[thelist] em's , CSS, aol - etc

[Bob Meetin]

Shocked describes it - I visited a future client whose office PC is 
running win98 (with a 15" monitor) and connects with dialup through 
AOL.  I had planned on demo-ing some menus, calendars, image galleries, 
etc, but couldn't without offering embarrassing apologies.. 

My site (CSS-based) looked awful.  Fonts defined in em's were perhaps 3x 
or 4x proportionate size, columns dropped out of place, CSS flyout menus 
(using csshover.htc), did not work, much more (runtime errors???).  I'm 
sure that they must have customized the browser font sizes (the 
resolution was set to 800x600), yet not knowing the AOL browser, I could 
not figure out how to reset the font, and not sure that I should 
anyhow.  This client is in the process of re-outfitting the office, so 
some of this will become moot shortly.

The question... in general, as a developer/designer, how prepared should 
we be for relatively extreme situations like this?  -Bob