Is this thing on?

I am interested in the concept of employee ownership, and early on while working for Opera I set a goal of a 1/1000 ownership. I never quite reached that goal, the rest of the world has more money than I do and I have not been willing to borrow money to invest in shares, but still I am more economically exposed to the fortunes of Opera Software than anything else I own. So when Opera posted excellent results, the market reaction made me more paper money in a day than I can expect to make in real money in this year. ;cheers: I'd say.

This 17% rise in a single day and a similar fall earlier when a disappointing result was posted is fair enough, this can be seen as a reaction to real performance by Opera, but most share price movements have not been a result of changes in Opera's profitabilities or potential. My experience of Opera Software is as a serious longterm company, my experience of Oslo Stock Exchange (OSE), where Opera is listed, is the very opposite. OSE has had a terrible reputation in the past, and there is no indication that it is any better in the present. In my view OSE has been, is, and will be gamed, and there is not much to lead you to believe that the Norwegian government will apply the same rules of transparency to it as it does to itself. OSE is no more trustworthy than most emerging market bourses.

As an Opera employee I reflected that it was probably possible to make (or lose) more money on short-trading the Opera stock than what it would be as an employee. Due to insider trader consideration short term trading was inconvenient to say the least, but it was pretty obvious that the market had little understanding of the consequences of an event, reacting strongly to an inconsequential event and ignoring an important one. It was also a useful lesson in why not to invest in the company you are working for, not so much due to spreading risk as due to the delay in buyng/selling stock.

I could go into trading, at least on a hobby basis. Two things hold me back, high transaction costs and a distrust of OSE. That said, longer term fundamentals always matter, some of the time.

That should more properly be "having left Opera", as I am no longer an Opera employee, but that doesn't work as well as a title. There is nothing dramatic about the decision, and I think Opera is an excellent employer, but I had been at Opera for seven and a half years and that was long enough.

Much of my work at Opera has been with standards, and standards don't matter. Having standards does, but as long as they are reasonably sane it doesn't matter what they are. The latest standards debacle in Norway wasn't related to browsers but with office products, word processors and the like, with the competing standards called ODF and OOXML.

ODF is not a good standard. You can read through the entire spec and will find nothing clever there. Anything ODF can do HTML5 can do better. Add cursor position to HTML5 and it could have been called ODF 2.0. What it has going for it is the absence of bad. Microsoft makes good standards, much of the time. OOXML is not one of those times, what it is lacking is the absence of bad. Could it be fixed? Probably, but to me it isn't worth it.

As for Web standards I think it should be an optional for Opera. Opera should encourage the presence of standards, and follow them unless they are bad, but it shouldn't necessarily form them. Opera should do what makes its users happy.

Opera Mini makes me happy. It lets me do things I couldn't do before. This entry was intended to be typed in on Opera Mini while I was on the move, but in the end it was typed in on a PC. It wasn't written in Opera Mini because Opera Mini isn't data loss safe, without copy&paste or save I can easily lose what I write, and data loss does not make me happy.

Being unemployed makes me happy as well, for now anyway. It's been a long while since the last time, as the last few times I changed jobs I went directly from one to the next. It is almost the same elated feeling as being homeless. I haven't actually been homeless in the sense that I own one flat and rent another, but I have adapted to a mobile lifestyle and from time to time I've not known where I will spend the next night and that is a strong feeling of freedom (until nightfall) — I can go whereever I want. I have used to claim that the bag in my one hand is my office, containing my laptop and other work stuff, and the bag in my other hand is my home, containing clothes and other private stuff. For now I can move with one bag less.

The better TV points to an entry I came across, Wii trumps Apple TV

This is the first time users can easily browse, find and watch YouTube videos right from their living room couch.

Alexis Gentry heard this statement yesterday when Apple CEO Steve Jobs formally announced the Apple TV product, which would allow users to find their favorite YouTube videos, pay a tiny fee, and stream them to watch on their television. She then thought something to the effect of, “Having I been doing that already?”

Back in December, Opera launched the trial version of their internet browser for the Wii. Since then, Wii owners have been casually watching YouTube videos from their couches - and for free.

