Google Labs today released another shiny new toy for geeks to play with… this one, a web page creation tool. My colleague says it uses Ajax and a rich dhtml Javascript interface to make page creation fun and simple. I wouldn’t know, since so far it doesn’t work in Safari.

I do plan to go back and try it out with Firefox, but what a pain! How come Windows users don’t have to suffer this way? Safari and the other KHTML-derived browsers are still the browsers of choice for Mac users, so by leaving Safari out in the cold, Google is once again doing the same thing to Mac users. Not good. Not nice. Bad Google!

I hope it’s just coincidence that the Google “Page Creator” abbreviates to “PC” and that it’s not a message from the clot of PC users that appears to be blocking Google’s technical heart.

Later on 2/23… I’ve now confirmed that Safari users cannot get in to Page Creator using Safari’s Debug menu, trying to masquerade as IE 6.0, Mozilla 1.1, Netscape 7.0, etc. That means Google isn’t blocking Safari merely by looking at the user-agent string… there’s some underlying technical reason. My suspicion is that it’s related to Safari’s lack of a “content editable” function, which both IE and Mozilla have (though those two browsers have completely different implementations of “content editable”). This is a convenient, and common, excuse, but it’s not acceptable. There are two other ways to include Safari in the party while waiting for the Webkit team to engineer a content-editable function in Safari: You can either employ a lightweight java rich-text editor, such as Edit-on Pro, or you could use an even lighter-weight DHTML editor, such as the one Dojo provides. Either of these would be pretty simple to accomplish technically, so I ascribe Google’s failure to do so to commonplace PC prejudice.