I’m starting to redesign and add pages to this site. (not online yet – won’t be for a while – relax – LOL) For the first page I’ve worked on, I’m using a non-repeating background image as defined in a style sheet – naturally it doesn’t work right in Netscape 4.7, the background image scrolls AND the color is off. BUT it looks good in IE and Mozilla (thanks tom!) and Opera, and works in NS6.0 even if the color is still off. I mention all of this because in the past I’ve been a minimalist – using really basic designs out of (laziness to learn much about CSS and) a desire to make my web page appear ‘correctly’ to everyone who might come. But this is a problem we also ran into in the tech. writing field. How far backward compatible do you make something? How many platforms do you accomodate?

I COULD of course use javascript to figure out which browser people are using and then send them to the appropriate versions of pages, but frankly, that’s waaaay too much work for me. Especially considering that I only have two browsers that will run on our little PC here, and one is an older version at that. SO… I may have to start putting those little warnings on pages “This page best viewed with Opera, Mozilla, or IE6.0” Oh, the inner torment! Oh, the conflicts in my soul to be artistic AND a perfectionist. *grin* Ahhh well, screw it. As a good friend of mine used to say, “Sometimes you just gotta say… what the hell.”