Online banking. Does it make you want to Smile, Smile, Smile? Well in the case of a friend, it made him want to Scream, Scream, Scream.

What could be spiffier than online banking run by the good people at the Co-Op? Well actually almost anything if you have a Mac. Smile - although web-based - have decided that you can't use any old platform. Thanks to their use of the Microsoft's Java Virtual Machine, if you have a Mac - forget it.

Here's a Q&A from their web site:

Q. I use a Mac rather than a PC. Can I still bank with smile?
A. I'm afraid the two systems are currently incompatible and so you cannot bank with smile. We do hope to be able to offer the service to Mac users in the not too distant future.

Well, surely the whole point of HTML, of the internet, is that it doesn't matter what system you use. Talk about missing the point...

So that leaves us with LloydsTSB - as luck would have it, both my friend and I had accounts with them anyway, so there was nothing to be lost by trying it.

I can report that LloydsTSB's online banking works just fine - except the screen fonts on the statement page are so small in Netscape on my iMac that they are barely legible:



This is a blessing when you're looking at the size of your overdraft, but not so good when you're trying to work out exactly which bunch of blood-sucking leeches took the lifeblood out of your paycheck in the first place.

Now we all know that screen fonts in Mac web-browsers appear smaller than their Windows counterparts. The snag is that choosing 'Make font larger...' in Netscape Communicator 4.7 on my Mac didn't seem to have any effect.

I mentioned this to LloydsTSB who said they would pass my comments on to their webmonkeys. They also suggested using Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.5 - well, gee thanks guys. I mean okay, the same text in IE4.5 with default settings is rendered perfectly readably, thus:



...but why should I have to use a different browser for banking to everything else? And besides, IE4.5 keeps whining about security certificates having expired, and how the Feds are out to get them.

I returned to the page in Netscape Communicator 4.7, to try to figure out why on earth 'Make font larger' had no effect - and I discovered that you have to click on 'Make font larger' (shift-apple-]) no less than FOUR times before it tips the threshold of screen font sizes and has any effect:



Each time you make the page larger, Netscape goes and refetches it from the server and redraws it, which takes ages and costs money.

The answer, I feel sure, lies in the Cascading Style Sheets and the fact that different browsers implement them differently.

There is a fine discussion of these font-size matters, amongst other things, at http://style.verso.com/. The GIF Essay on why you shouldn't specify point sizes in Cascading Style Sheets is particularly illuminating - and slightly ironic given that I stumbled upon it following a link from Microsoft's Mactopia rave about how great IE5 will be... once it's available.

In the meantime, shift-apple-] four times, and count your BT shares...