I wholeheartedly agree with the above arguments when it's applied to any particular site, community or company. Every developer and project is of course free to choose what to support, what compromises to make and how to allocate resources better.
However, a toolkit is used as a base for building hundreds very different sites and comminities, with different decisions behind each of them. This is what makes a difference. A toolkit must follow a reasonable 'lowest common denominator' approach. And, the home page is the face of the toolkit.
I played a bit with the source of home page. The vertical bars are missing either because Netscape doesn't support background GIFs with transparency or because of the file format (I used Photoshop 5.0 to save transparent GIFs). The bars appear if redone with no-transparency GIFs; this one is trivial to fix.
Now, the other layout issues are more difficult. The columns are made through the use of stylesheets. I have little idea how to debug that. Perhaps since older browsers don't support stylesheets, it's beter to make a table layout for the home page. Should I proceed with that?
