Curtain rises on Opera 9

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It's currently THE most standards-compliant browser for Windows.

It's the first and only browser so far for Windows to pass the CSS 2.1 ACID2 test (http://webstandards.org/action/acid2). The Mac has both iCab 3 (the first, and runs on even Mac OS Classic) and the latest Safari for OS X Tiger (but not previous Mac OS versions, including Mac OS X Panther) that are also ACID2 compliant. The various *nixes have Konquerer, which relatively recently became ACID2 compliant.

Neither IE nor Firefox 1.5 (nor any other Gecko browser) is ACID2 compliant.

ACID2 looks simple (when your browser passes, a cartoony-looking smiley face appears), but it’s actually very sophisticated. Each pixel-like block of the face is generated by different CSS code, which tests how the browser responds to various nuances of CSS syntax, including whether the browser properly handles invalid CSS syntax.

What this means is that Opera 9 is currently the only browser for Windows that web developers can use to see how their Web pages will look in proper browsers, including future versions of Gecko and (hopefully) IE (but not IE7, at least not the current betas). In general, it’s much easier to develop to the standards, then do whatever tweaks are necessary to make it look okay in older and less compliant (but more popular) browsers, than to do it the other way around. Opera 9 is thus, at present, pretty much required for any Web developer who develops under Windows, who has any interest in standards-compliance.

Too bad it didn’t implement CSS3. There’s some really cool stuff in there (e.g. standardized syntax for rounded corners [which currently have to be done either with a Gecko-only experimental syntax, or with hacks involving multiple <DIV>s that play havok with the site&rquo;s compliance with accessibility standards and the like], the ability to use images as borders [complete with stretching and making sure that the border always uses a whole number of complete image elements regardless of the width or height of the box element in question], drop shadows [complete with soft edges], etc.).

This is understandable, though, as CSS3 is still very much a work-in-progress.

Posted by: Joel R   Posted on: 06/20/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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