Mixed review of the new Adobe Reader 6.0. When installing on both XP and 98 machines with previous versions of Acrobat Reader 5.1.0 and Adobe Acrobat 5.0.5, the new version didn't replace the old version of Acrobat Reader, thus PDFs still opened with the old version, although the new version would work, but you had to manually select it instead of the associations handling this for you. And what's the whole NetOpsSystem's FEAD Optimizer about? Like that was necessary (can anyone say "slow"?!!) Two thumbs down on the installation. One nice new feature (at least I've never noticed it in the older version) is the "snapshot" feature which lets you select a portion of a page and print it off directly, great for graphs, sections, maps, etc. Two thumbs up on the new features!

UPDATE: I guess you *could* actually do the "snapshot" in Acrobat Reader 5.1.0, but it just wasn't called "snapshot", it was called "graphics select" instead.

I finally figured out how to do liquid layouts using valid CSS2 and XHTML 1.0. I know, I'm a little behind, but hey. I'm glad to get rid of HTML with all it's quirks, but the learning curve is kinda funny for XHTML. On the surface, there's an illusion of being nothing more than stricter HTML 4.0, but dig a little deeper and you find out that many of the ideas, practices, and miscellaneous things you're accustomed to doing "the old fashioned way" aren't valid in XHTML, such as many simple things like <link> tags within <noscript> tags, unescaped inline JavaScript (need external files for those), no tables for layout (must use CSS), accessibility issues are huge (different media types in CSS), everything must validate (no one really cared with HTML), not using <p> and <blockquote> tags for spacing, etc. There are some of the old familiar traits, however, lest we long for the nostalgic browser wars - incompatibilities amongst the browsers' CSS support is probably the biggest. Oddly enough, Opera 7.11 and MSIE 6 SP1 are both fairly similar to each other in this respect (from my experience - I know others will disagree), whilst all the Gecko-based Mozilla 1.4b/K-Meleon 0.7 SP1/Netscape 7.02/Camino 0.7/Galeon/Epiphany/Firebird 0.6/Safari browsers are all similar. Using validated stylesheets, it's amazing how differently the same page will display in these two different camps. At least it's a problem that we're all used to - at least no one uses NN4, Netscape 6, or MSIE 5 any more!