The Industry

16-bit coordinates in Opera

The Opera browser, which we just finished adding support for, has - among the usual anomalous behavior each browser has to ensure that every programmer’s life will be full of surprises and very little hair - an interesting issue with large coordinates.

Not talking about:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=215055

Where Firefox has a issue with heights [but not widths!] greater than 32767 pixels.

I am talking about the case, where, although IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome all allows us to put pages at coordinates [i.e. style.left] at well over 32767 [and well below -32767] pixels, Opera just truncates them to 32767.

Not having seen 16 bit coordinates since the mid-80s, I was somewhat taken aback for awhile. Opera was limited to just 30 pages [of about 1000 pixels in width each on a standard screen].

But, finally, realized there just wasn’t anything we could do about it [but change our code :-)]. Perhaps having pages in the magazine strewn across the X-axis for several 100 thousand pixels is a little wacko, but it really is only a mental convenience for the programmer - a little sanity thrown into the madness.

So much for sanity :-)