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Off Topic -
As far as Mac compatibility goes....I work in commercial printing in prepress and I am on a Mac all day, then a PC in the evenings at home. I see sites from both sides and I seldom can create a Mac friendly page or a NS friendly page. BTW - I also seem to get a few percent of WebTV users too....arrrg!...poor souls.
Back in 1998, I used to try, but by around 2001 I decided to quit. At that time I concluded, ultimately, it is up the the browsers to be compatible with the webmasters, not the other way around.
The evolutionary process will determine who survives...even on the web. It is not our duty as webmasters to "carry' the weak and crippled until they can reproduce enough times to possibly create a new generation that can survive on it's own.
And it is up to the public to use whatever tools they must...in this case, IE....until a newer and better solution comes along.
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Way Off Topic -
Dave - - Don't spend ANY of your precious God given "life" time on this pursuit of compatibility issues.
XML is proof that the evoluntionary process of languages is as true for computing as it is for humans. From the complex SGML to the more complex HTML and so on....we progress into more and more complex structure that has more vulnerabilities to failure....until we reach a point where something similar to McLuhan's Four Laws of Media kicks in and after a certain point, a reversal takes place and simplicity again replaces the complex.
Soon....compatibility issues (which is just language translation fallen into corruption) will no longer be an exclusive communication tool of the modern day Shamans and Wizards, but will be available to anyone who can write their own Schema for what their language is...and the computers will only require a reference point to find the library where the translation tools are stored and the spiders can access it.
In the next ten years or less, the need for "universal standards" will VANISH and everyone will be able to access and translate any document written in any programming language...and most of the modern human languages as well.
The new world OS may even use a linear timeline and some sort of intelligent media proxies (like millions of webbots and spiders) who work on our behalf as proxies to seek out other proxies and to instantaneously find relative content for any query or content on my system or any other connected to the
www....and Windows will become as obsolete as a horse and buggy is to a rocketeer.
I have little doubt a nation other than the USA will introduce a programming team that has created a totally new Operating System someday very soon...an OS that does not even use this familiar, yet totally unintuitive and frustratingly difficult windows interface....and it's stupid reliance on proprietary rules of organization.
And these days of struggling with Morse Code will be history.
Use your time to create better and faster ways for the Community to share information. That is the work that will survive the test of time. The technology we use to communicate changes constantly, but the community that uses it is the only constant....even from generation to generation.....
