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There are many types of technology to choose from when implementingyour Web application. There are many different types of device that canview the Web, from desktop computers to mobile phones, televisions andgames consoles. And last but not least, there are many types of userbrowsing the Web with these devices, all with different levels ofability and technical knowledge, different needs and desires, withdifferent connection speeds, who live in many different timezones, andhave all kinds of other variable factors. In short, it's a bit of amess, so how can we be expected to deliver sites that will suit all ofthese users? Telepahy? The Matrix? Digital Babel fish?
The short answer is "Use Web standards, and use standards compliantbrowsers." For the longer answer, you'll have to read on! Below youwill explore the concept of the one Web, why open standards areimportant in helping the Web community achieve this, and why Operabrowsers are such great tools for developers and users to develop andconsume Web content.
To any non—Opera users reading this, we'd like to suggest that youjust give the new breed of Opera browsers a try — we think you'll beimpressed with what you find. If you have any comments to make aboutOpera, its software, or this article, don't be afraid to comment at thebottom. Praise is always appreciated greatly, as is constructivecriticism; outright abuse is welcome, as long as you send your creditcard details along with it. Apart from a very small number of browsers (Mosaic, anyone?) Operais pretty much one of the first companies ever to make a Web browser.That was in 1994, and 13 years later we're still going strong, with 9major versions of Opera desktop, 8 versions of Opera mobile, 4 versionsof Opera Mini, several other browsers for devices as diverse as TVs andgame consoles, and a large number of partners.
We believe very strongly in 2 main principles:
One Web — first coined by the W3C, the one Web principle is what itimplies — there should be one single Web that can be accessed by anyWeb—enabled device, not different content for different devices — thisis unsustainable, and a maintenance nightmare — having to maintainseveral versions of the same content can be really frustrating. The"one Web" is made possible by...
Open standards. Technologies such as CSS and HTML are open — theyare free for anyone to use and get involved in the evolution of, andbecause they are also standards, pages created using them should beviewable on any device by anybody, as long as user agent vendors followthe standards. Most vendors, including ourselves, are making a prettygood job of this these days, mostly (hint — there is still a bloatedgiant out there that has trouble with standards, despite controllingover 70% of the browser market. We won't name any names...) Proprietarystandards, that is, standards that are not free for anyone to use andlock you in to having to use a single/few company's products, are badfor the one Web, and are often inaccessible (that is, not usable byusers with disabilities) and expensive to develop with.
To support these principles at Opera, we make our browsers asstandards compliant as we possibly can, and we also base all of ourbrowsers on the same core codebase, so you can guarantee that a Website that works in one browser will work on others.
The main 3 standards we have in use today on the Web are:
HTML — used to structure content and provide context and meaning for it ("semantics")
CSS — used to style and layout the HTML content
JavaScript — used to provide dynamic behavior on Web sites
We tend to refer to these as 3 layers — content, presentation, andbehavior. These layers should be kept as separate as possible, becauseit helps make the site accessible to users with disabilities, easier tomaintain, more likely to work cross platform, and many other reasons.You should never make the user rely on JavaScript for the Web site tofunction, in case they have it turned off — with JavaScript (or CSS)turned off, the site should gracefully degrade to a more static pagethat still offers the basic functionality you were intending to providevia your site.
We won't go into the technology too much, because there is a wholeload of tutorials and articles out there on basic and more advancedstandards. 1 For an example, consider the Web page you are looking at right now.The text and images are structured using HTML. A separate CSSstylesheet styles and positions the text and images — it tells themwhere to be on the page, what font to use for the text, how muchpadding there should be between each page element. There are lots ofadvantages to this approach, just some of which are listed below:
Because the information is all marked up as text (and images aregiven summary text to describe what they are showing) the page isaccessible to blind and visually impaired people, who can zoom in onthe text, or use a screenreader to read it out to them.
Because the style information is contained in a separate CSS file,you can reuse that file to style all the pages on this site. If youwant to make a change — colouring all the text red for instance — youonly have to update one file, not every file on the page.
The browsers we have available are many:
Our desktop browser is a cutting edge, feature rich, standardscompliant Web browser — it has full support for HTML 4.x and CSS 2.1,and even supports future standards such as parts of the CSS3 and HTML 5specs. It has many great features too, such as tabbed browsing, OperaLink to synchronize your bookmarks between different devices, sessionrestoring of all tabs and windows should the browser ever get closedunintentionally, and more.
Our Opera Mobile browser has the same standards support as thedesktop version — it is available for many mobile devices (check out the full list), and offers the full Web on your mobile phone.
Opera Mini is another Mobile browser. Why have 2? Simple: WhereasOpera Mobile is a higher—spec browser that offers the full Web on aphone, and may not work on lower spec phones, Opera Mini is designed towork on pretty much any phone capable of running a JVM. It worksthrough a proxy — when you request a Web page in the client, it sendsthat request to a server cluster, which finds your Web page, renders itusing an ultra compact binary language (OBML) that reduces the size ofthe page by up to 90%, and then sends it to your phone to view.
The possibilities this opens up are enormous, especially incountries where desktop computers are not that common and phones aremore widespread, either due to cost or cultural differences.
We're Opera — we really care about the open Web and open standards,and want to help open up the Web to everyone, regardless of(dis)ability, location, choice of user agent, technical knowledge, orany other of those variables that make us all unique Web users. And aswell as just opening up the Web to everyone, we want to produce awesomebrowsers that make using and developing the Web a joy.
Some resources we recommend are as follows:
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