Sunday, 22. July 2007, 13:30:10
The Days of Web Standards 2007 were taken place last weekend, at Akihabara, Tokyo. As I wrote earlier, I was not present there, mainly because I didn't have a ticket. I really wanted to meet Chaals again, but he would come to Japan this September, to participate in the SVG event, hosted by W3C. So I don't care so much to miss the chance this time.
There are not so many good reports on the net, so I waited good ones for a whole week, but failed. So I have to pick entries of some blogs up, to write this review. (What unlucky you are, to read a review written by non-attendee! I feel honest sympathy with readers here.)
This is an announcement at W3C, "
The Days of Web Standards, 15 July, Tokyo, Japan", and there are three sessions taken place/participate by/in Opera employees.
The first one was took place by hefa and keikii, about Opera Widget, on Sunday afternoon. (Last weekend, we had National Holiday on successive Monday, as "Day of Sea", comparatively new holiday, so the events were there on Sunday and Monday.) For the Widget session, you can get the materials of presentation at
keikii's blog. He put
some photo of Opera booth at that event as well.
Next one was "Opera - Web standards everywhere", subtitled as "To all devices, Open Web Standards" in Japanese by Chaals. (There are short
mention of it by himself.) From the reports by participants, he talked about several engagements of Opera into Web Standards, ECMA Script, Widget, Video/Audio, Formes 2 and Web API. You can hear them from him in details

The last one was a browser panel, with marketing people of Mozilla Japan and Microsoft Japan. According to the photo linked above, Brent, a general manager of Tokyo office, Chaals and Keikii were on the panel from Opera. At that panel discusion, Kazuhito Kidachi, a member of WaSP, was doing a host job. If you can read Japanese,
a summary was on the site of his company. He asked a question, to Chaals after second session, mentioned above, why can Opera allocate many people to the Web Standards related fields? Opera participates in W3C, and many other communities of standardization so active. But such a activities don't make money direct. Interesting answer, as kazuhito wrote, he got from Chaals, was that such activities spare the cost of developments, i.e. it speeds up the implementations of Standards into their software, besides it enhances the brand image of Opera as a company.
Several months ago, there were "Browser Wars Retrospective" session at SXSW, with Chaals, Brendan Eich of Mozilla and Chris Wilson of Microsoft. Before that, at Yahoo, also those three browser vendors got together and gave us informative discussions. This time we had a chance to hear the raw stories from them, in Japanese, though the panelists are not developing managers but marketing guys.
From the reports, the room was full of people, even some listened to it without chairs, the panelists talked about Web Standards, collaborations among each others, and the present situations of browsers and the Web. The other points I noticed with interests were the way how we could contribute the developments of browsers, remote from developers. For this point, IE team manager at Tokyo felt frustrations, for, when they have feed backs from Japanese users, the product is already in a final shape. MS Japan likes to have communications with our users, more closely than before, to reflect the wishes from domestic users into their products in the future. Thant's better. Quite welcome plan. We like to keep eyes on MS Japan a little bit, more than before.
To the end, the materials used at the events would be available in next months, I've heard. So if I can't find good reports for it, written in English, I would like to mention it again in the future.
[
EDIT] As you might noticed,
the official reports of jp.opera is now on the web, at CHOOSE OPERA in English. You should read that, then forget my crap.
[
ANOTHER EDIT] Now I got mp3 files of their sessions, thanks social bookmarks

to notify me. I did really want to paste the URI of them, but the organizer deleted the link to them. I didn't understand why they did so.