Ipernity and Opera browser

I am an Opera user since... I don't remember... long long time ago. It's one --if not the best-- web browser out there but (there's always a but) there are some pages in the web universe that are not rendered correctly. Most of the times, these problems are nothing more than a little bit annoying but every now and then you find a page that becomes almost useless if your using Opera.

I am writing this post in one of those pages. If you are using IE, Firefox, NetScape or Mozilla you’ll have a nice toolbar over the text box when you’re writing your posts. By using the buttons in this toolbar you can change the layout of your post: font, color, lists, even tables!. If you are using Opera, Safari or none of the above you won’t have such a toolbar. Even worse, all the end-of-paragraph characters are “magically” removed so all the paragraphs are merged into a single, messy and almost undecipherable message.

This is happening because this page is using the FCKEditor module which, as is stated on its home page, is not compatible with Opera

This is not the only problem I’ve found using Opera in ipernity.com. When I was chatting with Paul Peeraerts, the page was only refreshed with the last messages only after I sent my posts, so I had to write something to see Paul’s answers.

To be honest, this kind of problems are, most of the times, caused by poorly designed pages that make use of non-standard web features. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not telling this is the case, I didn’t take a look at the inners of the page code… and I don’t plan to, but I think that, at least, the Ipernity Team should give an alternative method to write readable posts. For web’s sake I can’t even write a post with more than a paragraph*.

I know that FCKeditor and Opera and doing their best to solve this problem but until it’s solved… should I migrate to Firefox?

By the way, does anyone know if there is a standard, polite way to report this kind of problems?. I know there’s someone call Ipernity Team… should I send them a mail? I would like to get, at least, an official answer.

* I’ve found a workaround for this problem… writing the html code directly in the text box (those strange characters you see when you press the “source” button in the toolbar). For those who wonder I did manage to write this post with Opera… after several tries.