Mozilla has emerged from its long nuclear winter to become a pillar of the Linux desktop. Alpha geeks everywhere (including Sun and Microsoft) are running Safari on their PowerBooks. But here's the reality check you knew was coming: cross-browser and cross-OS compatibility remains nearly as elusive as ever. I won't bore you with the details. Let's just say that testing CSS and JavaScript effects on the three major OS platforms, in six different browsers, isn't a good use of anybody's time. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
As my blog entries this week indicate, I'm still deeply contemplating the state of the browser art. It seems kind of retro to yearn for cross-browser and cross-OS support of advanced standards but, when the pieces of the puzzle fall into place -- as XSLT did for me this week -- it can still give me the same kind of buzz I got when the 4.0 browsers (was it really 1997?) delivered CSS, client certs, and rich mail/news clients.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2003/06/07.html#a714