Here's an interesting reply from the moderator of the "AspNetAnyQuestionIsOk" list at yahoogroups:

Subject: Re: Question on the Display of an ASP.NET Page
From: "Charles M. Carroll"
Date: 14 Jan 2004 10:35:50 -0000

http://developer.apple.com/internet/bestwebdev.html
is a great reference on such matters.

At 02:06 PM 1/13/2004, you wrote:
>Hi All,
>How can we prevent the controls and fonts in a page to be the same
>for all the browsers. I created a page. But the same page appears a
>little differently in another browser. How to stop these floating
>fonts in a page. The fonts are coming out of the Label when viewed in
>a different browser.

Hrm. Apple has the best reference on making crossplatform code? Surprising. Not today's answer to Webmonkey (which used to be awfully good) or some set of Netscape pages, but Apple.

But after looking at the pages, sure enough, all the references are there. Actually an awfully useful page.

The second issue that the thread on the list raises is that .NET is, as I've noted/predicted/whatever, bringing people to the net who don't have html skills. .NET's web controls make for very nice looking GUIs in specific versions of IE on Windows, but after you reach a certain point, all bets are off. And .NET doesn't give a net-newbie the tools to make things right. Kinda like all those ADO wizards in VB6 that hid so much from you that, as soon as something wasn't quite right, you were left starting from scratch. (As a quick aside, those issues seem to be fixed. Data binding controls, at least in Windows.Forms, is very straightforward now and includes hooks all over the place to grab as low-level an object as you'd care to, for the most part.)

And, of course, the third issue raise is why The Digest Handler isn't parsing up the individual emails quite right, often making the quoted reply an entry of its own. This is a known bug, and some slack company needs to get off of its slack arse and get that bug fixed. Were said company's employees all not employed elsewhere as well, I feel confident that said bug wouldn't exist. I'm also relatively confident that said employees' families, were said employees to have dropped their other jobs, would be very very hungry right now.