<Glazblog/>

Opera, Microsoft, the EU

Håkon Lie sent me an email yesterday to ask me to react to his 5 proposals. I'll keep my precise comments private but my conclusion was rather simple : no, that's not the way to go to increase standards-compliance in the browser world. Here's my take about it:

  1. form something called BTA : the Browser Testing Association, testing EVERY single standard-based feature of a modern browser, based on open-source tests contributions by the community reviewed and published by a restricted set of super-reviewers. We have hundreds of sites testing browsers features or listing if a given feature is implemented or not, but we miss a focal point, a unique and reliable source of information for all that stuff. These tests could reuse the W3C tests released with their specs, extend them, or implement totally new and different test.
  2. publish online scores for every available browser against these tests
  3. issue an official report twice a year, sent to tech news media like CNet and others, summarizing the state of the art
  4. for each new major feature Opera implements, explain publically how this is easy or difficult to implement ; if Opera shows it's easy, other browser vendors have no reason not to implement it...