This is why most of us are now using default form styling or a very simple approach (fieldset, legend, and possibly submit button).

Cameron Adams makes a few good points at: http://www.themaninblue.com/writing/perspective/2004/04/28/ , and of course - remember that his example button looks different in IE, Safari and Firefox! While this article is old, it covers most salient points and provides a simple approach that works well. Having said that, his 'Submit/Go' button is labelled as '>>', and the page options as \/, and these have two different effects (one shows a menu, one takes you to another page). Consistency is key - but remember that users usually browse in only one browser at a time.

John Hancock
identity.net.au

PS. On a side-note, can we keep platform discussion to standards and implementation? 'My computer is bigger/better/faster/stronger' is fairly non-relevant to WSG and most of us aren't on the list to receive that kind of post. The cheapest way of getting a Mac testing environment is an older tower running OS X, and a G3 (or older) running IE5.5 if you care about these things. Personally I run an older mac for Safari 2 testing and older Firefox versions (1.5), and a newer one running Safari 3 and Firefox 2, alongside a PC running Safari, Opera, Firefox and IE7, with IE6 in the usual VPC, and also on an older box with remote desktop. If you're retentive about testing, then you may also wish to run a suite with flash turned off, a suite with javascript turned off and one with CSS turned off - not to mention the usual


On 14/01/2008, at 12:47 PM, John Horner wrote:

can I safely develop in non Mac versions and expect
my web sites to behave the same on the Mac?

Behave? Yes. But...

I don't think anyone's made this point yet -- one key difference between
the platforms is the display of form elements.

Elements like buttons and select menus and checkboxes, etc., pretty much
belong to the operating system and the browser is only borrowing them.
If your design has an expectation that those elements can be finely
controlled, cross-platform, then you might get an unpleasant surprise.

For instance, if you have documentation which says "click on the button which looks like this [image of the button from a Windows browser]" then
Mac users may not have a button which looks like that.

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kind regards,

John Hancock
Identity
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