Opera, W3C and standards

Posted by
Charles McCathieNevile

Opera is trying to help a lot of different people use the web – everywhere, everytime, from all kind of devices.

The Web itself contains all kinds of different things. Short simple pages of information. Complex interactive applications. Large collections, distributed information, art, design, literature, games.

What is important about the web is what it can do for users. Different users are looking for different things, and there are lots of people and organisations wanting to make more of what there is, and make the web better. Just as ideas are coming from everywhere, so are the needs.

One way to meet these needs is to develop standards. The web took off because HTML was simple, easy to author, and vendor-neutral. People could use it to do many different things and it worked on different browsers across different systems.

But this was not the only important factor. It has also grown because HTML has adapted. The very early web had no way of including an image inside a page. There was no way of making a complex form that a user could fill in. It was not possible to create dynamic pages. There was no nice way to style content

Many different people came up with ways to do all these things and more. Some survived, some died out. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), the HTML form element and SVG are all technologies that have been developed to extend the functionality of the web.

Sometimes these things are developed alone, and everyone “just does it”. But often, the way a new invention becomes useful on the web means that many different people work on it and agree to a standard. One of the important groups for developing standards on the web is the World Wide Web Consortium, also known as W3C. An organisation whose technical director is Tim Berners-Lee (the man who invented the web), W3C brings together stakeholders from around the world to develop various specifications of standards for the web.

Opera Software is committed to a standards-based web. This is important because it allows tools to be developed to work with the web in new contexts, something Opera does often. Working with other browser developers, content producers, user groups, researchers, and others allows everyone to look at the new ideas coming up, make sure that they will work across the entire web, and produce a specification that anyone can implement. This is the fundamental reason Opera is a member of W3C, and further sponsors W3C activity in important areas.

This work enables us to meet the needs and desires of customers and users who are trying to develop new services, and ensure that these use cases are supported across the web, based on open standards which can be implemented by all browsers.

Opera Software is widely known for its pioneering support for Cascading Style Sheets. Our CTO, Håkon Wium Lie , is one of the people who invented CSS. Opera is or has been active in many other areas of W3C, from SVG to Accessibility, and from HTML to Mobile Web. We contribute our experience in deploying the web across a large range of platforms and devices, development ideas from Opera engineers, and ensuring that different standards groups are moving in directions that increase compatibility and interoperability across the Web. We also provide test implementations of work still in development – and here at labs.opera.com we will be writing about these things, giving you a preview of the future that you can use.

W3C is not, of course, the only place standards are developed. Opera is also a member of Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), a body working on specifications specifically designed for mobile browsing, and is one of the founders of the WHAT-WG, a group which is improving the specification and documentation of important features of the web that are in wide use, including simple-to-use extensions to existing functionality such as Web Forms 2.

Some of this work can be seen already in browsers. Opera was the first Web browser to ship SVG in a full release, with version 8.0, and other browsers are also developing SVG support. HTML, of course, has been the basis of what a web browser does since the creation of the web, and CSS has been around for many (web) years. Some of it is in development – Opera provides experimental support for some types of Compound Documents, leading this work which is still in development at W3C with practical implementations that people can use.

So watch for exciting new work coming from Opera and being offered to the standards world, allowing everyone to use it. Try experimenting in Opera, glimpsing the future web today. And as a user enjoy the power of standards being tested, refined, compatible and as useful as the collective experience of Opera and many others working together can offer.