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Case in Point

Caching is a very hot topic these days. Aggregation of scripts and style sheets, compression, setting Expires and Last-Modified headers. All of that is about improving loading times and reducing the amount of traffic. It's pretty smart stuff and it works pretty well.

There are always two cases to consider: a user with a non-primed cache and a user with a primed cache. If the cache is primed, the user will need to download far less files, because most of it is already cached. Scripts are the same, style sheets are the same, lots (or even all) images are the same, and maybe even the document itself is the same. Well, that's the deal basically.

Yesterday I noticed something odd, however. I visited some page I visited just the day before and all those images were reloaded. I also observed this on a lot of other websites I visit regularly. Of course I checked the headers and everything looked fine. Pretty odd. Especially if you consider that I already ramped up the cache size to 150mb ages ago.

It's great to see that others share my opinion about IE - especially if it isn't just venting. Bundling IE to Windows and sabotaging web standards as well does indeed inflict massive damages on the industry.

While it's true that there is a benefit (more working hours) for web designers; that money could be better spent elsewhere. E.g. on usability or accessibility improvements. (See Parable of the broken window on Wikipedia for details.)

We're requesting the European commission to make Microsoft respect standards. They should support standards fully in Internet Explorer. That's not the case today.
[...]
Web standards are very important. In order for pages to work across browsers - across platforms - standards must be followed. And today Microsoft is sabotaging the standards. They are not following them. They don't really want the standards to succeed. And that's what we want to change. - Håkon Wium Lie, Opera CTO

It's so awesome I almost shed a tear. ;)

The official stuff:
Press release
Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie comments on Opera's antitrust action (video)
(click the image on that site to download the smaller ~20mb video)
Opera files complaint — an open letter to the Web community

As I mentioned earlier the upcoming release of Opera 9.5 comes with 2 long awaited features: SVG as background-image (CSS), and SVG via <img/>. The alpha versions were buggy all over the place, but the freshly released beta seems to be pretty stable.

So, what is it good for? Good question. I also wondered about that. This is what I came up with:

svg_demo.html (screenshot)

Be sure to check out the the resize and zooming behavior. It's pretty nifty.

This is truly awesome stuff. The latest snapshot of Opera 9.50 allows you to use SVG in img elements and via CSS (demo) as well.

The Mozilla guys are also on this for a while. With some luck we'll see those features in Firefox in a few months, too. Unfortunately it looks like it will be somewhere after the FF3 release. I really hope that they'll hurry a bit with these features.

Well, now that's a surprise. The post-alpha of Opera 9.5 actually supports APNG 1.0.

I just tried it myself. The little animation I made a few weeks ago is displayed just fine. Nifty!

On a side note: the innerHTML workaround for delayed applet loading isn't necessary anymore.