Opera 4.0 beta 3 and XML

Opera was designed from the outset to be small, standards-compliant
(although it does support Internet Explorer and Netscape extensions for
compatibility with many Web sites coded for just these two browsers). The
former head of CSS development at the World Wide Web Consortium is now head
of Opera's software development. Opera has always been a good browser for
checking Web pages since it is more sensitive to bad HTML than the major
browsers which have extensive error-correction routines. I am presuming
their XML support will be very standards compliant. Their CSS
implementations have been praised as being the most correct of the pack.

Opera can be set to spoof some versions of IE and Netscape. Sometimes this
enables a site that uses browser detection to customize coding like
JavaScript for a particular browser to work with Opera. Most site routines
like this look only for versions of Netscape or Internet Explorer.

However, Netscape 6 has a number of features that will make book encoding,
especially non-English books easier. It has very good support for UTF-8
Unicode character encoding. UTF-16 is the default Unicode encoding, and
UTF-8 is a subset of this. All XML processors are supposed to be able to
handle either, but so far UTF-8 is the only one supported in browsers and
that support is partial. As long a you can find a Unicode font with
sufficient characters ( http://www.hclrss.demon.co.uk/unicode/ ) multiple
languages can be encoded using a single standard.

Opera has in the past developed separate language versions for each
language, while Netscape 6 has extensive support for multiple languages. For
example you could encode French, English, Cherokee, Thai, Hebrew, Hindi,
technical symbols, and mathematics symbols all on the same page and it will
display well in Netscape 6 (and almost as well in Internet Explorer -
although it may not print). For now Opera does not support Unicode and won't
display such a page. I am presuming they are working on Unicode since
Unicode is part of the XML standard.

Some of the fonts now shipping with Windows have Unicode character
extensions and will display a moderate subset of Unicode characters in
Internet Explorer 5.x and Netscape 6.

Terence de Giere
Human Factors International

----- Original Message -----
From: arthur wendover <arthurgw(at)idirect.com>
To: <hwg-gutenberg(at)hwg.org>
Sent: 2000/April/19 / 13:50
Subject: opera 4.0 beta 3


Let me first praise Opera and their accomplishment.
I tried it with the books I am now working on and was pleasantly surprised.

Now the problems.
Most of the early work that we did will not load into Opera. There are
Parsing
errors IE does not catch. And problems with our early style sheets.

It would be a shame if people see that our early work will not load in
Opera.
I have already spent a few hours reviewing the early books I did. Most only
require substituting the
new style sheet I am now using. Others required some tweaking and removal of
special characters that
the old parser never found.

Thank You Donna for letting us know about Opera 4.0.
There are still many elements missing from Netscape 6.0. They would do well
to
make a deal with Opera
 and save themselves much effort. Opera is 1.6 M, while Netscape 6.x M
something.
--
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Arthur Wendover       Toronto ON Canada
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