Imagine your dream project. Now imagine it being handed to you. What would you do?

Un-huh.

Now, what you do when you found found out this dream project was on a compressed deadline and its scope was still being pushed?

Un-huh.

Sure, some of the initially joy wears off, but I’ve yet to work on a project where the timeline is realistic and the initial scope remains fixed and manageable. These hurdles can’t compare to building a Web-standards-based site receiving millions of page-views a day that won’t worry about Internet Explorer on the Mac and that treats the other operating system’s IE like the ugly step-child. I can’t describe how bizarre it really is. The last time I did anything remotely similar, we were still sweating over Netscape 4…

Last night, after completing a rough demo of this new project in Firefox, I took a spin of it in Opera and Safari and it worked. It just worked.

With IE 5.5 and 6, there’s a style sheet served with conditional comments containing a couple of behaviours in HTC files to tease those browsers into behaving. And it works. And theoretically, the next version, IE 7, will work, too — by ignoring all those tricks and displaying the site the way Firefox, Opera, and Safari do.

In other words, doing what a Web browser should do.