Opera 9.5 – the next generation of web standards
// August 4th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // New Releases, Web Development
Introduction
Another exciting time dawns upon us for the advancement of web standards, with the release of the final version of Opera 9.5—download Opera 9.5 here. If you’ve been checking out the beta releases, you’ll already have a taste of some of the great new features our new browser brings to the table, such as Opera Quick Find and Opera Link integration, and the final release builds on this. Sure, it’s a great user experience, but what does Opera 9.5 mean for developers? The answer is that Opera is rallying around the web standards flag more than ever before:
- The browser features better standards support than Opera has ever shipped in previous releases—not only does it have very thorough support for current standards like (X)HTML, XML, XSLT, CSS 2.1, SVG 1.1 and JavaScript, but it also includes support for many aspects of nascent standards such as HTML 5 and CSS 3. Testament to this is Opera passing the Acid 1 and 2 tests, and scoring 83% on the Acid 3 test—check the Acid tests out for yourself here.
- As well as providing you with killer standards support, Opera has also created a great new set of developer tools to help you debug your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—the debugging application is called Opera Dragonfly, and there is also a brand new developer menu available. Check out our Opera Dragonfly page for more information on these.
- Last but not least, Opera will soon be releasing the first part of an education program to help propagate best practices and increase web standards usage on the web. The Opera Web Standards Curriculum will provide a thorough grounding in all the skills you need to be a proficient front end developer, including web background theory, in-depth HTML and CSS, design principles and introductory DOM/JavaScript. Watch this space!
In this article I will look at all of these in more detail, but with a bias towards the standards support in Opera 9.5—for much more on the Opera developer tools and the Opera Web Standards Curriculum, follow the links above. The structure of the article is as follows:
Thanks a lot to everyone who wrote the examples featured below.
Opera 9.5 web standards support
In this section, I will review Opera 9.5’s standards support, going through some of the highlights, and taking you through some examples to show you how the Web of tomorrow is shaping up! It’s going to be a brighter day when tomorrow eventually comes.
For a reference list of the web standards support in Opera 9.5, have a look at our specs support page. The article you are currently reading focuses more on specific practical examples.
(X)HTML, CSS 2.1 and JavaScript
As we all know, (X)HTML, CSS and JavaScript are the three mainstays that we do most of our web site building in; it also won’t be a surprise to many of you that Opera has a reputation for being one of the most standards-compliant browsers. This reputation starts with current web standards, and is gradually building forwards to some of the more nascent ones, which we’ll discuss later. Suffice to say, Opera 9.5 supports the majority of the HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.1 specifications; Opera 9.5 also supports nearly the whole CSS 2.1 Specification; finally, Opera 9.5 has very thorough support for both ECMAScript/JavaScript and the DOM. We support a decent amount of DOM 3, and the majority of DOM 2.
Summary
So that’s a wrap—the end of my summary of Opera 9.5’s standards support, and Opera’s overall commitment to the web standards movement. Let us know what you think of the new browser, our new wave of developer tools and our educational material.
