Is this thing on?

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.

By the end of last year one long-standing competitor to Opera ceased to develop its browsing engine. No, I am not thinking of Netscape, that browser was dead when it was bought by AOL, but an old Opera favourite, iCab. From now on iCab will use WebKit as the engine, in effect turning it into a WebKit skin, like OmniWeb before it. This is more sad and nostalgic, OmniWeb was always about the UI anyway, while iCab showed that two skilled and dedicated programmers could compete in making a browser that (some) people actually wanted to use.

This is not to say that it wasn't a sensible, rational, and reasonable business decision. iCab can prosper more easily now that as tiny team can focus on the one thing closest to their users, and leave site compatibility to the much larger group of WebKit developers and evangelists. My next will be on them. However, this leaves the choice on the Mac platform to three, WebKit (Safari, OmniWeb, and now iCab), Gecko (primarily Firefox, but also Camino and others), and Presto (Opera). In general the trend on any operating system is less choice, not more, and this trend is likely to continue. There is unlikely to be a radical new browsing engine in 2008 or in 2009, the choice is instead going to be among the existing ones.

I got a well-appreciated birthday gift from myself a few days ago, the Rome series 1 DVDs. The second, and probably last season, will air in a few days. The time slice covered by this TV series will thus (assumedly) be from the fall of Gaul to the preeminence of the first Roman Emperor. A small gripe is why does it always have to be Caesar and Augustus, and not for instance the republic a couple centuries earlier.

While the backdrop story is one often told and retold, the historical characters are not the stars in the series, but the city of Rome itself. This fictional account of the end of the Republic, and history is always fictional, is the best one I've seen so far. Given the high cost and usually moderate income from historical soaps, dramas, and documentaries, it is likely to remain so for some time to come. The creators have said that current Calcutta, err Kolkata, has been an inspiration for the recreation of the Rome as was, and the city is as believable as the story is enjoyable.

17 years ago, in a Friday November 17 far far away, the seminal event for the soon-to-become Velvet Revolution happened. The event itself, a sanctioned student demonstration ostensibly celebrating a martyr against the Nazi invasion 50 years earlier, mattered less than its aftermath: a fairly brutal police repression, augmented by a staged death by a secret police agent.

To my then jaded eyes, the depth of moral outrage among Czechoslovak citizen about this seeming police murder was endearing. This was shortly after Tiananmen Square (making everyone aware what was at stake), and even in Western Europe death by demonstration was not unheard of, or indeed 20 years earlier they had the self-immolation of Jan Palach and the 70-some killed in the 1968 Soviet invasion.

For me November 17 is connected with a fairly subdued plaque at the spot where the demonstration was stopped by the police. I don't remember when it was made, I think it was some time in 1990, probably at the anniversary. I do remember that in 1990 everyone would go out of their way to show you that spot, even if you had passed by a dozen times before. In the beginning were the revolutionary posters I mostly couldn't read at the time, then the candles, and finally the official plaque which was more or less the end.

The revolution itself officially lasted 11 days, including a theatre strike and a demonstration with an estimated half a million participants, which for a city of 1.2 million and a country of 15 million was an unmistakable signal the gig was up. The post-revolutionary euphoria lasted less than a year, it was commemorated a year or two more, and then the collective amnesia set in. Thereafter it was as it never had happened, it was never talked about. If I reminded anyone about it they were invariably embarrassed, a youthful and Un-Czech (the country had split by then) indiscretion they were aware of but rather would not remember.

As time went by a generation came to be that genuinely didn't remember it, because they never had experienced it (possibly apart from some weird and fragmented childhood memory), or the preceeding communist regime. That too embarrassed and secretly annoyed the slightly older generation. Until just recently when it became a subject again. Some of it was political, the high rating of the barely reformed communist party, as about the only protest party against the less than inspiring crowd of Czech politicians, did frighten the establishment and the anti-establishment alike. And youthful indiscretions are less embarrassing when you're not as youthful anymore. So nowadays it is a school subject, and if a revival is too strong a word (no expected theatre strikes) it is a reminder.

So today I decided to visit that old plaque. It is on one of the main streets, so it isn't as if I haven't passed by it countless times already, but I too haven't visited it for 15 years or so. It was much as expected, some strangely inappropriate posters and candles in massive appearance, to be taken pictures of by everyone in the audience with our camera phones. Having done that we all moved along.

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.

Going from the usefully useless spacer to the false start of HTML 3.0. HTML 3.0 never made it to a final specification, but it contained many interesting if half-baked ideas. One of these was the fig element. Like spacer the element had many attributes now obsoleted by CSS.

Also like spacer or the logo and photo types in vCard, but unlike img, object, or canvas elements fig tells what kind of image is shown, here a figure. In addition the figure had associated content, the caption and credit elements, as well as content fallback like for object in HTML4. caption reappears in XHTML2, while credit has yet to reappear.

