Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), W3C Pages and Macs

To the Group -

At home I am a stead-fast "Windows" type but at work, I am generally on a
Mac - a G3 Tower running OS-X with no Classic or other operating system on
the same machine.  Not sure whether we've discussed the issue but Mac's and
probably more likely the browsers created for Mac's DO NOT render certain
pages that were authored using CSS.

I tested the links or one link from today's Techniques Audio Conference
(http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/WCAG20/WD-WCAG20-GATEWAY-20030723.html) and here's
what I found with multiple browsers:

Microsoft's Internet Explorer:  Yielded the text very well.  The floating
buttons on the right that would link one back to the Table of Contents did
not render (showed up as a missing graphic).

Apple's Safari:  The text was all over the place - basically, no usable
rendering at all.  

OmniWeb:  Yielded good text.  Same flaw as Internet Explorer (floating
button showed up as a missing graphic).

Mozilla:  Same as "big brother" - Netscape below.  Mozilla and Netscape did,
however, render the floating buttons for anchoring back to the Table of
Contents.  

Netscape:  Table of Contents flowed to the right and off of the screen -
rest of the text (non-hyperlinked) was okay.

Opera: Good text rendering but floating buttons did NOT render properly.

My Concern -

I am not going to recommend one browser over another as not a single one in
this simple, non-scientific low budget experiment rendered the identified
page correctly.  This same page
(http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/WCAG20/WD-WCAG20-GATEWAY-20030723.html) did not
have similar issues on a Windows machine with various web browsers.

I recall some months back, we discussed the importance of assuring that web
accessibility cross the operating system divide and we needed to look at how
things render on Mac's.  If we make recommendations to authors that they use
CSS, we need to be assured that the user agents on varying platforms
actually support pages equally well.

Suggestion:

More people testing stuff out on Mac's and making some of this "stuff" known
to the rest of the group.  Again, I cannot be sure but feel this is a user
agent issue but it is still a concern that needs to be addressed.

Question:

Has anyone else encountered this same issue?  Anyone know if the User Agent
Working Group has discussed this?  Your thoughts and possible solution are
appreciated.  

Thanks for listening

Doyle Burnett


Doyle Burnett
Education and Training Specialist
Multiple Disabilities Program
Special Education Service Agency
dburnett@sesa.org
Www.sesa.org
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Received on Wednesday, 27 August 2003 18:53:33 UTC