Hi,
30 mintues ago I got a call from a user of our site (a department in a major public health institution) to say our site "doesn't work" for him. I established that he is using IE5/Mac (OS9). ... He took extreme umbrage ...
You've experienced a web developer rite of passage - "phone call from enraged user", specifically the mac user variety ;) To see what went wrong for them, you could run your site through browsercam (www.browsercam.com). The free trial will show you how it works and give you an idea of what your page looks like in IE5.2/Mac. Personally I see this as evidence of why we should serve entirely unstyled (or very simply styled) pages out to IE5.2 - pages remain functional without falling foul of design issues. The user can't say they "don't work", although they might think the pages "look boring". The only exception would be a site with a massive proportion of IE5.2/Mac which justifies the cost of writing the extra stylesheet. We've actually removed IE5/Mac from our supported list and onto our "actively recommend you upgrade list". We generally do that for browsers with known rendering, scripting and security issues - for IE5.2 it was mostly due to Microsoft formally ending its life. If a security issue is found, it won't be patched; and we feel it's an unreasonable risk to users and advise them accordingly. Still, none of that helps when the user is already upset. cheers, Ben -- --- <http://www.200ok.com.au/> --- The future has arrived; it's just not --- evenly distributed. - William Gibson ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
