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Netscape 4: Government Standard or Urban Legend?

I can’t believe that it’s 2004 and we’re still hearing anecdotal stories about how certain government agencies have standardized on Netscape 4 and require all agency related web development to support this archaic browser. This, of course, creates a trickle down effect where developers believe they must support Netscape 4 because so many government agencies still use this browser. The result is that developers are afraid to design with web standards because of Netscape 4’s notoriously poor support for CSS.

I have to say that I’m skeptical about these claims. Are these agencies completely unaware of Mozilla and the fact that it’s FREE? How do they rationalize standardizing on seven year old technology when the best web browser on the planet is available at no cost?

If possible, I’d like to debunk this myth once and for all so we can all move forward with accessible, standards-based design. If anyone has hard evidence of government agencies that still use Netscape 4, please post a brief comment here. I’d like to get to the bottom of this once and for all.

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Exporting Word to xHTML

I’ve spent a fair amount of time recently marveling over Microsoft Word’s complete inability to generate clean xHTML, or even clean HTML for that matter. It is the year 2004 after all — you would think a company with Microsoft’s resources would be able to figure this stuff out.

Microsoft’s latest offering, Word 2003, features the ability to export to numerous formats including XML and two varieties of HTML (filtered and regular). I have to admit that I held out some small hope that ‘filtered’ would produce the sort of clean code we’ve all been waiting for. No luck, the resulting HTML still included embeded ‘mso’ class references on every element. I can understand, and even appreciate, the applications attempt to generate a document specific stylesheet. I’d appreciate it even more if I could turn that ‘feature’ off.
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