In some internal reorganization I recently moved from R&D to Core where I am in some subgroup together with chaals. Nothing much has changed. Same office space when I’m in Oslo, same internal IRC channels, and the same internal mailing lists. Then again, effectively I was already part of the Core department for a long time. Core is the department that makes the Opera engine: Implementing HTTP, ECMAScript, APNG, HTML, DOM, et cetera. You know, the fun stuff. Part of Core works in Sweden (e.g. zcorpan and jgraham) and part works in Norway (e.g. Lachy and wilhelm) and chaals and I work elsewhere (mostly; we share an office in Oslo).
Recently we also started to publish a bit more about what we are up to: Carakan and Vega. Both post Opera 10 although some bits have creeped in. I think we should do more of this. At least personally I’m a huge fan of reading about browser internals and browsers in general (see also the blog of roc).
Lately I’ve been working on the CSS Namespaces Module Test Suite (not exclusively). @namespace must be one of the most pointless pieces of CSS syntax. Normal authors are not actually using namespaces in Web content. If MathML and SVG become more popular it is still not necessary because they work with scoped trees. RDFa hides namespaces in attribute values and therefore does not play well with the DOM or CSS per definition. I heard we use @namespace for something in the mail client. Some user agents use it in their user agent style sheet. HTML5 uses it to describe certain rendering rules. Yay! Definitely sounds like something that needs to be standardized including spending all the resources it takes to get several interoperable implementations. Here is hoping we more carefully consider these things going forward.
(Truth be told, namespace support was in Selectors API since the initial draft I wrote (Lachy has since taken over editing). Only after a lot of discussion I managed to get it out and there is still contention over that. Standardization is a weird game.)