I can so relate. The first startup I joined post Sun was a place called GolfWeb, which was a website dedicated to Golf enthusiasts and it was, in 1995, the top dedicated Golf site on the Internet. We had all sorts of Java plans, except only a few of the people coming to the site had Java, and RealAudio plans, but the same story. The great masses were all AOL customers it seemed and not all of them had a browser that could display tables correctly!

As publishing site you had to shoot for the lowest common denominator in order to reach the most customers. That is still a good strategy, sites that can shrug off features that aren't supported but still get the message across. Maybe MySpace will get that message.