Opera should be renamed

Why is it Opera is hopeless at formatting HTML


I mean i create scripts that look great in Netscape and Explorer
so im thinking yeah got it sussed now


And up comes a new browser to spoil the party
now we have to check our stuff in Opera which in my view
should stick to caching technology which no doubt they are good at and leave browsers to people who know how to format documents correctly


Mark

Well if it's any consolation I'm looking at the forums now in Opera 6 and the text box for entering the reply is tiny, and in general it all looks a bit nasty at times.

The answer should be to not support Opera till they get it sorted but I guess the real answer is that if you're going cross browser then you have to program for the lesser denominator. NS4 or Opera whichever that may be.

I thought Netscape was strict


There are definate formatting problems with Opera
i know it's fast has some great features but the latest versions from Netscape and Microsoft have a standard format they follow
and most my HTML looks the same in both
can't say this for Opera


Mark

I haven't had too much trouble with Opera. The current site I'm working on, which is fully W3C compliant, looks fine. It does tend to render text boxes and buttons a little bit strangely sometimes, but other than that it seems ok to me...

i agree on not supporting opera. having three different DOM´s and lots of different rendering output on IE and NN4-6 is enough already.

if you really want to make cross-browser pages, keep them as simple as possible. back to the roots. anyone still using <h1> tags and making form following structure (was it the other way?)?

you can add css to make it look nice in the browsers that support it. but since there is also at least 5 different css implementations, better don´t use it at all (i try to make everything work in NN3, then it will have quite good results in NN3-6, IE3-6 and opera. - if you are not using javascript...)

since network bandwidth is becoming cheaper and cheaper: use images! but then you sort out disabled people that get their browser content read by a speech plugin or braille display which is not very nice either...

search engines will only process the text content on your page too and some even weight on using tags like <h1>

anyone got numbers on usage of browsers on the web?

i estimate: 90% MS IE 4-6, 7% NN4, 1% opera, 2% NN5/6

seems like my estimate was not that bad...

Of course, the numbers in this log are far to small to be of any relevance, (368 total hits). Also remember that Opera by default identifies as IE.

Opera is a very good browser. If things look tiny in Opera it's because MS screwed up when implementing the HTML sizes, everything is one size too big in IE.

Opera probably has it's quirks, but all in all it's a very standards compliant browser. To say that it's hopeless at formatting HTML is completely absurd, but it does follow the good old "garbage in -- garbate out" more than IE and Netscape whose acceptance for poorly written HTML is beyond silly.

The real problem is that Netscape and IE made a mess of everything during their "browser war", it will take some time to fix all the damage they made.

CSS is definitely something you should use today. If you do your job well, the content will be accessible to all people, regardless of user-agent, and that's the whole point of the WWW. Who cares if it doesn't *look* the same.

Finally, Opera is so good because it does actually try to implement the fundamental idea of the WWW; *I* decide how I want to view the information. If I want a font-size of 16, then I'll set a font size of 16, regardless of whether some clueless designer thinks this "doesn't look good". After all, *I'm* the one reading the bloody content and I should be able to make my reading a comfortable experience.

Just think about it; why are Yahoo and Google so popular? Because they give you instant access to the information without any frills, and you are fairly free to view the contents your way.

i don´t call this "standards compliant"...

of course it is not as bad as someone stated earlier. but i just don´t want to deal with another browser that only some 0.x percent of my users use for a short time till they find out that most pages don´t display as expected. and they switch back to the working ones.
maybe this could be different in the future (i hope!) when IE and Netscape get back to the standards. i like that NN6 does different interpreting of HTML depending on your DOCTYPE!

but i doubt that MS does not somewhat "own" the web...

Why not? If I edit my Mac edition of IE5 (which is pretty close to 100% standards compliant) to identify as "Ye olde fart", is it suddently not standards compliant?

The only reason Opera has to do this is because it supports a very large portion of the IE DOM but because so many sites use browser detection to determine javascript capabilities the user wouldn't be able to take advantage of the extra functionality provided.

yes. and this is what i call "not compliant".
it is using a workaround because they claim they can display IE pages, too. since it does not work....

i don´t have the specs around for the http-user-agent setting, but i am sure they say "the browser identifies with its name and version number" or something similar.



nope, IE5 on mac is NOT standards-compliant. but its the closest i found on the mac up to now, i agree... ie45 is total crap, netscape is the same as on the other os´s.

and since your browser is not called "ye olde fart", it should not identify as such... anyone disagree?

Hi


Me I am really tired of Opera users, I get complaint more from them then any other browser user!


The reason why is that they always use the user agent of msie 5 or mozilla/4.76 or mozilla/5 instead of using what they are really using opera/5 or opera/6, I design pages for opera and ns4 based on browser, so I can allow all my users the same view of all content.


It makes it hard for webmasters and designers to built sites when lame software companies, try to hide who they really are. To me maybe they just are not proud enough of thier software to put thier name on it, hehehe!

I know that is not the real reason, but it is funny to me!!!!



F!

Another reason why Opera identifies itself as IE is that many people browser detect in a method that culminates in:

if(!ie) ? isNS = true;

And if Opera is more IE than NS then this isn't good.

I like Opera as it's very fast compared to IE6/NS6/Mozilla 0.9.8 and NS4.7 (yes I do have them all on my system) and Amaya (that too) is a wierd one to program for. Thing is, it doesn't format our new web app at all properly so there's always problems (NS6/IE5+/Mozilla 0.9.8 work okay).

Can't speak for anyone else, but I only use Opera, and I always have it set to identify as Opera. If someone's site thinks I'm running Netscape 3 because their browser detection JS doesn't account for Opera, I'll either identify Opera as Mozilla for that site or, more often than not, forget about it and move on.

anyway... that's all..

You do realize that the only one actually being lame are webdesigners that design *for* some specific UA. The whole idea of the WWW is that your information should be widely available, regardless of software.

Unfortunately the majority of "webdesigners" these days are clueless people with little or no understanding of the medium they are working with, I myself would probably prefer a products designer (5 years education or so), they know how to deal with different materials and how to make the most of whatever limitations the medium has, not to mention harness it strenghts.



You're not allowing your viewers anything. You're forcing *your* view of the content as seen on *your* computer using *your* settings and *your* browser. I visited the Zend site a while ago, and decided I wanted to read a rather lenghty article (using IE, mind you), so I reached for my font-size settings because I wanted a larger font (like so many sites they used font-size: unreadable). I tried "larger". Nothing. I tried largest. Nothing. The font-size was fixed using goddamn pixels! Can you imagine that?!

Needless to say I don't read articles at Zend.com. I even contacted the webduhsigner, and he told me that they were adding a setting in "My Zend" for the font-size. Talk about being clueless.

Finally; with Opera I can actually override the settings of clueless duhsegners like the one responsible for Zend.com.