I’m attending a lecture where you are supposed to check the material discussed prior attending every week. I’d be happy to do it but cannot access the website. The teacher is a some kind of fanatic pro-Mac person and so the site is done with Mac.
Is it possible that this site is somewhat/totally uncompatible with Win98/IE6? I’m 99.9 % sure that the url is right.
Hmm, I’m running Opera 5.12 and I couldn’t get the site to load. According to my browser it was unable to locate the site, which with Opera, generally means that it couldn’t find the site. Perhaps the server is down. (Opera is sometimes unable to load a site, but usually, when I get an “unable to connect” message from it, it means that there’s nothing there for it to connect to.)
The site is completely down. I don’t think using a Mac would help. (I’m using IE6 in Windows).
That’s my guess too but it’d be nice is someone with a Mac would confirm this.
Mac user here, using IE 5.
I get the “A connection failure has occurred” error, which I believe to be IE-speak for something being wrong on the server side of things.
Just MHO, but I think it’s unlikely that the fact the site was made on a Mac has anything to do with the problem we’re having. In my experience, it’s been Macs that have problems accessing some websites, not Windows. (I’d give some examples, but their URLs elude me at the moment.)
Can you get a confirmation on the URL?
I pinged the address and it does respond, but the web server is obviously down. Nothing you can do from this end except maybe to email the administrator and hwill have to restart it.
As AudreyK said, creating a site with a Mac is not a cause for compatability issues – if anything, Mac-created sites tend to be more compatable for users, because Macs don’t have as many proprietary plug-ins that Windows web developers have access to. It’s the fanatical Windows-only web sites that you should be worried about.
(Then, of course, there are web sites with bad HTML which will render on some browsers and not others. For instance, Netscape 4.x won’t draw an improperly-coded table, but IE will take a wild stab and draw it anyway. It’s convenient for users, but encourages sloppy HTML design)
It’s not a Windows/Mac thing. It’s a Microsoft IE vs. other browsers thing. MSIE on the Mac has most of the same “features” as the Windows version, so you can abuse and misuse the standards on either OS.
For page-rendering issues, you’re right; IE has more-or-less parity between the Windows and Macintosh versions. One of the reasons I finally switched to IE from Netscape was because I was running into more and more sloppy pages that assumed the user was using IE and wouldn’t render on Netscape as a result.
On the other hand, in terms of platform-specific issues, there are definitely proprietary plug-ins that are available only for Windows and not for other platforms. For non-Windows users, once you get out of Quicktime/RealPlayer/Flash, it’s almost a crapshoot if the plugin you need is available or not. Part of this is because the developers are too lazy, and part of it is because Microsoft has been pressuring folks to use their proprietary ActiveX system to develop IE plugins (the newest Windows IE supports only ActiveX plugins, which left third parties like Apple, AOL, RealPlayer, and others scrambling to retool their plugins for it).
As I said before, it’s the fanatical Windows-only web sites that you should be worried about.