there was/is no standard for the way that HTML is *interpreted

I take your point, tsuwm (and yours xara).
It is bloody tough just allowing for Netscape and IE (although I'd have to say that IE actually makes better use of HTML standards than Netscape - roll on Netscape 6, perhaps).

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Still, with the assistance of people like http://www.htmlhelp.com, http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/ and, of course, with the odd reference to http://www.w3.org, it's certainly within the capacities of even individuals to take on most comers adequately. Maybe the resulting site won't be as flashy as you'd like, but that may well be a price worth paying.

If you don't have identical platforms (PC/Mac/Unix), then you can always find someone who has that kit and ask them to check out your site. But platform differences tend to be less significant than browser differences in my (admittedly limited) experience.
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