Gloating aside, there's an article I'd recommend if you are interested in how your web site will work with Wii, Making Wii-friendly pages. From working with phones and similar devices it is interesting how the Wii, much more powerful than any phone, shares some of the characteristics of a phone, some of the characteristics of a PC, and some unique characteristics of its own. And I'm not just talking about the Wii wand.

1995 was the year Mobile SVG arrived, and 1996 was the year Mobile SVG got lost. Before 2005 SVG was used in a few niches, "semantic graphics" like map applications with a limited number of users but really nothing to talk about. In 2005 on the other hand the phone world showed interest in SVG, and while other SVG events happened like the first public alpha implementation of SVG in Opera and Firefox, and pre-alpha in Safari, the Canvas spec, and ominously the Merger of Macromedia and Adobe, everything newsworthy was related to phones.

Not so 1996. The phones were set to mute, and SVG hit the Web. Behind the scenes in 1995 and much more publicly in 1996 there were cultural and technical conflicts with other Web formats, particularly CSS and the new Canvas, with Adobe Flash and Microsoft in the background. This year Opera started to matter in the SVG world as the first useful integrated SVG browser with the release of Opera 9, with the promise of Firefox and Safari. The SVG 1.2 specification reached Candidate Recommendation, being both too early and too late.

The bomb, though expected by the people in the know, was Adobe's discontinuation of its SVG viewer plug-in, the dominant SVG viewer. It was the way to show SVG in any browser (which for most users means the Internet Explorer browser), and though as Adobe had paid good money to buy Flash, the terms struck everyone as stunningly harsh, if not directly hostile to SVG: By the first announcement the plug-in would be gone and unavailable by the end of this year. Later Adobe relented giving the plug-in a longer lease of life, you can download the unsupported plus-in next year too. This was obviously taken as bad news, but personally I think this is advantageous in the long run, much like when AOL Netscape ceased ownership of Mozilla. This was commonly seen as the end of Mozilla, but I thought it was more likely to be the beginning and was proven right. Sugar daddies are only advantageous to a point. Worse than the loss of ASV is that authoring products like Illustrator are unlikely to provide useful SVG support.

Symbolic, but still, the year ended with good news for SVG. By Christmas the first game console, and a hugely popular at that, supporting SVG was released through the Opera beta for Nintendo Wii. I have been sceptical about how useful SVG really is for phones, game consoles seems a better match.

What about this year? I expect 2007 to be a fairly quiet year. Browser support will improve incrementally, the work with finding a replacement for Adobe SVG Viewer will continue. An unknown is whether Microsoft will provide SVG support one way or another, but I don't expect they will. We have begun adding SVG articles on our developer site, and fundamentally developer support is the make or break for SVG. But that is more a challenge for 2008 than for 2007.

I am using a fairly fresh install of Opera right now, with more default settings than I normally would use. One of these was the PDF file handling, like with other browsers (at least for Windows) Opera uses the Adobe Acrobat plugin by default. I do read quite a few PDFs, particularly work-related, and Acrobat is a fine program, but I really don't like the plugin. In theory integrating PDF files with the browser sounds good, but it takes away my control over my browsing environment, for instance I can't go back with Z (or a mouse gesture), and the plugin can't do all what the full Acrobat program can do either.

Fortunately this isn't hard to fix. What you need to do is to change the PDF settings.

1. Open Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Download (Ctrl+F12,D should do it)
   
2. Type PDF in the Quick Find field, application/pdf will show.
   
3. Hit the Edit button
   
4. Change the option to Open with default application
   

In some cases you might want to open with another program than the default. Personally I prefer, instead of just opening the PDFs, to store them in a particular directory and then open them. That will mean that junk files will accumulate in that directory as all PDF files will be saved there, but I don't read much junk PDF anyway, so cleaning up the directory isn't that much of a challenge.

Opera 9.0 Beta is now available for download. For those of you who have regularly tested the 9.0 previews and weeklies the difference from those isn't that great (except in stability), but from 8.5 it is huge. There are new features and advances in standards. One that has truly progressed since 8.5 is SVG. While we don't have complete SVG Basic support yet, with full styling and scripting, we are close. Getting here has been a long journey.

