The Good Life... a weblog about life, technology, and the Opera Web browser

Two days ago, we announced we had achieved 100/100 on the DOM portion of the Acid3 test. Later that evening, a bug was found in the Acid3 test itself. The bug was fixed and the WebKit team announced that they had achieved 100/100 on the DOM portion of the test and they had pixel-perfect rendering, making them the first to achieve two of the three pass conditions (congrats on that, by the way!).

Today, we'd like to announce the same. We have achieved 100/100 with pixel perfect rendering:

This screenshot is copyright Opera Software ASA and released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

Windows and Linux users may test this out themselves by downloading the GOGI build available from the Opera Labs. A note about these builds: GOGI, short for Generic Opera Graphics Interface, is a tool our Core team uses internally to develop our cross-platform/cross-project code. It has a very simple UI, which is nothing at all like Opera for Desktop. It is in no way meant to replace Opera for Desktop and we don't expect to duplicate any GOGI features in Opera for Desktop. It also lacks some security features, and thus we recommend that it not be used for regular surfing. Furthermore, please don't file bug reports about problems you find in GOGI.

Now, WebKit and Opera have reached the same point and have the same challenge: optimize enough to run test 26 in 33ms.

At the beginning of March, the Web Standards Project (WaSP) released Acid3, a web standards spot-checking test. As with Acid2, the goal of the test is to improve interoperability between web browsers. The Acid3 test consists of 100 DOM sub-tests, which assess a browser's support for DOM, CSS, SVG, and ECMAscript, as well as some rendering tests. To pass the test, a browser must render the test pixel for pixel identical to the reference rendering, pass all 100 DOM tests, and animate the test smoothly. So far, Opera is the only browser to pass all 100 DOM tests (more on that in a bit). Information about the pass rates for browsers is available in Wikipedia's excellent article about Acid3.

While browser vendors implement the same web standards, their implementations are sometimes incompatible due to bugs, different interpretations of the standards, or missing functionality. Incompatible implementations increase the development time and decrease the innovation of web sites/applications. Thus, the WaSP Acid tests establish a compatibility baseline that web developers can count on during development. That is, once browser vendors pass the tests.

As with the Acid2 test, the Acid3 test should not be viewed as a race. It's all about improving interoperability and making the Web a better place. If only one or two browsers pass the test, the test isn't a success and the Web can't improve. It's important that all major browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari) pass the test. The Acid2 test was released in April 2005, yet three years later only final releases of Opera and Safari pass it. That means web developers still can't rely on the functionality in Acid2 as a baseline. It'll probably be at least two or three years before the functionality tested it Acid3 can be used as a baseline.

Opera's Progress on Acid3

At Opera, we rely on web standards to allow us to render live web sites correctly. Interoperability allows us to use a different rendering engine, yet render web pages the same as other browsers. That's one of the reasons we've put a lot of focus on the Acid3 test since it was released:

• Opera's latest final public release, 9.26, scores 46/100 on the test and has some significant layout problems
• The initial alpha of Kestrel, released in September 2007, scores 58/100 on the test and has some small layout problems. At that point, we had not done fixes specifically for the test, which is a testament to the rendering engine improvements in Kestrel
• Our latest snapshot release scores 77/100 and has some small layout problems
• Our latest internal build (screenshot below) scores 100/100 and renders the test almost perfectly! We have some work to do still, but we expect to have that taking care of shortly. UPDATE (2007-03-27): a bug was found in the Acid3 test, which may affect our pass rate

This screenshot (and the screenshot it links to) are copyright Opera Software ASA and released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

This is the first time a screenshot of GOGI, our internal testing platform, has been released publicly. Core developers and testers use GOGI for their development, so they have a platform-independent setup. Also, Core testers do regression testing in GOGI before Core fixes are released to the Desktop Team build. That said, Kestrel may not pass the Acid3 test, even if internal builds do. Some of the internal fixes are experimental and they need regression testing before they can become part of a Desktop release. We hope to have a public test build within the next couple weeks that passes the test.

I'm looking forward to the day when we'll have routine body scans. If you're exposed to a lot of science fiction, as I am, you've probably seen what I'm referring to: some sort of bed where you lie down and you get scanned. The doctors know immediately if there's anything wrong with you. It's simple, painless, and just a regular part of medical care. Nowadays, it seems like so much can be lurking within you without showing any outward symptoms. If we could all go to the doctor and get a body scan every six months or so, we'd find problems sooner (at a more treatable stage) and get more accurate diagnoses.

Sure, there are a some scanning technologies today, such as MRI or CT, but they're much more limited than I have in mind. I've had two MRIs: one on my jaw and one on my wrist. In both cases, I had to stay very still for several minutes while a specific area was targeted. MRIs only show slices of certain parts of our bodies, so I imagine a full body MRI would take hours. Not fun. CT, also known as CAT scans, uses x-rays, so I imagine any large-scale and regular scanning would have adverse effects.

