From�my perspective, the whole point of coding to standards means that it doesn't matter what browser the user is viewing your site in - they should be able to read your content regardless.
Whilst a little idealistic, yes that's the whole point of standards. We can only hope that one day we don't even have to TEST the site in multiple browsers -- it will just work. But that's not today.
"They can still read your content" is also pushing it a little, because in reality, the Mac IE5 user will see the broken styles, and *possibly* be able to read / access the page. If they can't, they'll either turn off their style sheets to access the unstyled content, or walk away.
Sadly, my guess is the latter for 99.9% of that community.
I certainly do hide my CSS from Netscape 4.x, but being a Mac user, I've always attempted to pull IE5 into line -- which means no hiding. There are ways to target JUST IE5Mac in your style sheets, and it can also be done with JavaScript or server-side scripting like PHP and ASP. For IE on Windows, I use IE conditional comments to directly target IE versions.
I guess my point is I'd try EVERYTHING I can (JS, PHP, CSS hacks, etc) before giving up / hiding the style sheets / accepting a broken style-sheet on IE5Mac (or any other popular browser).
I would however not embed all this mess in my main style-sheet -- I'd either separate it into targetted style sheets (eg ie5mac.css), or at the very least comment the hell out of it so that in 5 years time, when IE Mac and most IE Win versions are irrelevant, it's easy to trim their bloat out of your CSS.
As already stated, there's minimal choices for Mac OS9 users, and anyone still on IE5Win probably has a good reason too :)
--- Justin French http://indent.com.au
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