Opera’s Dancing: Smashing CSS Bugs
Friday / 09 July 04
Today I have spend a numerous amount of hours smashing CSS bugs for Opera. I have had version 7.23 installed ever since it was available, which was the version I had tested the site in. I’ll be honest and say I despise the Opera browser for reasons I’ll save you from hearing. If we want to be consistent with browser support, then Opera shouldn’t be forgotten.
As the TODO list mentions, there were two strange issues with Opera: the navigation and certain form elements. Fixing the text fields proofed to be fairly easy, once you figure out Opera does not like fixed heights being applied to its precious text fields. By applying padding one can achieve an identical effect.
In the near future I’ll do a seperate and complete writeup of the navigation. For now, it’s enough to know that the ‘custom tooltips’ should be positioned relatively to the list item. Strangely enough, this wouldn’t work as expected in Opera 7.23, yet it’s advertised as being W3C friendly. Even stranger was when I took a long shot and upgraded to Opera 7.52 and noticed that the navigation worked near perfect.
I have seen a numerous amount of cases where only the slighest increase in Opera’s version number actually meant a lot more than what one would believe. Right now I am sitting here wondering how am I going to tackle this problem. Surely one cannot cater for all these versions of Opera. I have only looked into Opera 7.23 en 7.52 for this. I am sure I should add a body { border: 0px } for Opera 7.11 too, not even mentioning Opera 6. Opera’s bug dancing with every release has made it one of the most annoying browsers to support.
Where does one draw the line? Do you try to support only for the latest versions, say the ones released in the past six months? Or have I spend writing an entry about behaviour that only effects extraordinary cases? For now, I will stick to Opera 7.52. Thinking about all those other versions makes my head spin. Perhaps some other day, not now.
1Nick Coad posted:
11 July 04, 06:21:34 AM
Sounds like you're having a really annoying time there. Being so stubborn, I just made sure my site worked well in Firefox and ignore anything else since I think as long as my web site is standards compliant, there is nothing I'm obligated to change. I'll just let the browsers change. This probably isn't the best way to do it, but just wanted to let you know that you've done well in making your site standards compliant - should you really be bending over backwards for browsers that have been poorly written?