The first version of SVG, SVG 1.0, became a W3C Recommendation in September 2001. We had an interest in SVG even earlier, but the sheer size of the specification made us decide against it, it was hard to justify putting so much effort into a format that was going to need years to get a foothold in the market. We had done it with PNG before, but that was easy. The arrival of the Adobe plug-in decided the matter, why should we spend our remaining resources on SVG when there was a viable alternative?

We weren't looking for a Flash competitor, which seemed to be Adobe's main drive until they bought Flash several years later. It definitely wasn't to make a Purity of Essence markup language not sullied by the real world like the HTML harlot – many working group members at that time were deeply hostile to the Web. The mobile companies were the next to turn on to SVG, and while there are clear benefits with SVG on phones, the gains can be even larger on a larger screen.

We saw a vector graphics markup language as an adjunct to HTML, together they would become more than they were separately. Each language could provide what the other one could not. HTML augmented with CSS could do both text, layout, hypertext, semantics and more. But it couldn't do the simplest illustrations (except through brutal hacks), or graphs, or fancy boxes or headlines. As HTML was a W3C language and SVG was a W3C language you would have expected that these two were well integrated, that you could easily use one to enhance the other.

That certainly isn't the case and this is a tremendous unfulfilled promise. It isn't all bad, the two languages do integrate with each other after a fashion. They can be looked at as feuding siblings, having them in the same room will cause torment, but they are family. Hopefully some years from now they will both grow up.

How did it get to this state? One reason was attitude, another was timing, a third the participants. The way W3C works may also have had an influence. Many at the time believed that the Web was fundamentally broken, that it was better to have a fresh start. If the Web was broken, what was the point in integrating with it? Whenever SVG integrated with other specs, it was always to other new and still largely unused specifications. SVG wasn't to enhance the Web, it was to replace it. This was less ridiculous than it might seem now. The Web was war-torn and not in a very presentable state. To this day our Open the Web team is working on, or rather against, the Web of 1999.

The timing was unlucky too. HTML 4 was done when SVG started, and in the following years that group was preoccupied on reengineering HTML to be on top of XML instead of (ostensibly) on SGML. In any case the climate for HTML, W3C's greatest hit, was chilly. There also seemed to be an implicit W3C assumption that XML made document integration automatic, and then that XML Namespaces would do so.

For one reason or another the browser makers were not involved. Microsoft, that had an SVG precursor in the VML format, has just won the Browser Wars and could go back to sleep for another half decade. Netscape was busy changing its skin to Mozilla. We were turning our CSS browser into a DOM and CSS browser and, more hidden from view, a browser that could thrive in the most cramped devices. The actual SVG implementors didn't have any great interest in Web integration, for them this was just extra complexity with no direct benefit.

We might have been one of those implementors. In the summer of 2002, mere months after SVG 1.0 was published, our lead SVG developer held an internal demo of a prototype SVG implementation that included the iconic SVG image of the time, the SVG tiger, looking the same way then as it does now. A bare-bones SVG feature set, much smaller than the extended SVG 1.1 Tiny we released in Opera 8, could have been a part of Opera 7. It would have been scalable vector graphics later to be animated, styleable, and scriptable, but not much more. But the great migration towards Presto had started, SVG had to wait. Further on there was a repeat of the Adobe plug-in story, as Ikivo made a great SVG Tiny implementation that covered our phone needs if not our cross-platform needs.

Had it made any difference if we had given higher priority to SVG? For the standards, probably not. The odds were against it at the time, and we had little time to spare for W3C work. It might have increased the browser attention to SVG, but none would likely have come up with an actual implementation faster anyway.

Web developers might have caught on to SVG a little earlier, but they would have been even more frustrated with SVG than they were with HTML+CSS. Today Opera 8 (but not Opera 9) suffers from what I see as a mistake in the specification: If there is anything in SVG a browser doesn't recognize, it is not allowed to show anything at all. For a hardcore graphics SVG implementation, like the one we were contemplating, that would in practice mean that unless the SVG was specifically made for Opera, we would not have been able to show it.

Another and much larger problem is that even with this rule, which was made with the intent to make different implementations interoperable, the existing SVG products today aren't really compatible. We will eventually get this right, but it will take years of slog (déjà vu for any CSS enthusiast).

