Comments on: Opera gets proactive and helps you fix your code

By: bruceOpera

bruceOpera — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 14:17:06 +0000

The article is right, but the example email is poor. The vast majority of the emails that we write to people is to point out that they’re coding to IE-only markup or quirks, and that if they change it to our suggestedc fix, it’ll work better in *all* browsers.

The initiative is called Open The Web, and is one of the responsibilities of us Web Evangelists. My job (as a teacher and accessibility wonk) also sees me teaching n00bs about standards and accessibility; others on the team speak at high-end web conferences. The aim is to promote use of standards rather than sell Opera (although we do gain in the long run if people use standards).

And, yeah, we’re still hiring. Any Brazilians or Russians reading?

By: C4

C4 — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:54:54 +0000

Wouldn’t be easier for Opera to just add support and make all the no’s yes’ to this list:
http://www.opera.com/docs/specs/js/ecma/

Particularly for arguments.callee.caller

By: stimpy77

stimpy77 — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 07:23:18 +0000

Opera Software is building a team of â€œweb evangelistsâ€ whose job it is to find sites that do not display correctly in Opera **AND** are not standards-compliant, and then email the site owners.

By: moshe

moshe — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 22:01:45 +0000

Umm.. I’m probably not updated..

Was it announced somewhere that to make a page standard compliant, it has to have â€œoverflow-y:visible;â€ in the â€œBodyâ€?

Could not find it as a requirement in W3C specifications.
Maybe you’re talking about a different standard?

By: stimpy77

stimpy77 — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 16:41:18 +0000

No, not at all, it’s “Your web site is not standards-compliant. Our software will soon work around your flaws, but in the mean time would you please clean up the bad code that you plastered on the web and made our standards-compliant software look bad??”

By: whyisjasontaken

whyisjasontaken — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:15:04 +0000

Wait one moment, here’s what I got out of that:

“Our software doesn’t work properly. So, we were wondering if you could add something to your standards compliant website so it displays on our buggy software properly.”

By: peroo

peroo — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 23:21:16 +0000

@Unfocused
I think you’ll find that practically all websites work around browser bugs in one way or another, be it IE, FF or Opera. The difference is that Opera’s marketshare is a lot smaller and thus people don’t spend the time looking for ways to solve them, or may not even test in Opera at all.

It was a rather poorly chosen example though.

By: Unfocused

Unfocused — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 22:26:07 +0000

Back on topic…

When I originally heard of this practice, I thought: Great! Its Opera, they’re all about promoting standards!

That was until I saw they’re also doing it for Opera-specific bugs – which, if anything, is against standards.

Now, if it were just for the standards stuff, I’d support it 100%. But with the Opera-specific bugs, its just another company trying to shape the web to try to get more marketshare.

By: matanlurey

matanlurey — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 19:11:03 +0000

I remember when WordPress first started getting big it’s all I would use for 90% of small sites and blogs. Nowadays I hear (correct me If I am wrong) that an average page view may run several dozen SQL statements. Plugins such as WP-Cache have helped, but it’s like putting gum on a pipe leak.

That being said, I also believe WordPress simply wasn’t and isn’t written to be scalable commercial software.

By: mdmadph

mdmadph — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:48:13 +0000

Well, maybe it’s time for a rewrite! WordPress has such a good community behind it — it’s amazing that everyone can’t get together and fix the problems.

By: tj111

tj111 — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:05:54 +0000

@mdmadph: If you’ve ever looked at the WordPress source code, its probably as bloated and poorly maintained as the Windows source code. It’s been ~2 years since I have, so it might be better now, but man talk about a clusterf***k of includes and stuff.

By: mdmadph

mdmadph — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 13:46:35 +0000

That’s WordPress for you. -_-’

I swear, just the other day I heard WordPress is starting to become the Microsoft Windows of web frameworks, and I’m starting to believe it.

By: fullman

fullman — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 13:15:57 +0000

Seconded for spam :(

By: SimonWillison

SimonWillison — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 13:05:03 +0000

I’m afraid it looks like you’ve been hacked – there’s invisible spam text at the footer of this entry (it’s hidden using display:none but it shows up in Google Reader because that strips style attributes).