MSN Search - From A UI Perspective

An anonymous reader writes "The user interface community has also started poking and prodding away at the latest iteration of MSN search and has discovered some interesting findings including: XHTML strict, CSS for layout and the death of IE 5 support. You can also read first-hand MSN designer insight into the design process as well."

XHTML Strict my Arse

[Spy der Mann]

From the validator webpage:

Line 6, column 998: there is no attribute "VCARD_NAME" ...ze="20" value="" name="q" VCARD_NAME="SearchText" />

It may be WELL-FORMED XHTML, but it introduces a proprietary attribute (so... Microsoft).

Respect for web standards... yeah right. IMO they just did an optimization of their design... and certainly they did NOT have in mind any consideration for web standards. They nerver had.

Re:CSS problems?

[nine-times]

For clarification, MSN search displays without styles, and at the bottom of the page, it says:

Why does Search look like this?

You are seeing this message because our stylesheet is not compatible with your browser.

MSN.com displays fine.

But still....

[the_mighty_$]

...its gone from about 130 [msdn.com] errors when it was first released, to eight errors now. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Re:XHTML Strict my Arse

[rushmobius]

At least read the blog entry before posting.

Then you would see that they know it was not XHTML compliant yet, but was a work in progress getting there.

Jumping on the bandwagon and saying "XHTML Strict my Arse" would warrant the reply RTFA

Faster load times...

[GillBates0]

Microsoft links to an explanation of benefits of the new MSN where they list the top (first) feature as being "Faster load time". Not sure what the old HTML file size was, but it would be interesting to have as a comparison.

According to the Wayback machine [waybackmachine.org], file size doesn't seemed to have changed (or reduced) that much. This old version from July 2004 [archive.org] is actually smaller (33.95kb) than the current one [msn.com] which is 40.55kb. Note that this is from Firefox's "View Page Info" which does not take the total size of the images, etc into account (I think).

But then there are several factors other than raw filesize leading to slower load times.

It's nice to see webpage developers at Microsoft aware of standards, and trying to adhere to them. From this comment:

At 6:29pm on 1 Feb 2005, Venkat Narayanan wrote:
Guys,
I work on the MSN.com Homepage team. Thanks for all of this feedback.
We know that there are still some validation errors. There are still some accessibility issues. We will be working to fix those issues as soon as possible. Please let us know what you think.

I think it only needs standards awareness from a few of the low-level developers to bring about a change. Even if the high level management/QA may not know or care about standards, a developer could make the work standards friendly without foregoing any of the performance/features. It would help, though to have management promote standards awareness, and devote resources to make sure they're complied with. Good for Microsoft if they're doing this. On the other hand, it may only be these few standards aware developers trying to do the right job.

Re:It's not...

[Zexarious]

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://search.ms n.com [w3.org] the one the article refers to, only has one

Re:Why so many MSN Search stories?

[xoran99]

The result you cite is obviously a placed result, not among the real search results. It's in a little block that says "Sponsored sites". Compare the first few results from MSN and google:

MSN Google
1. linux.org same
2. linux.com same
3. linuxinsider.com Redhat
4. linuxdoc.org kernel.org
5. gentoo.org Debian
6. ibm.com/linux Linux Journal
7. techupdate.zdnet.com linux-laptop.net

Re:XHTML Strict my Arse

[arkanes]

Actually, the main problem is that the attribute is in upper case. That's the cause of 3 of the 8 errors on the MSN home page, too.

Re:Addendum: Usability

[Animaether]

Do people check this out when modding things Interesting ?

Firefox 1.0, Windows XP.
The pulldown menu doesn't overflow the border. Sorry.

The next button is indeed in the rightmost corner of the webpage. Well, sorta. It's not like it's all the way over to the right, just on the right. The browser window at 800 pixels wide still shows the Next link. So unless you set your browser to be really, really tiny, you should be fine.

And the results are in an incredibly huge font, you say ?
I measure the height of the lowercase letter 'o' (baseline, basically) of the results' excerpt as 8px wide by 8px high. For Google, I measure the same as 7px wide by 7px high. Oh yes, incredibly huge.

Now, I'm not saying that you're not having problems with MSN Searh. But maybe, just maybe, it's something on your end ?

Re:XHTML Strict my Arse

[nazh]

But then they have to use the mime type application/xhtml+xml which IE supricingly doesn't support ;)
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/ [w3.org]

More about xhtml and media types: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/ [w3.org]
Explains why msn really should have gone for html 4.01 strict. Since IE doesn't support the right mime type.

Re:W3C Validator fight!

[Anonymous Coward]

I only looked briefly at the result, but it looked like all of Google's errors were intentional streamlining. Google used href=/foo instead of href="/foo", saving two bytes for each case where they did that. They left off the DOCTYPE tag, saving themselves some 40 bytes or more. No browser in its right mind would mis-interpret the Google page.

On the other hand, the one error on MSN Search is use of a non-existant attribute "VCARD_NAME" on the search text input field, which no browser in its right mind would interpret at all.

Google bent the rules to save itself and its customers bandwidth.

MSN broke the rules for some reason not clear to me.