[KLUG Members] Re: Calling all Linux novices: -- MS Office on non-Windows platforms ...

[Justin Buist]

> Windows.  MS IE for Mac doesn't read the great majority of "IE-only" sites
> either.  In fact, Mozilla on Win32 will read a lot of, and even Mozilla on Mac
> will a number of, "IE-only" sites that IE for Mac won't.

I know this is an 'Office' thread, but the browser is probably one of the most
important pieces of an office these days, so I'll take the time to comment on
this, as I've been 'web guy' of sort for a few years now.

IE on the Mac is not IE at all really.  It doesn't behave -anywhere- close to
what IE on the Win32 platform does.  I was involved with a project once that
had the requirement of running in IE 5.0+ browsers, and you should have seen
the effort it took to get IE 5.0+ PC code running on a Mac IE 5.0.  It was a 
re-write, due to the original decision that VbScript would be used for client
side scripting.  To the best of my knowledge there is -still- no way to get
VbScript running client-side on a Mac.

No, the VBScript decision wasn't made by me ... and I wasn't around when
it happened either.

At any rate, after looking into the details of Mac IE I found out that it
really doesn't share any common code with the Win32 IE at all, or at least
not any significant portion.  It's basically a re-write of the rendering
engine from what I gather.  As the above poster noted, it's far more likely
that Mozilla on the Mac will act more like IE on a Win32 platform than Mac IE
will.  I saw that happen plenty of times, which resulted in a total port of
the application in question.  How did I (and the other member tasked with this)
go about it?  Code it to JavaScript/DOM2 standards, test on every browser,
and then pray that Mac IE handled it right.  So long as IE, Mozilla (PC & Mac)
worked it was very likely that Mac IE would too - and we were right.  In the
end the client ended up with a very standards compliant site that worked on
more than they originally had asked for simply because that was the only
way to be sure it would work on every platform we had originally promised.

As I understand, IE 6.0 for the Win32 platform actually pulled a fair number
of ideas, or implementations, from the IE 5.0 on the Mac due to it having a
better security model.  That's kind of scarey to me -- why weren't the Mac IE
writers involved with IE all along?  Oh well.  

This is my anecdotal evidence showing just how portable MS formats are between
Mac and Win32.  This alone leads me to beleive that there's no way in the world
that MS software on Mac will ever be compatible with the Win32 counterparts.

So, in short, even when MS is trying to interpret a known standard they get it
wrong when going from platform to platform.  I don't see any reason to beleive
that it would be any better when they code to an internal, and often changing,
standard either.

Justin Buist