Two other properties were unique for this version of HTML, the overlay, an image positioned on top of the figure, handy for sprite animations, but here ostensibly to save bandwidth. The images could have a checksum so that when leeching an image the owner of the site would not be able to swap the image with an inappropriate one without the browser detecting that the image had been tampered with.

Still in Prague. Had I blogged using Opera Mobile or Mini I would have been at the airport in time (maybe a posting on battery life on mobile devices at a later time), but as the trip was almost a stopover in Oslo before going to Berlin a couple days later, and Berlin is just north of here, missing it was no disaster.

The travel time from my flat in Oslo to my base in Prague is 4 hours and 42 minutes including busses, metro, and walking distance plus a maximum of 29 minutes waiting (assuming no delays). The cost is 100€ upwards return fare for the ticket plus another 17€ getting to the airports and back (thanks to the the currency converter to figure that out).

Ten years ago travelling by bus would cost half again as much, and take 24 hours (twice that again, and slower and less convenient, if you travelled by train). Six years before that the Iron Curtain was still in effect, which didn't just separate the "East" from the "West", but the East from the East. A train journey in those days would entail as much standing still and be processed, or just as likely standing still for the purpose of standing still, as it would be actually rolling along at anything but high speed.

As the wireless connectivity of Prague is excellent, city-sponsored WiFi (partially) and unlimited GRPS connectivity to an acceptable price, working here is just as easy as it would be in Oslo, and a bit cheaper. Fifteen years earlier the Internet connectivity from the Charles University in Prague, the entire republic in effect (there was a further line to Liberec in the north), was a shaky 64kbps line to Linz in Austria. Then again at that time the infrastructure was abysmal, and apart from Austria, the Netherlands, the UK, and the Nordic countries that had megabit lines between their universities, the situation wasn't much better elsewhere. West Germany for instance was a X.25 morass that didn't "get" the Internet until years later.

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.

I finally got around to watch Der Untergang (or "The fall of the third realm" in the uninspired Czech translation, the English title "Downfall" is considerably better) a few days ago. Set in the fast imploding Nazi universe in the days before the ultimate collapse, this is a refreshingly real and honest account of madness set upon itself. Real as a story that is, not an arbiter of historical truth. Unsurprisingly, given its subject, the European debate has been on its instrumental role. Will it prevent a rise of neo-nazism? No, certainly not. Neither will it be their The Birth of A Nation.

I rarely visit the cinemas, but this film ought to be seen in one and not just watched on DVD. Partly to reinforce its claustrophobic nature and partly to feel, and not just look at, the shells ripping Berlin and its tattered defenders apart. Meanwhile, down in the bunker, Adolf weds Eva even though the required paperwork that the couple are of proper mateable Aryan descent is waived.

There was an unsettling idea to stage the Nazis' final downfall not in Berlin, but in the fairly impenetrable Festung Norwegen. The several hundred thousand German soldiers stationed there had a relative comfortable and safe existence by the northern bunkers, far away from both the west and east fronts. There was less comfort in the labour camps for the largely Russian prisoners that managed to survive the arctic winters.

The war struck my mother's home, an isolated fishing village a few fjords to the south of Narvik (road connection came twenty years later), by surprise. Outsiders rarely came to visit, let alone Germans with guns. The neighbouring farmboy realized he was going to be drafted when he heard about the invasion. Resourceful as he was he got a friend to find an axe to chop off one of his toes, as it was better to lose a toe than your life. The friend was no expert executioner so his best attempt was met with the yell of "Yow, you cut too far" and a stream of invectives. The "you cut too far" story got better with each retelling, of which there were many throughout the decades. As it turned out the joke was on him, the mobilization order never came and whenever German planes flew overhead and everyone else scurried for shelter (the village was never bombed) he had to hobble around hoping not to get hit.

Post-war reconciliation was swift, except to the British tabloid press perpetually stuck in 1942. West German soldiers trained in Norway as part of a NATO exercise only a few years after the Nazi German soldiers had occupied the country. The scars would remain. As one war survivor put it in an interview fifty years later, he didn't hate the Germans, but he still shuddered whenever he heard German being spoken.

I toured Europe extensively fifteen years ago and then WWII was still raw. After all the Cold War was just an epilogue, and Germany and Japan had won (this was also the time of Japanophobia in USA). The Berlin Wall was being chopped up and sold to the highest bidder and the Anschluss of DDR was in progress, to mixed emotions both inside and outside the country ("I love Germany so much I'm glad there are two of them"). Even where people were just recovering from the Soviet Russian occupation the memory of the Nazi German occupation laid just beneath. Since The War affected not only every European alive at the time, but also their children, I expected its repercussions would last a century.

Now fifteen years later the healing has happened faster than that. Thirty years from now World War II will cease to be memory and remain part of our history instead.