Assuming that iWeb 08 templates for MacOSX have not been pre-tested with major browsers will save you a lot of headaches. If your only visitors will be MacOSX Safari users than you are going to be okay. If you wish other browsers to view and print your website than be ready to do some grueling tests and dig into the source code. For example, using the Comic template and visiting the site with Internet Explorer 7 gives you graphics that are not correctly aligned, printing that does not work and in some cases jammed or inaccessible web pages.

After may hours swimming through the source code and trying different things (not helped by my MacOSX Leopard upgrade making websharing disfunctional) I finally discovered that it was the shadows in this template that were causing all of the problems in their DIV containers. After deactivating shadows in the inspector for every object and text box for every page the site could suddenly print in Internet Explorer. There were a couple of objects (some arrows) that I could not disable the shadows for so I simply took screenshots and saved those objects as jpgs to replace the objects with shadows.

So it is possible to have a compatible website with at least the Comic template but be prepared to test and test and test since it appears that Apple did not.

Note, since I am not a Apple employee I cannot guarantee that tests were not made on other browsers but if they were they must have been subcontracted to Microsoft.

Tags: compatibility, microsoft