You usually get something like "we have budget problems and can't afford testing on every possible browser", "we prefer to spend our resources on adding more advanced content (read: silly shockwave animations, popping menus and advertisements) than supporting fringe browsers".
This sort of answer usually comes because a lot of the Israeli web-designers (and web design courses!) are simply behind on the progress of the field in the last few years (the reason: ever since IE won the browser war, they stopped advancing their browser. So if no new browser features were added - designers didn't feel they need to learn new stuff and keep updated on the news in the field. The fact that standards & other browsers had already advanced further, leaving IE behind, is not really important news since it's not relevant for the vast majority of the market). You might be surprised, but many think that supporting standard means support of *Netscape 4.x* . They never heared of Mozilla, and they might have web statistics saying that the next more common browser after IE is Netscape 4, which is a bit limited compared to IE6 (of course - these statistics dont add together all w3c complyant browsers, and don't take into account browser-id spoofing). Indeed - trying to make a site work on *Netscape 4* while keeping all the spiffy new features IS a difficult and very time consuming task.
Also, many web-admins already got a lot of offending non-constructive mail from enthusiastic but ignorant linux/mozilla users, so by now they're fed up and have zero tolerance for any messages mentioning linux, mozilla or even w3c (if you're still living in the bad old times when the browser-war was in progress - "standards" just mean "lowest common denominator").
Given the above considerations, I would suggest the following guidelines when talking to web-admins.
1) Try consulting experienced tech-evagelists <http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tech-evangelism/> before (is Shoshana Forbes reading this by any chance?).
2) Be polite and constructive. NEVER try to educate the webadmin - they might know better than you, and you might not be the first one contacting them (focus on your goal - making the site non-ie-specific - rather than on "educating" or "punishing" anyone).
3) Facts worth mentioning if it turns out they are not known: * What works on one Gecko based browser, should look the same on all others (Mozilla, Netscape7, Firefox, Galeon, Epiphany & others are all really one and the same). KHTML engine (Konqueror) usually follows closely. * The standard has come a long way since the browser wars. Today there's practically nothing that can't be done while keeping it. * W3C provides automatic standard DOM/HTML compliance testing tools. * Microsoft is a member of the W3C consortium. Expect IE7 to be more W3C compliant. * There's really no point in doing any Netscape-4 specific thing. Virtually all it's users (many are probably just browser-spoofs anyway), can at no charge and close to zero effort upgrade to Netscape7, which is just another mozilla really.
4) If you have (minimal) technical knowledge try looking at the source yourself. Sometimes you might be surprised from the ease of finding problems, and you'll be able to offer direct solution to the web developer (remember: be constructive - not didactic). On mozilla, just enable Tools/Web Development/Javascript Console and you'll be able to see the error messages. Clicking on the message will get you to the relenant line in the page source (on most modern browsers you can always use "view source" on any page).
As a relevant example, look at the following extract from a popular Israeli cellular company's site:
<input type="text" name="oldCellNum" maxlength="6" size="5" ID="Text1" value="" id="oldCellNum" onkeyDown="onlyNumeric(this)">
Now, you don't need to know much about programming , DOM or html to figure out that having two (different!) "id"'s for a single tag is probably just a bug (the fact that IE does not complain about it does not change this fact) - sometimes fixing these little trivial things can enable many new linux/mac/etc. users access their site. If you tell the webmaster this fact in an appropriate manner, they might actually appreciate it.
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