Let’s face it Mark, we Mac users are an abused lot. I encounter many of the same problems and don’t even bother to inform the webmasters if only because the complaints are often dismissed out of hand. They’re not inclined to make a change that might make life simpler for such a small percentage of their users… one day we’ll have our revenge.

I’m not convinced that the house simple site is displaying correctly on my PC with Firefox, so it may be even worse than you thought…

Try opening the Ubuntu home page (ubuntu.com). Internet Explorer 6 makes a complete hash of it, while Opera renders it beautifully. (I don’t have Safari or a Mac to try it with.) This is the opposite of what the Microsoft FUD spreaders always tell us to expect! Interesting to know how Canonical achieved this small triumph for alternative systems…

Any article on web design for beginners comes with the exhortation to try out your pages on a variety of browsers. This is based on the assumption that someone will actually want to READ your website And by knocking a bit of homemade HTML together it will work almost anywhere, even though it may look a bit dull. On the other hand, a different rule appears to work for the top professionals, who use their proprietary web building software to produce a page which is exciting to look at, but only if you have the right browser, with the right OS, and the right plug-ins, and a high speed ADSL connection to get all those bandwidth hogging graphics . So…perhaps they should think about employing newbies to build their websites.

Thanks for bringing this topic back into view, Mark.

I’ve found the same problems with Firefox as Julian, but Richard has really nailed the problem: developers don’t (or won’t) check for multi-platform, multi-browser compatibility.

Usually, it’s some version of Windows IE that’s being planned for. After all, doesn’t nearly everyone use it? So can’t site owners ignore the few weirdos who won’t conform? (Mac users, other browsers - that’s at least 15%, and anyone with a vision problem - the same again, probably.) But web design tools vary so much, and the code some of the poorer design programs produce doesn’t work correctly in ANY browser. And, as Richard says, the more bells and whistles you add, the more chance that something will break.

Web programming really began in earnest with the first standard, HTML 2.0, in 1994. Over the next five years, the standard was improved (and degraded) many times, till we now have XHTML 1.0 - which came out in 1999. So, why do so many programmers (including those who design web design programs) still want to use the older HTML 4, and especially some tools, like frames and text manipulation codes, which force everyone to see exactly what the programmer wants?) Simple. Power and laziness.

HTML is a MARKUP language, intended to tell the browser how to display and lay out the page. It was never intended to replace a word processor or desktop publisher, but that is what too many designers want to do.

Take a look at http://www.w3schools.com/tags/default.asp and you can see on this 1999 list what should and should not be in the code - everything that is deprecated should, by 2004 at the latest, have gone. It hasn’t, because it’s harder and takes longer to design a web page properly to use CSS and other tools to make a page work well on any browser, yet fulfil the design brief properly. Such a page will also respond faultlessly to font size global changes by the viewer and be simple for the designer to alter elements and styling at will - the ideal situation.

I wonder how many web programmers learned their trade in the mid to late 1990s - and never grew up as the W3C standards did?

Try opening the Ubuntu home page (ubuntu.com). Internet Explorer 6 makes a complete hash of it, while Opera renders it beautifully. (I don’t have Safari or a Mac to try it with.) This is the opposite of what the Microsoft FUD spreaders always tell us to expect! Interesting to know how Canonical achieved this small triumph for alternative systems…

Ah… How can I put this?

I just looked at it on a MacBook in Safari and it displayed perfectly. Or at least it did to my Corbières infused eyes so I may be wrong.