14 DAY TRIAL // While with Internet Explorer 9 Microsoft is for the first time placing strong emphasis on modern web standards support, there are players on the browser market that have always made this a priority. Case in point: Opera. A new Beta development snapshot of Opera 11 is now available for download, and early adopters will be able to test a range of enhancements related to technologies such as HTML5, CSS3 and SVG.
Opera 11 Beta Build 1128 was offered to testers today, and in addition to improved web standards support, the release features a range of bug fixes as well as improvements to extensions.
“On the Core rendering side, we have made some nice improvements to HTML5 forms and have also been working on SVG Performance. With regards to HTML5 forms support, we cleaned up our old Webforms implementation from 2005 to align with the current HTML5 spec,” revealed Ruarí Ødegaard, from the Opera Desktop team.
Developers will be able to test a range of new HTML5 elements with the new Build of Opera 11 Beta.
According to the Norway-based browser maker, Opera 11 Beta Build 1128 is designed to play nice with features such as document.head and the HashChangeEvent, but also with some that have a tad more importance such as Web Sockets and Web Messaging.
“This means we now have support for the items added to the spec since then: the attributes 'placeholder' and 'autofocus', the input types 'color' (pops up a color picker), 'search' and 'tel' (no visual effects there),” Ødegaard added.
“There is less default styling for the 'email' and 'url' type input fields, allowing web designers to add their own thing here. The error messages that can pop up on form validation are much prettier and we support upload of multiple files now.
“As a bonus, we've also included support for the new HTML5 elements 'progress' and 'meter'.”
There are additional changes related to DOM3 support, with Opera Software adding CustomEvents and defaultPrevented. isEqualNode to the browser.
And of course, focus was placed on better embracing CSS3, with support introduced for the full CSS3 Backgrounds and Borders module, as well as for new object position values from the CSS3 Image Values module.
Opera 11 Beta for Windows is available for download here.