"Half the industry uses Mac. So the Mac compatibility (multi-platform) is desired."

I was surprised, I'd rather say shocked, when I heard the requirement from the client.

I'm currently working on a project called "Theatre Script Online Database" as a Project Manager.

Its main purpose is to distribute acting script to the actresses and actors through the Internet, saving costs of copying and papers.

Back in Korea, I guess more than 95% of the people, who are not in the computer industry, use PCs.

They also use only Microsoft Internet Explorer as their primary web browser, which makes me, as a web developer, never need to care about any other platform when I work, even though I built everything to the web standards.

The world is big, the situation over in America is little bit different.

SAL Computer Lab, in Salvatori Computer Science Center, is filled with half PCs, another half Macs, and few Solaris machines.

It's not like one platform has monopoly, but competes each other.

We, the project team, finally decided to make it web-based, compatible to all the major browsers.


My friends in Korea, be open and get out of the jail of Microsoft.

Google announced its first web browser - Chrome.

What they claim is that current web browsers are not well-tuned for rich web applications, and Chrome is developed from scratch to run those applications such as Google docs.

There's only Windows version by now, I hope Google keep working on the other platforms - Mac and Linux.

I'm working on the U:Desk project at this moment, and I really have to say this.

"Microsoft Internet Explore Sucks!"

I do understand that not every web browser perfectly follows the web standards, suggested by W3C, but IE seems like it seriously does not.

We, U:Desk team, test U:Desk on number of browsers such as Firefox, Safari, and of course IE. IE is the only browser that cannot show the web pages how we wanted them to show, while the other browsers do just fine.

These are the "W3C XHTML 1.0 valid" U:Desk snapshots.

U:Desk on Firefox 3

U:Desk on Internet Explorer 6

The bad news is that IE is the market leader, meaning more than half of the Internet users are using IE, so we have to look for a way for U:Desk to look fine on IE, by not following the web standards.

The web standards are not mandatorial, but they need to be kept for efficient web contents development.

I hope the next version of IE, which MS says it will consider the web standards, would keep the standards.