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Living Can Kill You

Welcome to the beta of the new saila.com. Send in your bugs.

Dream project

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.


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