Yeah, that's a good point. I can muster some sympathy for
someone on a slow machine on an unreliable dialup I guess.
On the .js, .css issue in openacs now we don't really
ns_return any .js or .css so it's sort of a nonissue
(although I can see doing dynamic css at least). I
am not sure if the .js and .css problem is addressed by
the IE padding (I think it is, certainly the printing problems are).
Same thing and WWW-Authenticate, most openacs sites don't really use
it (and for those that do I expect it is during devlopement
and most of the people looking have modern browsers which
just do the right thing).
Maybe someone will address those issues, but so far they don't
really seem to have been a problem (and rubylane for example
gets a lot of traffic and I would think it probably sees more
old browsers than most sites and Jim Wilcoxson has said
they don't have problems with the gzip encoding).