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."

Re:IE 5 Support

[qurve]

It's not really that hard if you know what you're doing. as for not implementing fixes and hacks, well unfortunately I live in the real world, not an ideal utopia where I can tell my clients users to go to hell.

Re:XHTML (or anything) strict ? kidding right ?

[Mike Rubits]

They said they were *working* towards XHTML strict. Just as you (hopefully) wouldn't say that about a beta with a work in progress feature.

No I am not trolling

[avandesande]

Who cares about the UI? How good are the searches?

Why so many MSN Search stories?

[FunWithHeadlines]

No one cares. It's from Microsoft, and thus cannot be trusted. Do a search for "Linux," for crying out loud, and take a gander at the first thing that shows up for display: Right, a sponsored link from Microsoft that lies about Linux.

Has nothing about this company's past and recent history meant anything to us? Do you really think they intend to play fair? Do you really feel you will be able to trust their search results no matter what promises they make? Maybe you do, but I can't imagine ever trusting Microsoft for anything. Live and learn, eh?

Slow news days?

[bigtallmofo]

How the design principles used on a web page that is basically a textbox and a submit button is news is beyond me.

Mobile device consideration

[wombatmobile]

Look through the imported style sheet on the home page, and you'll see several uses of @media handheld {} to target certain rules for handheld devices.

Hey, that's good practise. The intent is for the one page to render appropriately for multiple device types. The web needs more implementations of this to make mobile browsing viable.

Re:IE 5 Support

[filtur]

It is indeed a Vicious circle, its not like you can explain to a client that your page is the one that's complient and IE is wrong.

Not quite...

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand, it may only be these few standards aware developers trying to do the right job.

I doubt it. Microsoft is one of the most coordinated operations around. They do their best efforts to time the development and release of everything - hell, optimally they want to release the next version of Office with Longhorn. The point is that, at Microsoft, the left hand almost always knows what the right hand is doing and there are very few communication blocks between management and developers (anyone that's worked at Microsoft in recent years can verify this, and anyone that says the contrary is true is an utter liar). Do you honestly think that the issue of standards compliance regarding their main web portal has gone unnoticed except by a few developers? Think again!

What's with all the MSN Search articles ?

[Animaether]

Okay... so supposedly nobody fears MSN Search.
Everybody says Google still kicks full-on ass.
Etc. etc. etc.

So why is it that in the past 2 days alone there have been -3- articles on MSN Search on Slashdot ?

MSN Search has arrived [slashdot.org] - actually, it was there a long time ago. It was simply finally put into place on the msn.com portal. I'm sure that was big news to all the Slashdot users who have msn.com as their homepage *smirk*

Inspecting MSN Search [slashdot.org] - comparing image search, specifically. Using 'Britney Spears'. Gar, what inspection. Do something really interesting and post a website with text and images on a rather specific thing at various locations. Don't announce this. Now check which engine adds which website and its images, and when. Then compare them, and publish THOSE results. That just might be interesting.

MSN Search - From A UI Perspective [slashdot.org] - So from a UI perspective they've found it uses XHTML (to some extent) ? Wow. Next time I'll evaluate a user interface, I'll be sure to note that it uses COMCTL32 and COMDLG32 instructions. ffs. This says nothing about the actual UI. Which, by the way, is quite sleek - imho. Bit more form over function than Google's, but still pretty light-weight. (Again, this is search.msn.com , not the msn.com portal.) I suspect the title here is chosen wrongly - it's more of a "internet standards compliance and device support inspection".

Could Slashdot editors *please* just hold off the MSN Search articles until something actually interesting about it comes up ?

Sceptic mode: Or perhaps do they post this simply to allow some more Microsoft- / MSN Search-bashing posts in the comments ?

Re:Why so many MSN Search stories?

[elrusoloco]

re: do a search for linux... The "first thing" you're referring to is an ad. Do a search for Linux on Google, and you get the same exact link as the first result on the right-hand side under "Relevant ads" or whatever they're called - MSN just calls them "sponsored sites". I'm not advocating trusting Microsoft, but I really think you were not being objective here and felt the need to.....object.

