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Acid 3: Opera Passed?
It appears that Opera has passed Acid 3: Since the test was officially announced recently, our Core developers have been hard at work fixing bugs and adding the missing standards support. Today we reached a 100% pass rate for the first time! There are some remaining issues yet to be fixed, but we hope to have those […]

It appears that Opera has passed Acid 3:

Since the test was officially announced recently, our Core developers have been hard at work fixing bugs and adding the missing standards support.

Today we reached a 100% pass rate for the first time! There are some remaining issues yet to be fixed, but we hope to have those sorted out shortly.

We will release a technical preview version on labs.opera.com within the next week or so. For now, the screenshot above shows the Acid3 test as rendered in our latest WinGogi Desktop build. WinGogi is the Windows version of our reference builds used for the internal testing of Opera’s platform independent Core.

At the same time, Ian Hickson posted about changes to the test and Anne has commented that Opera is passing the latest and greatest:

“The updates from Ian have been done since the release of the test. Opera gets 100/100 on the latest version of the test.”

• Sub-pixel testing: It turns out that the original test accidentally required that browsers implement sub-pixel positioning and layout (and in fact the reference rendering got it wrong too, and relied on the same kind of rounding as Firefox does), which is somewhat dubious. I’ve changed the test to not rely on sub-pixel layout. However, it is very likely that this will be tested in Acid4, if we can get the specs to be clearer on this.
• Surrogate pairs in SVG APIs: One of the submitted tests assumed that SVG APIs worked on Unicode codepoints, but the SVG spec changed to work on UTF-16 codepoints, like the rest of the DOM API, so the test was changed there. (The test changed a couple of times, because I originally got the fix wrong.)
• The click() method: The test originally assumed that the click() method was reentrant, but the specs were vague on this and someone suggested making it fail if calls to it were nested, so I removed this part of the test (the spec hasn’t been updated yet). I replaced it with an attribute test (the new second part of subtest 64).
• The Performance Test: I made the loop counter in the performance test (a part of subtest 63) less complicated and shorter, to make it at least plausible that browsers could be fixed to pass that test quickly enough that it wouldn’t always feel jerky. At the same time, I updated the test’s infrastructure to report more details about pass and fail conditions and how long each subtest takes to run.
• Namespace bug: Someone noticed that http://www.w3.org/1998/XML/namespace should have been http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace in one of the subtests.
• Linktest timeout

I made the linktest more resilient to slow network conditions. However, the test is still going to give you major issues if you are on a network with multi-second latency, or if the acidtests.org site is being slow.

Congrats to the Opera team!

Oh, and Safari is at 95/100 and will close in on 100 shortly.

UPDATE:

Hixie has another update:

Just as Reddit is celebrating Opera reaching 100/100, with the misleading headline Opera the first browser to pass the Acid3 test (hey, submitter: it wouldn’t hurt to read the Opera blog post before submitting it to Reddit), the Apple guys track me down and point out that there’s yet another bug in the test. With heycam’s help, we have now fixed the test. Again. This presumably means Opera is now at 99/100… the race continues!

I have to say, by the way, that the relevant parts of the SVG spec are truly worthless. Where are the UA conformance criteria? You’d think a spec that was so verbose and detailed would actually tell you stuff, instead of just rambling on without actually saying what the requirements were…

Web Content: Not just YOUR words and pictures
If they read what you write, they may also want to read what you read. Webmasters and bloggers know this. That’s why we’ll embed links within our text, build pages with links to recommended sites and/or add linkblogs to our side bars. In a world where most of us don’t have the time to research and write everything we’d like to share, such resources add value to our existing content and give readers guidance on where to look for additional information.

My Google Reader Shared Items

If they read what you write, they may also want to read what you read. Webmasters and bloggers know this. That’s why we’ll embed links within our text, build pages with links to recommended sites and/or add linkblogs to our side bars. In a world where most of us don’t have the time to research and write everything we’d like to share, such resources add value to our existing content and give readers guidance on where to look for additional information.

Recently I’ve come across some other good ways to share what you read, so I thought I’d share those with you today.

Publish your OPML file to share your blog subscriptions

A few weeks back I was reading an entry on David Bradley’s blog, Sciencebase, when I noticed something interesting in his footer. There, at the bottom, he has a section called “Geeky Fun Stuff” in which he shares, among other things, a link to his OPML file. That, I thought, is a really good idea. For those of you who don’t know what this is, an OPML file is basically a type of XML file that includes the links to the RSS feeds of the various blogs one reads through RSS Readers such as Google Reader, Bloglines, etc. Such services allow you to import and export these files so that you can easily switch services or add a batch of feeds to your existing service. Thus, if I wanted to subscribe to all of David’s feeds I could just save that file and import it into Google Reader myself. Or if I wanted to subscribe to only a few I could edit the file (in Dreamweaver or any plain text editor) to delete any I didn’t want.

If you are already using an RSS reader, sharing such a file is fairly easy. Just export your file from your reader and save it to your computer. If you don’t want to share everything, just open the file in a text reader, and delete the extraneous feeds—lolcats, curling news from In the Hack and anything else that may not be of interest to your readership. Once the file is ready, just upload it to your site and link to it as you would any other page.

