Macintosh DHTML Javascript - worth it?

Should we bother trying to make it work?

[blaze]

I have a friend who is working for a small client developing some rather complex drop down DHTML menus.

Unfortunately, she's running into a lot of roadblocks making it work on a macintosh. So therefore, I have a few questions for you:

a) What can she tell her boss to help convince him that it might not be cost affective to get to work on the mac?

b) If it must work on the Mac, what browser and version is it reasonable to get it to work on and which are not reasonable?

I realise that as Mac users you are probably fairly religious about making stuff work on the mac.

However, my friend is not a mac expert and is getting rather frustrated. She is already at the point where the contract is pretty much a loss but because she's one of those people who keeps her word she's still working at it.

If you can look at it from that perspective and come up with a few good answers to the top two questions, she would really appreciate it.

Many thanks ahead of time (and probably quite a few after!)

[timster]

To come up with a reasonable philosophy on this, you need to consider the purpose and audience of the website.

If this is a brochure site for the general public, be aware that Mac users tend to be well off, computer literate, and very touchy about websites not working on their Macs. (For example, a few years my sons switched with brand of miniature car they bought based on which website worked on Macs. Dad did not make them do it; they were alienated consumers all by themselves.)

But down to brass tacks. When you say "doesn't work on Macs" what browser(s) do you mean? I've found there's much more difference between IE and Netscape on this front than there is between platforms using the same browser. Safari, Apple's Web browser OS X, works a lot like IE as far as DHTML goes.

One other tidbit -- many of the Mac users I know are willing to boot up a new browser if your website requires it (assuming they have a real need to see your site).

<addendum>
Oops, I see you did already ask about browsers. You might consider these:

Safari is a common Mac browser that (as I mentioned) works a lot like IE. Downside is it only runs on the Mac OS X, not OS 9.

Mac IE is a discontinued product, but it still the choice of a lot of Mac browsers. It doesn't work exactly like MSIE.

Netscape 7 seems to work pretty well, and just anecdotally it seems to me people are starting to pick it back up, since Mac IE has been discontinued.

[mivox]

I use Firefox on my OSX Mac (IE as a backup for sites I need to use that blow up Firefox... which is very rare). Tried Safari... HATED it. Recommended Firefox to a total Mac newbie who bought a Powerbook on my recommendation. He stopped using Safari immediately afterwards.

I use Opera5 & IE5 on my OS9 Mac.

I don't know anyone who uses Netscape on a newer Mac, although Firefox is a distant cousin.

Cross-browser/cross-platform issues are the #1 reason I quit using DHTML menus and almost all javascript. I haven't found any functionality that's worth the hassle of coding it for full compatibility.

[gfguthrie]

Getting DHTML/JS to work is mainly a function of the three different ways to access the style properties of an element, and less a function of catering to a specific browser:

document.getElementById('divId').style
document.all('divId').style
document.layers('divId')

There are some Mac specific things, like Mac IE 5 not recognizing the 'undefined' keyword. But the JavaScript engine should report back errors like that (and then you fix them).

Your friend should test Safari and IE 5 on the Mac, all the other browsers behave similarly enough on Windows that you don't need to test them again on the Mac unless you really want to (in my experience).

Are you sure that it's that the code doesn't work on any Mac browsers, or is it rather that it only works in IE for Windows (and not, say, Mozilla on Windows)?