I actually found my first MRI quite relaxing. If you haven't had an MRI, there's a lot of noise involved. The noise is something like the sound of wood blocks being knocked together continuously. For whatever reason, I found the noise very soothing and I almost fell asleep. The MRI on my wrist might have been equally relaxing, but I was in an uncomfortable position.

In any case, I hope we'll see such technology in my life time. That, and teleporters.

As part of my site relaunch, I did some major behind the scenes work on the software used to run this site. I had been using Drupal 4.6, which was released in April 2005. Since then, Drupal has had three major releases, the most recent in February. In addition to using the core Drupal software, I use several third-party add-ons (called modules). Since modules usually take some time to be compatible with new core releases, I decided to base my site on Drupal 5, which works with a large number of modules.

When I first launched my site using Drupal, I used the core blog module, since I figured it made sense to blog using blog module (a fair conclusion). However, since I was the only user blogging, I found the extra bits of UI added by the blog module got in the way rather than helped. As part of the upgrade and based on the Dag Wieërs' advice, I decided to ditch the blog module and use the generic story module. It's been a seamless transition so far.

I enjoy the dialogue that sometimes occurs in post comments, so I wanted to see if upgrading could improve the usability of comments. Previously, I allowed site visitors to register at the site, which gave them a couple additional benefits, such as e-mail notification of new comments and posts. Unfortunately, the vast majority of these registrations were used to post spam and very few registered users actually used the e-mail notification, so I decided to disallow new registrations and delete all old registrations. The site now automatically remembers commenter information and I added the ability for users to receive e-mail notification of new comments to a specific post if they've commented on it. Additionally, I added several new RSS feeds: all comments, comments to specific categories, and comments to specific posts.

As if that weren't enough, I also changed the way comment subjects work. By default, Drupal will take a chunk of the comment body and use it as the comment subject if a commenter doesn't fill in a subject. In practice, this leads to a bunch of duplicate text between the comment subjects and bodies. Instead, my site will use the post title as the default comment subject. The alternative was disabling comment subjects, but some of the other functionality I added requires comment subjects, so this ended up being a good compromise.

Spam is one of the big concerns for anyone allowing comments to their site. There's a great third-party spam module for Drupal that I used on my old site. That caught a large amount of spam, but I'd like to prevent spam from being posted in the first place. So, in addition to the spam module, I decided to require commenters to enter a CAPTCHA. Instead of using the CAPTCHA module's default arithmetic CAPTCHA, I decided to use the reCAPTCHA service. reCAPTCHA, a project of Carnegie Mellon University, uses words that couldn't be understood by OCR software when books were scanned. So, the CAPTCHAs that are solved on my site are helping to archive books digitally. It's a really neat idea and I'm glad I can be a part of the project. As an additional measure, I'm using the commentcloser module to stop comments on all posts a set amount of time from their publication.

I decided the relaunch was a good time to give posts more recognizable URLs, rather than just using "/node/1234". I wanted the URLs to be as meaningful as possible, so using the pathauto module, they are now title- and date-based, i.e. "archive/2008/03/02/title". Many sites that use this format don't have true path hierarchies for the URL, meaning that visiting "archive/2008/03/02/" would return a "Page Not Found" error. I'm a big fan of path hierarchies, so I decided to use the archive module to help out. By default, the archive module uses the "all" keyword in the URL to determine which types of content to display. Since I only have one type of content I want displayed in the archives, I hacked the archive module to remove the keyword handling, so it automatically handles the path hierarchies for me. Now post URLs are meaningful and allow easy access to archives.

Of course, I would be committing the cardinal sin of web sites if I changed all my URLs without also making them accessible from the old URL. Drupal has built-in functionality for this using path aliases. If I used this functionality, my content would available both at the old and the new. Unfortunately, Google dislikes such duplicate content. Global redirect to the rescue! This module uses redirects to forward the reader to the new URL rather than allowing content to be accessible at both URLs.

Another new addition to the site is a copyright. Previously, my site didn't indicate how the content was copyrighted. Though, I never saw evidence of misuse, I figured I would rather be safe than sorry.

Here's a list of the modules I found essential for this site; these modules should be seriously considered for any Drupal-based blog:

• archive: date-based post archives
• captcha: anti-spam measure: require users to enter a captcha to post a comment
• comment_info: remember anonymous commenter information
• comment_notify: e-mail notification of new comments to previous commenters
• comment_subject: default comment subjects based on node title
• commentcloser: anti-spam measure: close comments after a set period of time
• commentmail: e-mail notification about new comments for site administrators
• commentrss: provide various RSS feeds for comments
• copyright: add copyright notices
• elf: add an image indicating off-site links in posts
• globalredirect: uses 301 redirects to stop duplicate content from arising when path module is enabled
• pathauto: creates memorable URLs
• pathfilter: filter for referencing internal paths, e.g. previous posts
• quote: node and comment quoting functionality
• recaptcha: anti-spam measure: use the reCAPTCHA service for CAPTCHAs
• spam: anti-spam measure: apply Bayesian filtering to submitted comments
• xmlsitemap: provide a sitemap for search engine spiders to improve search engine ranking

I'd be happy to give additional information about my site setup as requested.