Using Google Reader to share specific stories

Google Reader recently added some enhancements to its sharing features. I first noticed this when Robert Scoble posted a note on Pownce with a link to his Google Reader shared items page. When I went to view the page I realized that this could be a useful feature, one that made me want to revisit Google Reader.

When you visit a shared items page you will see a site that looks pretty much like a typical blog. Stories are posted on the left, information about the page owner is on the right—along with links to other resources, a feed, etc. The main difference is that the stories are things the page owner has read rather than written (though, if you subscribe to your own feed, you can share your own entries as well). Each story also includes a link to the original entry and the original source—so the material is not mistakenly attributed to you.

After viewing Scoble’s page, I immediately thought of my friend X, who says she wants to establish an online presence, but isn’t quite yet ready to blog. Sharing stories on a page she can link to might be a good way to get her feet wet and let people know what she is thinking about.. For those of us who already have one or more blogs and Web sites, the shared items page adds to our online mix and provides an easy way to share stories with our readership.

Getting started with Google Reader

Getting started with this is pretty easy. Just go to the Google Reader site and sign-in. If you don’t already have a Google account for Gmail, analytics, etc. you can create one there. Once your account is set up, just subscribe to some of your favorite blogs and start reading. A menu at the bottom of each story gives you the option to share the story so it will appear on your public shared items page. (There is some controversy about this, but you just have to understand that it’s a public page that can be seen by anyone who has, or discovers, the address. For us, that is what we want, so it’s not a big concern.) If you change your mind later, you can unshare the story the same way. You can also organize your subscriptions into topic folders and share topics rather than individual items. To learn more about using Google Reader visit the Reader Help Center.

If you don’t want to send readers to your Google page, but still want to share stories, you can also share a clip from the feed on your own site, as I have done on my “What I’ve Been Reading in the Blogosphere” page.

More sharing options

My Streamy Subscriptions

Google isn’t the only service that allows sharing, but aside from the hubbub regarding privacy settings (pertaining to how and with whom one is sharing—see links below) it’s very easy to use and will be familiar to a large audience. I’ve been sharing blog stories with groups on Streamy since last summer, but my Streamy shares aren’t fully public. Another friend has recently recommended Feed Each Other which looks promising and also produces a public page. StumbleUpon, while not a reader, is also a great way to share blog stories and other Web sites. (Stumbling is quite popular with insomniacs and is a great way to learn about other sites.)

These are all useful services, but how you share is less important than what you share. If you can find articles and sites that offer additional information on the topics you discuss, or even stories that add insight to your personality or world view, you’ll be providing a helpful resource to your readers.

OPML, Google Reader and Sharing Resources

• fav.or.it - favorit RSS Reader and Blogging Platform
• Google’s new Reader Features
• Google Reader needs GPC (Granular Privacy Controls)
• Google Reader “Share With Friends” Feature Gets Privacy Complaints
• Google Reader Sharing FAQ
• Is Google Reader Sharing Too Much?
• OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language)

.NET on the ‘NET March 10-17: SubSonic Rocks and MVC is Hawt
This is being posted bit later than “early in the week.” But then again, I got the fun job of migrating some PHP apps (unfortunately of my own nubile design so I cannot point fingers). I never thought I would miss the yellow screen of death until I hit the blank screen […]

This is being posted bit later than “early in the week.” But then again, I got the fun job of migrating some PHP apps (unfortunately of my own nubile design so I cannot point fingers). I never thought I would miss the yellow screen of death until I hit the blank screen of death. No IIS7 so no FREB love, just lots of feeling around, print_r(), SQL Server Profiling and on the fly coding. I don’t miss the old days. And now on to dotnet . . .

The lead story is that Rob Conery has been very busy boy post-MIX. He released SubSonic 2.1 Beta 2 and launched a new SubSonic project site. Also, if you missed it, Windows Vista SP1 has been released. Roll the dice and upgrade today!

ASP.NET MVC is the new hawtness. And, while you are thinking hawt thoughts about MVC, you should make sure to check out Stephen Walther’s post on the Life of an ASP.NET MVC Request as well as Jeffery Palmero’s post on unit testing ASP.NET MVC Controllers. Finally, don’t miss Phil Haack’s MVC Routing Debugger.

There wer also some notable releases this week. Miguel de Icaza announced the release of MonoDevelop 1.0. The Telligent crew has also released Graffiti CMS Service Pack 1. And Jonathan Cogley & company over at Thycotic have released SecretServer 4.1. In the “not so much a release as a really neat product I just discovered” column check out LINQPad for your random LINQ tasks. It is exceedingly slick tool that can speed the discovery cycle.

On the “handy code to understand” front, we have a pair of submissions. First, Will Smith shares some handy ViewState extension methods. Second, for those of you undergoing painful PayPal integrations, see Anthony Grace’s solution.

In the “not so technical but still good to know category” make sure to take a gander at Kyle Baley’s post on human generated IDs. While computers are cooler, it is an unfortunate fact of life that the humans are paying your salary and the software must work with the wetware.

Back to tournament basketball. Go Terps.

This article provided by sitepoint.com.