Web Devout tidings

Yesterday, this site’s standards support resource appeared on the front page of digg, an extremely popular social bookmarking site, and the resulting impact made Web Devout inaccessible to many visitors for several hours. At the peak, the server managed to serve over 7000 requests to a total of nearly 1500 unique visitors in one hour. That doesn’t include the many people whose connections timed out during the wait. The digg post has achieved almost 2000 diggs (bookmark actions, which are treated as votes in favor of the page). More initial statistics are available.

The digg post was marked by some users as “inaccurate”, possibly due to a recent blog post by Chris Wilson, group program manager on the Internet Explorer platform development team, where he criticised some aspects of the structure of the standards support resource and the resulting percentage values. I presented my counterarguments in the comments of that post and I recommend that people take a read.

Shortly after Web Devout appeared on the digg front page, I quickly set up a server-side caching system to reduce the server impact and hopefully make the site available to more people. The site is now functional again and the caching system will remain up and running.

I finally sat down and finished the standards support information for Opera 9.

Opera 9 shows some major improvements in key areas. The CSS information was discussed earlier, and here are some of the HTML and DOM support highlights:

• Various minor HTML support fixes.
• Support for Document.adoptNode().
• Improvements to XML namespace support in DOM Core.
• Support for Node.textContent.
• Improvements to DocumentType (document.doctype) and Notation and Entity interfaces.
• Huge improvements in DOM Level 2 Style, surpassing Firefox 1.5’s support in some areas. Includes near complete implementation of DOM Level 2 StyleSheets and most of DOM Level 2 CSS (excluding the CSSValue interface, a number of other interfaces related to CSS property values, DocumentCSS, and DOMImplementationCSS).

According to the tables, HTML/XHTML support has increased by under 1% and DOM support has increased by 6%. The tables now put Opera 9’s overall DOM support above Firefox 1.5’s: 84% compared to 79%, with Internet Explorer 7 at 51%.

I have received a number of e-mails asking about the recent lack of updates, particularly regarding the rest of the Opera 9 information in the standards support tables. I have been rewriting the backend of this site and am preparing to launch it with several new articles and hopefully a large new section of the site if I can get it finished within a reasonable amount of time. I plan to finish the rest of the Opera 9 testing once that is more or less wrapped up.

I have finished testing the CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 support in Opera 9.

Here are some of the major changes in Opera 9 as far as CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 support:

• Apparently full support for CSS 2.1 basic selectors.
• Corrected support for :active and :hover with universal selectors and the body element.
• Some fixes for margin and width properties.
• Elements can now properly overlap iframe elements.
• Much improved support for CSS 3 media queries.
• Apparently full support for CSS 3 basic selectors (from previously no support).
• Support for most form-related CSS 3 pseudo-elements.
• Some support for CSS 3 opacity property, although the support is somewhat flawed (for example, if you have an element with the same color for foreground and background and reduce its opacity, the text’s alphatransparency is rendered separately from the background’s, causing the text to be quite visible).

There isn’t much that I was personally disappointed about. There are still some issues with :before, :after, and :first-line, but they are no worse than the issues other browsers have with them. Counter scope is still handled incorrectly according to the current CSS 2.1 drafts, although the problem can be avoided by remembering to use counter-reset in the appropriate places. I would have liked :last-child support, but that’s in CSS 3 anyway. I still notice some slight positioning problems when dealing with very complex styles, although it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact source.

All in all, this release shows that Opera is continuing to make consistent progress in the area of CSS support, and it is certainly giving other leading browsers some strong competition. According to the Web Devout tables, Opera’s overall CSS 2.1 support has risen from 93% to 96%, compared to IE 6’s 52%, IE 7’s 54%, and Firefox 1.5’s 93%. Opera’s support for current CSS 3 changes has risen from 8% to 22%, compared to IE 6’s 10%, IE 7’s 13%, and Firefox 1.5’s 27%.

HTML and DOM support information will come later. Some improvements have been made in both areas.

The latest alpha version of Firefox has been labeled “feature complete,” meaning no significant changes are planned for the webpage layout engine. In response, I have added the Firefox 2.0 information to the Web browser standards support resource. According to my information so far, there have been no significant changes to the areas currently covered in the standards support resource. However, since there were changes to SVG support and I hope to add SVG information to the tables eventually, I have decided to list Firefox 2.0 separately from Firefox 1.5.

Opera 9 information will be added when the public builds are labeled “feature complete” or an equivalent. Opera is known to make significant changes even in the final beta versions, so it’s possible that I will be unable to begin thorough testing until the final version of Opera 9 is released.