David Scotson

Although you always have to test in multiple browsers, the general rule of thumb is that it is much easier to create a design that works in Mozilla first (i.e. is close to following the standards) and then tweak it to account for oddities in Internet Explorer (including older versions as each has it's quirks) and any other browsers you wish to support. Doing it the other way round and trying to patch a design created around flawed standards implementation will give you far more headaches.

As an incentive, Mozilla also provides many useful tools (both built-in and extensions) that make life easier for web developers. See http://gemal.dk/mozilla/mozdev.html

And yes, :hover applies to more than just links, the following article talks about the errors that this assumption can lead to: http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2003/arbitrary-hover/

A similar tale unfolded recently when feedster updated and they decided that they couldn't afford to support IE 5 on the Mac:

A ex-developer of IE Mac discovers this:
http://tantek.com/log/2004/07.html#d15t2116

A mozilla developer chimes in:
http://www.jluster.org/node/214

The feedster web developer responds:
http://scott.feedster.com/archives/4_Joining+the+Dark+Side+-OR-+Is+Mac+IE+5+Support+Worth+1,500.html

And a standards guru responds in turn:
http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2004/07/17/scorning-standards/

But to be honest the original article inspires me to ask one question: if you really need such rich GUI functionality in a managed intranet situation then why not develop those applications in Java?

All you are doing by using IE specific extensions is locking yourself into the Windows desktop and avoiding the opportunity to increase security and cut costs at the same time by moving to a linux based workstation in the future.

You'd need to edit every instance of a submit button in the HTML to give it a class. This would allow it to be styled separately from the other input elements, and then you'd have to add the CSS too.

I don't know if it's worth the effort just to have different coloured submit buttons especially as it may be confusing if you miss any (users may wonder about the significance of differently coloured buttons) and grepping for type=submit (with and without quotes) returns quite a number of results. However, since Martin is currently evaluating libraries to generate HTML forms, he may want to add this feature as an evaluation criteria.

You can get an idea of the techniques and possibilities from this article: http://www.sitepoint.com/article/1166

When I click on the link at the bottom of a Moodle forum post email (just below the text: "To add your reply via the website, click on this link") I get the message: "Sorry, guests are not allowed to post". And I find that I am indeed logged in as a guest.

I don't remember this happening before. Has something changed? Or am I doing something different?

That's a very good point. I'd forgotten about the HTML editor as we have it switched off for everyone (as it's not particularly accessible, either to use or with regards to it's output).

Of the two browsers Don mentioned, though both are produced by the same group of people, I would steer people towards Firefox (on Mac or PC) as the difference in ease of use is night and day, particularly as Firefox strives to look and act like a native program on each platform.

I should note that Safari has a built in spell-checker for text areas, which FireFox lacks, so depending on the level of the students they may prefer correct spelling over multi-coloured text.