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Opera's Haakon Wium Lie On CSS, Web Standards, and More
mikemuch writes "The standard that eventually became CSS was originally submitted to Tim Berners-Lee et al by Haakon Wium Lie, who continues to have new ideas for the web formatting language. The latest proposal from the current CTO of Opera Software is the CSS Generated Content for Paged Media Module. Lie sat down with PCMag to discuss not only this scrollbar-free browsing initiative, but a wider range of Web topics, including thoughts on powers like Apple and Google. A teaser from the story: 'At Opera, we sometimes wake up in the morning and see a new Google service that could have been optimized if we could have worked with them in the development phase. It seems they're more eager to put out things and see what sticks.'"
As you can see from the specification page, Bert Bos also worked on the CSS spec. Bert and Håkon also wrote a book together "CSS: Design for the Web" covering CSS. It's not as practical as some CSS books, but it certainly covers the spec and explains why things are the way they area. (especially the first edition of the book)
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-CSS1-20080411/
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
The whole idea of CSS was to separate content from presentation. But it never lived up to that promise for me. It would be more accurate to say that it separates content from *font* presentation. What would be REALLY useful to me is a way to separate out the actual layout of the page from the content. I can do this now with php (and I do it on most of my sites now), but it would be nice to have it native to html/css. The way I have it set up is that the header of the page (with all the header graphics, page background image, sidebar graphics, etc.) are in a separate file, as is the footer. So to change the entire look of all my pages and subpages on the entire site, all I have to do is edit those two files. That was supposed to be the kind of thing that css could do, but in practice I can only do it by making my pages php files and using an include statement to bring in the header and footer html. Sure, I can change the fonts with a separate css file, but that's pretty trivial.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
In the context, it sounds far more like optimized from a design point of view, ie instead of just slinging stuff out to see if it'll stick, they could focus on the design and create something that they know people will love. Apple really go the whole hog when they add even the most trivial features or concepts to their software, making everyone think that stuff like a lame version of multitasking is manna from heaven even when other platforms already have proper multitasking and so on.
I'm having to learn that kind of lesson myself. I've created a few in house apps here recently that have a lot of functionality, but some of the users just aren't aware that it's there, and when I spoke to one of our Directors recently he isn't even aware I've been making all this stuff that's boosting efficiency in a few different departments. I need to publicise myself better, and probably have more meetings with users to highlight things which seem obvious to experienced users, but a lot of people don't even think about. Even just basic UI things like being able to sort a table by clicking on the headings.
which is totally what she said
I think he means "optimized in general"; Google has a preference for throwing something that works into the wild (usually, as a clearly designated beta, demonstration, etc.) and then getting outside opinions on how to make it work better rather than tossing out abstract proposals with no implementation.
Lie seems to prefer people discussing the proposals, refining them, and then putting together an implementation.
There are arguments for both approaches, though for most things on the web I think Google's approach is better in practice, even when it might not be better in theory.
In a way, it mirrors the whole HTML5 vs. XHTML2 story.
Safari isn't "further down" for OS X users. It's the default browser for Macs, IE is non-existant and Firefox on OS X has been a joke for quite some time (memory hungry, extremely slow to start). The only real options for browsing on a Mac are Safari, Chrome and Opera, with Firefox in a distant fourth.
In any case, Safari and Chrome both use Webkit, which powers Apple Safari and Google Chrome. By August 2011 they held nearly 30% of desktop browser market share between them.
If the matter was just about "optimizing" for a given browser, it wouldn't be much of an issue. But Google has this nasty habit of not supporting Opera outright, with browser checks and such (for an example, go to Blogger and switch to "new UI" in Opera to see what I mean).
Well, it's mostly web apps that I do, so more tooltips would make more sense than F1 style loading of a help document.
I've only recently started considering that I should write up some documentation myself, even before putting down any code. Documentation is obviously is beneficial to new users, but while reading other people's views on documentation, I read that writing up the documentation often helps you to think more clearly about the design and purpose of your software. I hadn't considered that before. It doesn't have to be something that bores you out of your skull if you approach it correctly.
which is totally what she said
Opera's Haakon Wium Lie On CSS, Web Standards, and More
A standard norwegian word, pronounced lee-ah. Please move aloing.
The browser that all other browsers are based on you mean?
The browser that was out 10 years before Firefox?
He's being polite about Google. He's basically accusing them of behaving like Microsoft.