Re:But still....

[arkanes]

JavaScript has zero (zilch, zip, nada, nothing, nowhere, nohow) to do with XHTML compliance. Also, compliance doesn't test ugliness or clutteredness.

Re:No I am not trolling

[curunir]

Umm...I don't give a rats ass about the searches (Google works fine for me), but the fact that they've chosen to be mostly standards compliant on one of their significant projects could signal their intent to make IE more standards compliant. If you've ever tried to create an XHTML/CSS website that's more complex than just swapping in new colors/fonts, you've also realized how annoying it is that you basically have to use hacks or separate stylesheets to get it to work correctly in IE. Them moving their browser platform closer to standards compliance would make the life of a web designer significantly easier.

They are moving in the right direction

[Ars-Fartsica]

The search is fast, the results are good, and the layout is clean(er). Maybe they are beginning to get it. Competition works.

You do know what the X in XHTML stands for?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why use an Extensible HyperText Markup Language if you can't extend it?

Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Um.... why is everyone whining that Microsoft has 8 xhtml errors? Go try and validate Google's page.

the death of IE 5 support

[Hell O'World]

One good thing to come out of the nightmare of malware is that more people will be upgrading their browsers to the latest versions. Supporting ugly old browser versions won't be as necessary.

Re:IE 5 Support

[Anonymous Coward]

He was converted to Firefox for a time by an in-house OSS zealot .. but I'm proud to say that I've converted him back.

Congratulations. You are officially part of the problem.

Er.. WHO CARES

[brunes69]

Man, talk about searching left and right for a problem...

The whole point of XHTML compliant documents is so that the data can be parsed by a non-HTML user agent without issue, as regular XML. This lets you do nice things like XSLT transforms on the HTML, XPath data queries, etc. It is not to make things nicer in the browser, it is not to make things faster, and in fact, both Mozilla and IE can render XHTML compliant pages SLOWER under certain circumstances, because of the validation procedures involved in the parsing.

Using JavaScript to fancy up a page has absolutely no effect on this. Unless the website is actually placing useable data on the page via JavaScript (**ahem** [gmail.com]), then the JavaScript has ZERO impact on either the compliance level or the utility of XHTML. And from what I can see, this is exactly what MSN Search (and what most websites) are dong - using JavaScript to write fancy navigation and whatnot, none of which is really useful to a non-HTML user agent.

Standards

[ottffssent]

From the article: "I have seen some feedback that we should not have declared the doctype as XHTML Strict. If anything, we are closer to HTML 4.01. I agree. But our target is to get to XHTML strict."

And what is a doctype? That's correct: the type of the document. So if the document is really more like HTML 4.01, it should be labeled HTML 4.01. It should not be labeled with some marketing 'we'd really like this to work' drivel. Sort of a micrososm of the Microsoft Approach, actually. Lying to people fits under marketing - we're used to it and can take it into account. Lying to computers, computers which are trying to make your not-really-HTML into something presentable, is just stupid.

Re:IE 5 Support

[DaHat]

I believe the parent poster is not familiar with the concept of a de-facto standard. Even as an IE fan I will be the first to agree that it sucks that it does not do the officials standards the best... but the fact that people have to make accommodations for the most dominant browser is nothing new.

I work for a company that builds systems for use with digital television systems that are used by broadcasters and producers, lots of head end stuff. It is not uncommon that we find some product on the market that doesn't adhere to ISO13181-1 very well for instance (head to Best Buy with me and I can point and rant), of course, we as a small company have no way to force the likes of Sony and others to change what they are doing it or now... even though it doesn't conform to the standard... so, we need to find a happy medium between supporting the standards and working on such incompatible devices.

As I've said in other posts here, if Firefox and other browsers want to be taken seriously, they and their fans cannot waste time crying because the big guy isn't playing by the rules, they need to learn to play by the same rules as well as the real ones.