As a newly-christened Mac user, I'm sometimes appalled when a website I go to says I must be using IE 6 and Windows in order to access it (Wells Fargo Online Bill Pay comes to mind). And it's not a matter of actual, factual compatibility. A website knows what browser you're using because the website sends an HTTP_USER_AGENT request to your computer, and your computer responds by telling the website what browser it's using and what operating system it's using. Some web browsers -- most notably Opera -- can "spoof" as USER_AGENT request, responding with whatever you want. By default, Opera identifies itself as IE 6. And does this mean the website doesn't work? No! It works fine! It wasn't a precaution inserted there by the webmaster because he knew that there would be compatibility problems between his website and anything that wasn't IE 6. It was inserted because he was lazy and didn't want to have to create several stylesheets for several browsers. (Remember the good old days when websites had phrasing like "This webpage best viewed at 800x600 resolution using Internet Explorer 5"? Well, those days are gone, but some people still think we're living in 1998.

FEMA is one of those people. On its website, you can get information about disaster relief, but only if you're running IE 6 on a Windows machine:

My 90-year old mother sat out Katrina in her brother's home next door in Diamondhead, MS, about eight miles from the Mississippi coast where the hurricane's eye hit. They survived without injury but with massive destruction to their homes, and my mother has lost most of her possesions. I brought her to my home in California yesterday and this morning went to the FEMA website to register to start the assistance process.

To my dismay, our Federal emergency agency requires Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, and only IE 6, to use the website for disaster assistance. I don't want to be political about this, but this smacks of a serious leadership failure that the use of the Internet is reserved for only the Windows community. I will reserve my opinion of the administration for the op-ed pages, but I want to vent my dismay about this to the rest of the Mac community. I hope other Mac users let their political reps, newspapers and other media know of this marginalization. [...]

This person, Gary Mullins from MacInTouch, is right. The Internet is not a Windows community. In fact, given its structure, it's a *NIX community (Linux runs about half of the world's Internet servers.) As Matt can tell you, Internet Explorer isn't standards-compliant because Microsoft decided to make up its own standards, and dammit, the rest of the Internet will follow its standards, not W3C's standards.