About This Site

The www.opera.com Web site was designed to follow open, international standards and to meet accessibility requirements, while being as light and quick as possible to download at any connection speed.

Why did we change the design?

A Web page is a living thing, and as we change, our site should too.

We decided to redesign the site to reflect that Opera now offers browser technologies for smartphone/PDA, and Devices markets, in addition to our popular desktop browser for a wide range of different platforms. We also wanted to improve accessibility and usability, and make it easier to maintain the site.

To reach these goals we have separated the content from the presentation, improved the page and site structure, and made the design scalable. We have also used some of the latest Web standards to make it easy to maintain and update the site.

Use of style sheets

Opera.com is a good example of how Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) can be used for Web site management. By separating the design and presentation from the content, we can change the complete look and feel of the site by simply applying a new style sheet.

Accessibility

If you have visual or mobile impairments, you may notice that www.opera.com follows accessibility guidelines closely:

  • Style sheets (rather than deprecated markup like <font>) are used to present content
  • Markup is structural and meaningful
  • Content is not presented by graphics alone, graphics are not necessary to understand the main content
  • Text equivalents are provided for every non-text element (e.g., using "alt" or "longdesc" attributes, or in element content)
  • The main navigation menu is short, all main content is provided near the top of the document

Code

The markup is validated XHTML. By removing legacy coding such as nested layout tables and font tags, the page size is dramatically reduced, and the source code is easier to read and maintain. HTML compatible XHTML is used and the pages are served with the media type text/html, not application/xhtml+xml. This is done to minimize issues with most current browsers.

At the backend a custom XML format and dynamic content generators are used together with Apache AxKit to produce customized XHTML content.

Thank you for visiting www.opera.com.

Please send us your feedback if you have any comments.