Re: Porting web apps to Mozilla Mac -- guidance needed

dw wrote:
>     - What are some guidelines for our developers to follow to make Mac
> users happy? We heard about not using ActiveX and avoiding client-side
> VBScript.

You should already be avoiding these things for compatibility with 
non-IE browsers on Windows.

>     - On many sites, they have a minimum set of requirements to support
> (usually browsers), with Netscape 4.7x and IE 4 being as low as they go. How
> about the Mac side? What are some minimum requirements for us to support as
> far as browsers are concerned, OS, hardware, etc.?
>     - What OS and browser do most users have today on the Mac?
>     - Is it a good idea to just develop for Mozilla, or make the sites
> compatible with Safari as well? Is there a big difference?

Mozilla behaves pretty much the same as it does on other platforms, so 
if you're already keeping Mozilla & Netscape 6/7 compatibility in mind 
you should concentrate your Mac-specific effort on Internet Explorer and 
Safari. (As always, fonts will *never* be exactly the same. Don't count 
on pixel-perfect sameness.)

Safari goes to great effort to be standards compliant and compatible 
with both Mozilla and IE/Win, but things don't always match 100%. It's 
broadly similar to Konqueror on Linux/Unix as they share backend code 
(KHTML). Safari has shipped as the default browser on Macs in the last 
year-ish, but doesn't run on the old Mac OS. Older Macs won't have it 
and are more likely to be running Internet Explorer (or sometimes even 
Netscape 4.x).

Internet Explorer on the Mac is *completely* unrelated to Internet 
Explorer on Windows; they have different capabilities and different bugs.

If you're supporting Netscape 4.7x on Windows, you should at least 
support back to IE/Mac 5.x. (5.1 is the latest that runs on the old Mac OS)

>     - We're a state-"funded" university (with "funded" being somewhat of a
> joke); should we purchase a Mac for in-house testing, or are there tools
> that can check compatibility -- like validation tools that can take a page
> and say if it will work/look okay on a Mac?

I'd strongly recommend you get a real Mac to test with if you can. 
Automatic validation is unlikely to be possible as the issue is whether 
things work the way you intended, and the computer can't tell what you 
intended.

List price for an eMac is US$799, you should be able to get a better 
deal as an educational institution.

>     - What is a good Web site with info about Mac Web development
> questions/requirements? We've found some sites on Google, but they're about
> general Web development as opposed to focusing on Mac development.

A few Safari-specific snippets: 
http://developer.apple.com/internet/safari/safari_faq.html

General notes on browser compatibility with various (D)HTML, CSS, JS 
bits, including Mac browsers, are available at various sites including:
http://www.quirksmode.org/

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)