MSN Search - From A UI Perspective 297
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."
IE 5 Support (Score:5, Interesting)
If every webmaster would stop implementing fixes and hacks to support non-standard browsers, I think IE would lose quite a marketshare to Firefox... end users don't see the problem (IE render every page fine! Firefox don't in some situations!) because webmasters optimize for IE (it IS 95% of the market, you know). Vicious circle...
Try being a little more constructive. (Score:5, Interesting)
All we ask for is for people to look at the page as a work in progress. 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. We realize we are not at a point where we can say we have achieved our goal. We will be working hard to get to that goal. Let us know how we are doing. Where are we slipping up? What do we need to fix? We are listening.
But I suppose giving actual feedback would be too much to ask.
Re:It's not... (Score:3, Interesting)
They'll probably have to go down to transitional in the end.
Re:It's not... (Score:2, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
That all depends... (Score:2, Interesting)
Does the page break in IE 5? I can't check from this computer. If it does, it'll be much easier now, since we can show them that even Microsoft's own MSN.com no longer supports outdated browsers. If Microsoft does it, the people will follow.
Re:But still.... (Score:3, Interesting)
--------------INDEX.HTML----------------------------/INDEX.HTML--------------
The final output would be invalid because I misused tag nesting by closing the parent element before closing its child. This shows as valid on the W3C Validator, however, since it doesn't check final output (e.g. post JavaScript document.write).
Be wary of any site with tons of JS that document.write tags in the HTML that claim W3 compliance. I'm not saying that MSN is doing this, and I'm not saying that I've gone through all their JS code, but I did find the following on their site inside an img tag inside a JavaScript document.write:
ID="GTrkImg_56"
The problem? All attributes and tags are to be lower case. The site has more problems than the validator lets on BECAUSE JS has nothing to do with valid XHTML.
Works in IE5/Win (Score:3, Interesting)
Incidentally, the site renders fine in Safari except for a somewhat ridiculous looking problem where the search button runs smack into Safari's OS X native widgets.
Re:IE 5 Support (Score:3, Interesting)
That's like saying, 'my friend believed that 2+2=4 for a time, but I converted him back.' The pages which display incorrectly are themselves incorrect. Firefox is a better browser, period, end of discussion (I do not argue that it is perfect, merely that it is better). To deny that is much like denying that the sun is above the sea.
To be proud of perverting a user's mindest is a pitiful thing.
application/xhtml+xml (Score:3, Interesting)
They obviously won't be using valid (and correctly-served) XHTML 1.1, since IE refuses to even render application/xhtml+xml documents as XHTML.
And judging by previous comments, they're not even bothering with XHTML 1.0, either. And writing invalid XHTML 1.0 is much worse than writing invalid HTML, since XHTML is XML and should thus die horribly if there's a single error.
Out of curiosity, why does Microsoft find it so hard to write valid XHTML when everyone else finds it so easy? And in general... why the FUCK don't full-time web developers write valid XHTML? AARGH!
Re:Faster load times... (Score:3, Interesting)
However, it references a 1K gif file, a 16K