's handling of media types distinguishes it from the other browsers, because in Opera you can have different stylings for screen, projection, print, etc. while S5 emulates a projection for other browsers.

This also makes it slightly more tricky to write cross-browser presentation scripts, including Opera because it changes media type. I still applaud the fact that the presentation falls back to a standard Operashow, but I agree a bit more styling for the 'screen' version of the presentationwould have been nice.

collisionebend # 28. July 2005, 23:52

Eric explained his process <a href="http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2005/07/29/opera-and-s5-11/">here</a>.

I have seen Eric give talks -- while he was still an employee of Netscape -- and use Opera Slide Show as his CSS/Standards presentations. Ooohs and ahhs always followed when, at the end, he'd hit F11 and show that he was really using Opera and a HTML/CSS-based page for his presentation rather than a PowerPoint ap!

I know Eric. I know why he used what he did to create what he did. He didn't purposely exclude Opera users. He never would.

Please *read* his post: he's asking for more users to help so that a program BASED ON OPERA SLIDE SHOW will *still* work in Opera.

If you can, please help; but if all you can do is complain, well... that says a lot about you, doesn't it?

Effovex # 28. July 2005, 23:52

<a href="http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2005/07/29/opera-and-s5-11/">In his answer in his blog</a>

hallvors # 28. July 2005, 23:52

Some of the comments to this post were way more loud than my post. I appreciate the OperaShow compatibility and the general cross-browser usability he has managed to keep. Actually I might not even have posted this if I could have foreseen that someone would call Eric a liar in the comments.

I hope I have time to take up his challenge and tweak S5 to give Opera the same features as the other browsers get (if anyone else want to contribute feel free to get in touch!).