Comic Update: Escaping Opera’s SVGorilla
As a response to the last comic that featured Opera (right here), viking descendant and Opera Software web opener David Storey simultaneously did three things at once:
1. He left a comment. Which I love. Feedback of any sort is appreciated, especially when it includes the phrase “funny comic”.
2. He defended his company’s product’s implementations of standards by pointing out that one of the three CSS properties I mentioned is in 9.5 (which is now launched), one is only experimentally implemented, and the third is as he puts it “not in a stable spec”. I’ll give him the first two, but I don’t think word-wrap is unstable enough to justify not implementing it.
3. Lastly, he threatened to attack me with the SVGorilla.
The idea of a smoothly scaling primate collided with my recent CSS3 rgba colors experimentation in my head, and spawned this week’s comic.
Opera’s been doing a fine job with their browser, and 9.5 is actually pretty slick. Will I use it day to day? No. It’s feature set does not offer enough to draw me away from Firefox, which is officially launching version 3.0 in mere hours. If addons became a big thing with Opera, I think it’d have a fighting chance in sucking me in, though. As a rule, I prefer browsers made by browser software companies, not operating system software companies.
That said… although the properties I’ve mentioned earlier (word-wrap, border-radius, and outline-offset, aren’t exactly going to see a lot of use by me. However, CSS3 rgba colors? I’m all over that. I especially enjoy the ability to set an element’s opacity without it affecting all of its children. I don’t think it was a good call for Opera to skip adding this into 9.5, as it means it may be a while yet before we see it in an official Opera release.
Well, on the plus side, it let me escape the vicious SVGorilla.
Haha. Ah but we’ve released Opera on Acid some time ago that includes both HSLA and RGBA support via a back-port to the Core-2.1 code base of some of the advancements we have added in Core-2.2. We’ll send the SVGorilla on acid after your pesky squirrel. He even has Web Fonts so he doesn’t need to speak in Comic Sans. Maybe we’ll send the Open the Web Valkyries too.
Well, I’m certainly glad that there’s an Opera build out there with RGBA and HSLA support. What is a shame to me, though, is that it’s currently only on the strange WinGogi internal test build, and not in Opera 9.5. There’s no doubting that Opera is one of the leaders when it comes to implementing standards, but RGBA colors is one of the newer features that would be doing all of us a favor by getting into the standard version of each browser as soon as possible.
For the record, I’m super excited by Web Fonts, and the SVGorilla can beat me up with those whenever he wants. My initial concept for speech bubbles for the webcomic was with SIFr text replacement to make the text readable by search engines, but there were some definite compromises on how that looked on certain browsers so I ditched it. In a world with Web Fonts I won’t have that problem.