July 10, 2000

6:25 PM

Here is a somewhat innacurate review of opera - yet another example of lousy 'web' journalism

if you're going to test a browser for standards compliance, does it really make sense to do it by browsing a site with ~ 200 occurances of non standard html on its homepage?
posted by sawks (4 comments total)

Let's face it, a lazy AP stringer isn't going to convince me otherwise that the Linux incarnation of Opera can't come along soon enough. And yeah, I paid for it on Windows.
posted by holgate at 9:23 PM on July 10, 2000

Good link, and good comment, about a very bad piece of "journalism."

I used to be extremely concerned about credibility on the Internet, since anyone can say anything. I realized only recently that, thanks to nearly instantaneous peer review, Web-based writers on such subjects are actually more credible than old-media folk like the writer of this article.
posted by syrynx at 9:26 PM on July 10, 2000

if you're going to test a browser for standards compliance, does it really make sense to do it by browsing a site with ~ 200 occurances of non standard html on its homepage?

Yes, given how few sites use fully-compliant, it'll get by W3C's syntax checker, HTML.

What I guess I mean is, the test he used is not such a good standards test... but it is a good broad useability test. {shrug}

posted by aurelian at 12:42 AM on July 11, 2000

yep, its fair enough to point out that opera might not handle your average joe webpage quite so well as the 'mainstream' browsers

but theres a bit of a double edged sword here... ie5 for mac does a very good job of standards compliance, but also has a backup rendering mode that handles non standard code in a non 'messy' way.
and this might just defeat the purpose of supporting standards in the first place - if the browsers will still display your non standard code as you intended, why code any different?

if the article had said something along the lines of "opera does indeed have excellent support for web standards, but (possibly at the expense of this) it sometimes has problems displaying common web sites that have non standard html"
then that would of been ok

what wasn't ok was how the writer held up the display of a non standard html webpage as a test of web standards compliance
(at least thats how i read it)

its miseducation like this thats very frustrating when web designers who care more about users than dollars put a lot of energy into supporting web standards, and educating our clients about cross browser code

the majority of people will take this article at face value and end up thinking that opera doesn't support standards as well as ie or netscape, and its the unfortunate way of the world that yahoo has a lot more credibility with most people than me with my messy hair and baggy pants :)





posted by sawks at 4:56 AM on July 11, 2000