When the SVG world and the Web world eventually did collide, that meeting was often acrimonious. It probably was unavoidable. While there was ideology on both sides to be dealt with, SVG as a standard needed some years on its own to find its standing. HTML, CSS, and DOM is today a fairly harmonious trinity, but that was not the case at the beginning.

Early on Netscape had annexed HTML, CSS came from W3C and got its first real implementation in Opera, and while Netscape came up with JavaScript, Microsoft trumped it with a superior and more popular DOM. Neutral ground W3C DOM (which is more similar to the MS DOM), while formally the standard DOM created by Microsoft and Netscape together, wasn't really supported by either browser. Mozilla was the first browser to support W3C DOM, followed a few years later by Opera, Konqueror, and most recently iCab. Standards are the first casualty in browser wars, and it took a decade to mend them. But during all this hammering something else happened, the three specs began to fit.

Fitting HTML and SVG the same way should hopefully mean less banging, and the signs are that they are slowly melding, and people from both camps are seing the mutual benefits (and, as many of us are commercial, the business cases). What is more intimidating is that this is going to be the easy part. Uniting HTML and SVG is a bit like uniting magnetism and electicity, there are other forces less mallable to the theory of the Grand Unified W3C.

Quick note from a hotel reception in Prague, a couple hours before after the second preview of Opera 9 and labs.opera.com launched and a couple hours before my flight to Oslo will do the same. The preview offer all the goodies like native search editors, BitTorrent, and of course Widgets. But I wanted to point out an Opera 7 feature that we knew wasn't yet up to its full potential, namely User Style Sheets. We are not quite there yet, but we are closing in on it (as will undoubtedly the airport gates if I don't get going).

There is something bombastic about round numbers. Opera Software just celebrated 10, a long time in Internet years. Half that time I have been working here, while Opera in turn has been around almost half my Internet life, which has been close to half the fifty-sixty years lifetime I expect the Internet to have as a project. It will garner as much interest to speak about the Net in the 2020s as it would be to speak of electricity today.

A decade ago Opera was this ridiculously obscure Telenor based browser that no sane observer, myself included, would give a fighting chance to survive a the decade, let alone come into the position we are in today.

When I started five years ago Opera was in transition. Like today Opera was growing fast. In 2000 we quadrupled in size, compared to a doubling in 2005. The goals were to turn Opera into a truly platform-independent product and complete the Opera 4 (codenamed Elektra) migration. While the offices were stacked with an amazing array of multicultural machines and gadgets, they still are, in truth the Opera versions were largely Windows ports and remained so until Opera 7. We were committed to CSS and flexible design at the time the dinosaurs ruled the web.

But the excitement was around a shh! product we were to make for this large to-be-unnamed company in Finland. While the Communicator 9210i was a minor product by today's standards, it was the harbinger of phones to come. And then the lean years came.

The bubble of temporal insanity had to burst. While it didn't affect us directly our customers found themselves short of money, and projects started to disappear. We rode this out, expecting them to return eventually as they did, thanks to our users buying Opera licences. The turnaround happened not long after Opera 7. We got more customers, many more users, and IE started to look vulnerable.

There is no guarantee there will be an Opera Software ten years from now. But we are in a vastly better placed to make a difference than ten years ago. The spunk, the skill, and the ideas are there as before but now we have more just a handful of people to take advantage of them. Five years from now we will know how well we did succeed.

Opera phones, including my Sony-Ericsson P800, use the handheld media type allowing the page designer to make a customised style sheet for phones. If there is no handheld style sheet Small-screen rendering is used instead.

But what if a handheld style sheet is provided, but it is bad for you? On this phone, using the fairly old 6.31 version, you are stuck with what you have got. There aren't many sites yet that make handheld versions, but we do. www.opera.com has an excellent style sheet, while the My Opera forums have a bad one (this will change) including setting display:none on information you need.

And here is the tip: Toggle the Edit > Fit to screen option. The first time SSR is overridden by the handheld style sheet, but the second time the handheld style sheet is ignored and SSR is applied. This was not intended but has proven fortuitous.