Surfin' Safari

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... if there were a Safari v62, and it did happen to leak to the public, and someone did happen to run it, and that person did happen to discover a bug with text-decoration, well then I would hypothetically be most grateful, and would in fact fix such a bug with the utmost expedience. In fact, it might even be fixed already, assuming of course there were such a build, and it did in fact have this problem.

Some more issues I fixed tonight:

1. Added support for attr to the content property.
2. Fixed dotted/dashed border drawing to draw the correct type of border (and in the right position).
3. Implemented the CSS3 :target selector.

I have integrated the CSS parser from the KHTML trunk into Safari. It uses the CSS2.1 grammar. Mark will no doubt be disappointed that it closes most of the sheet-content-related hacks. In particular, Safari is no longer vulnerable to the Safari Spacer hack, the Simplified Box Model Hack, the Star HTML bug, or the Inline High Pass filter. It is, however, still vulnerable (interestingly) to Fabrice's Inversion.

Note that some of these hacks really couldn't easily be left in, since using a correct grammar will just naturally close these hacks off. There's no way to easily pollute the grammar to support constructs like the Safari Spacer hack (nor should we).

An article about how NetNewsWire and Safari complement one another can be found at O'Reilly here.

I agree, although Safari really needs to be able to reuse windows for URLs sent from applications like NetNewsWire rather than always opening a new window every time.

Zeldman writes about a mysterious background image problem that plagued his blog in Safari. I wrote up simple test cases and couldn't reproduce the problem. Yo, Zeldman, any chance you could place a reduced test case on your site somewhere so I can debug the problem and fix it?

Brad Choate complains about Safari's handling of backgrounds on inlines in this blog entry. Don't worry, Brad, the new inline box model (post-v60) handles your links perfectly . It even works when the links wrap to multiple lines.

I also got your fancy title tips to work. The transparency effect even works in Safari (how the heck are you accomplishing this?!). In case you want to work around the problem now, you just need to move the hookup of the of the makeNiceTitles event listener (the load handler on the window) to after the body element has been declared (i.e., put it in your body).

If you don't want to pollute the body of your document with a script in order to fix this now, you can wait for a subsequent release of Safari (which will contain the fix).

How did you accomplish that transparency effect without using -moz-opacity? I'm amazed this works in Safari! :)

[Update: Duh, PNGs. I get it.]

So go download it! v60 has most of the stuff in it that I've been babbling about in previous blog entries. What it does not have: the fixed :before/:after handling or the new inline box model (which is really sweet and fixes a whole slew of bugs).

[Note:: The opinions expressed in this blog entry are purely my own. Take them with the appropriate grain of salt.]

John Gruber has an excellent blog up about Opera's potential withdrawal from the Mac platform.

My earlier blog entry on the subject was a little more concise, consisting of... well, a one word response: "Wah."

Opera is playing the same game that Netscape played in the 4.x days. They call themselves "cross-platform", but what that really means is that they have a solid Windows offering, and then straggling offerings on other platforms.

Did Opera expect some sort of prize just for showing up? Any Mac user could tell you that just showing up is not enough. Nobody wants an afterthought for a browser, or a second-rate knockoff of your shining Windows star.

Being pissed I can understand. Fine, be pissed. But the way their CEO went on the record with news.com and directly insulted KHTML, calling it a "simple little browser," was really unprofessional. It was an insult to all the people who have worked on KHTML over the years (via Apple or KDE, on Safari or Konqueror).

(You'd think the CEO of Opera would be able to distinguish between a browser and a rendering engine, but ok, given his other comments, maybe not.)

mpt writes about my little experiment.

The real reason I caved and started using my blog as a GUI feedback zone was to try to stop people from emailing me, and it has worked.

Ever since the experiment went into effect I have only received one piece of email about Safari's GUI. Thank you, readers, for being good citizens and sticking to Trackback and Comments. Besides, this way the whole community can see your GUI feedback and respond, unlike email, which goes only to me.

To the one person who sent me email anyway, I am watching you.

[Update: The entire 800 comment page has been forwarded to the whole Safari team. Thanks again for the feedback.]

I just finished slogging through all 750 comments (and 36 trackbacks). Really great feedback. Given the bandwidth limitations, I've had to disable the comment posting.

I will continue to read Trackbacks for more GUI feedback, so if you have a blog of your own, you can give feedback that way by using Trackback on this entry.

Ok, so let's try an experiment. If you want to give me GUI feedback on Safari, post a comment or a trackback in response to this blog entry. I will read the comments and follow all trackbacks for information about what changes/additions you'd most like to see in Safari. If you have a non-GUI request, e.g., some specific CSS flaw or DOM flaw that you feel should be really high priority, you can post here too.

We've disabled comments for now, as it was driving our bandwidth use through the roof. -Admin

Please do not send me email (or post comments to this blog) asking if/when UI features are going to be implemented.

Also please stop asking me about release dates, when the next release of Safari will be, if there will be nightly builds, what the plans are for builds, etc. etc.

Some of the things I've been tinkering with in WebCore recently:

• Added support for display: run-in and display: compact. Not that I completely understand how they're supposed to work, but I do have basic test cases behaving "correctly" (by my interpretation of "correct'").
  
• Improved the line breaking code to deal with mixtures of white-space styles on the same line and to be smarter about determining breaks (e.g., not breaking in between spans if there isn't a breakable character).
  
• :active now works on all elements and is hierarchical.
  
• :hover can now be used in conjunction with descendant rules, so that e.g., Eric Meyer's pure CSS menus work.
  
• Lots of bug fixes for positioned elements.