Cross-platform compatibility…ugh

My friend Kirsten e-mailed me earlier today, and one of the things she mentioned was that my website looks “completely different” on a mac and on a wintel box. This got me a little curious, as I try to make sure that things are fairly compatible across the platforms — with one caveat. As I mentioned in a post last July, I’ve switched my layout from a table-based layout (pros: works [mostly] in all browsers on all platforms; cons: kludgy, browser-intensive to render, and considered poor layout by current web standards). By doing this, I’ve more or less nuked the appearance of my site for older and non-compliant browsers, but I wanted the simplicity of CSS layout for site redesigns and to be able to say that I’ve got a truly compliant site.

However, as I know things can be a little tweaky from browser to browser on the two platforms, I decided to try a little experiment. I set up a link (the one mentioned in my previous post) that uses JavaScript to open a 800x600 window (considered the minimum necessary screen width for designing these days, as so few people run their computers at 640x480 anymore) with no toolbars or anything to get in the way. I then tested my main page under 10 different browsers, 7 on the Mac and 3 on the PC, to see how they appeared. The results (updated on 02.20.02 and 02.27.02) are in the rest of this post… have been deleted, as I didn’t want to bother with re-uploading all of the graphics to the new server. The end result was essentially that Mozilla-based browsers worked great, IE didn’t, and Opera, Omniweb, and iCab had definite issues.