MAC issues with perl-cgi?

Please excuse me if this sounds totally stupid. I've been coding perl/cgi for over 2 1/2 years, but this is the first time I've run into this problem.

I built a real estate site over a year ago that runs on a UNIX server, and uses perl/cgi to dynamically build many of the listing pages (some of the pages on the site are static, and were built by someone else). It has been running successfully over this past year, without any problems.

The site owner received an email from a MAC user recently, who was upset that once he left their title page (static home page) - everything else displayed "machine code". I had the site owner contact the user to find out what browser and version he was on. His reply was:

"I am using Internet Explorer 4.5 on a imacSE400mhz operating on System 9.0 software"

I know nothing about MACs (I don't even know if IE for MACs is different from IE for PCs), and have not had this type of problem reported before. Can anyone provide insight into this problem - and whether it is simply an isolated case or is common with MAC users? It doesn't make sense to me that the html produced from a cgi script would be turned into garbage when displayed on a MAC! Although I've had to account for browser differences (IE vs Netscape) when coding, I've never had to be concerned with the user hardware platform. Should I be?

Thanks in advance for any help,
sharon

hi friend,

thats really strange.
i have never heard this kind of problem before.


but all i can say is that there should not be any problem with script. if script is working fine for PC and IF it is generating proper HTML output then i dont see any reason wat so ever for the script not to run properly on MAC.


may be the browser of that particular person has some bugs. it may be sening wrong request...may be the parsing is not working properly.

btw wat do u mean to say by 'machine code'.

so u dont need to worry actually..it may be some paricular moment that user's browser messed up something....

thats all i can say...
btw if u have given the site url , some mac owners may have tried it out...
i would advice u to post the url of the same site for checking things out..

thats it,

take care,
jd

After checking around and determining that no one else had heard of anything like this (along with your response), we had someone at a local newspaper check it out for us. They all had MACs and no one had a problem viewing the site. So, a message was sent to the person who complained - and it was suggested that he upgrade to IE 5.0+.
I have no idea what he meant by "machine code" - I was curious myself. The site owner was communicating with him, not me, so we didn't get much detail.

So - thanks for your response. It's good to know I'm not going crazy. It's bad enough to deal with browser and version differences when programming, but if I had to deal with different user hardware platforms - then it was time to get out of the business!

Thanks again,
Sharon

ok sharon,

as expected u were not at fault .
good....


and yeah its always tiresome to deal with all browser, versions and stuff.

i wonder wat amazing work ppl have done if they had not to worry about these things....( cross broser probs , cross platform probs )


anyways we can only wish for a COMMON standard..

best of luck for future work,
jd