Hi Alan,
I'm not so much a fan of CSS but rather well structured and designed web sites. Design is becoming increasingly important these days as people are becoming more and more discerning about what looks right and what doesn't.
One off-topic example is Clipper Tea Company. They took the decision to redesign their packaging and the result was an increase of 400% in turnover, or was it profit. Either way, that's a nice increase.
We are indeed at a transitional point in the browser scene and good old MS has been pretty slow in this regard. What we have been in need of is standards.
The idea that some web sites don't work on a Mac actually goes against the spirit of the internet, especially when you consider that the guy who developed the world wide web, Tim Berners Lee, developed it using a NeXT workstation (set up by ex-Apple guru Steve Jobs). Some of the technology used in that system is now being used in Apple's OSX, which is by far the most advanced OS on the market today, that's how far ahead of the game Steve Jobs was (and still is with his excellent iPod product)
Personally, I would not recommend that anyone uses Front Page to design a web site. I have used both DW and FP and at the end of the day, from what I do know about html & css, it's much easier to hand code using a text editor such as BBEdit.
Anyone interested in doing it by hand should start here:
http://www.westciv.com/
They offer excellent tutorials in xhtml and css. Well worth a visit.
As soon as I discovered I couldn't use certain sites with IE5 for the Mac I upgraded and started to use Firefox. I'm glad I did as I have re-discovered the web (they say that, and for me it's true)
It's like having new glasses. The things you thought looked OK before now look awful!
With regard to cross-browser checking, even that is starting to become defunct. There's a growing number of cutting edge designers who have coded their sites so that the presentational aspects of their sites 'degrade' in older browsers. That is to say, that the content is still there, the structure is still there and the sites are accessible and even work on other devices such as PDAs, text readers, mobiles etc, but they don't look as nice. Key point being, the info is still all there and people can still use the sites.
If the balance was shifted to more people using Macs than Pacs (PCs) then imagine how beautiful the internet would look.
Just a thought, we can only dream!