What’s new in Opera development snapshots: 28 September 2011 edition

September 29, 2011 · by Divya Manian

The biggest news for this snapshot is that your users will no longer see an XML screen of death and instead it will be rendered to the error console.

As usual, your Opera Next should already have this update (checking opera:about should give you "Presto/2.9.211 Version/12.00" under Browser Identification) (or you can download it from the blogpost linked above).

Rejoice! No more XML death notifications!

Andreas wrote in detail what this means. At Opera, we loves us some HTML5. (After all, we started it!) One of the design principles behind HTML5 is web users shouldn't see authoring errors. So now, even with XML errors, they won't.
rem unit!

Finally! Yay! You can now use the rem unit! Jonathan Snook has a great article explaining what it is and why this unit is useful. See it in action with our CSS rem unit example. This update also fixes some other bugs in CSS units which make it easier to use decimals in your calculations (300.3333333333333 anyone?)
Add/Remove EventListener's capture now defaults to false

You typically add/remove an event listener with addEventListener(type, listener, capture); in your code. If capture is omited, the browser should use the value of false. Opera was not adding/removing event listeners which lacked the value of capture, but it does so now. Here is a testcase.

Please do try it out and let us know if any of these do not work for you, or any other suggestions you might have!

Readers' comments 6

Left under the original article, as archived.

Charles SchlossThursday, September 29, 2011 4:47:19 PM
QuHnoThursday, September 29, 2011 6:45:38 PM
rem is cool, I'll start to use it, it can't be so long until the final

capture default is cool too, that can avoid several page display failures

No more XML death notifications?
Please - a little bit of it - just a small a hint, directly visible and not in the error console only. The console is not "on" by default, so there is effectively NO error message visible by default and a b0rked page that is re-parsed could fail to render correctly anyway.

With a little hint - a red border indicating that it is some quirks mode, may be? A fixed notification at the bottom of the page saying: Opera renders this page in error correction mode? - people would know that Opera tried its best to render the hosed code and it is the fault of the webmaster, not Opera's.

Please - everything, but no semi-silent re-parse!
IgorThursday, September 29, 2011 10:38:44 PM
Originally posted by QuHno:

Please - everything, but no semi-silent re-parse!
+1
I think something like your last proposal have to be used for all the non standard pages, not only for XHTML (but in XHTML it is absolutely needed!).
Cutting SpoonFriday, September 30, 2011 2:45:46 AM
A small warning would be good. Especially if the page actually was supposed to be XML. ("We tried to fix this page, click [here] if it still doesn't work")
Charles SchlossFriday, September 30, 2011 3:23:55 AM
Originally posted by hellspork:

A small warning would be good.

maybe a message in the status bar
FataLTuesday, October 4, 2011 5:01:13 PM
Would be better to show XML error, but have "Suppress XML error for this site" button somewhere around. Ideally this button should just switch an option inside Site Preferences dialog.