Opera Software University Tours

"Bandung is the 4th largest city in Indonesia, nice and cool due to being up in the mountains. We visited Institut Teknologi Bandung last year, and found the students to be highly knowledgeable and standards-aware. We later found out why: ITB has one of the most standards-compliant websites in the nation. I subsequently interviewed one of the web team, Mr Widianto Nugroho for the Web Standards Project.

On our return visit, we were lucky enough to be joined by Mr Beni, the leader of the ITB web team, who explained to the students how and why they coded the University website that way. ITB is hoping to become a W3C member; I wish them luck as they are a great example to the rest of Indonesia.

The students didn't disappoint us this year, either, listening attentively as Zi Bin showed them SVG, Widgets, Opera Unite, Opera Turbo and the new smartphone-like features of Opera Mini 5 beta. After I showed them HTML5, canvas and CSS 3 Media Queries, they really put us through the Q&A mill, asking about HTML5's offline storage capabilities, the differences between XHTML1.1 strict and HTML5 and Opera's relationship with the open source community.

After a delicious lunch of Masakan Padang (a dozen or so dishes of chicken, fish, lamb and vegetables, we headed off to our second university of the day, Parahyangan Catholic University, in a modern campus and huge auditorium filled with students.