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."
XHTML compliant? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:XHTML compliant? (Score:4, Funny)
Sucks to be you, buddy! (Score:2)
But still.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:But still.... (Score:2)
Re:But still.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:But still.... (Score:3, Interesting)
--------------INDEX.HTML--------------
Er.. WHO CARES (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:It's not... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's not... (Score:2, Interesting)
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)
Re:From a 48 Hour Perspective (Score:2)
Not by default, but you can add it, if you like: http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html [mozdev.org].
Scroll down to "General" and follow the link.
Re:From a 48 Hour Perspective (Score:2)
That wasn't the point. The point is that I never added it myself - I never saw the reason to.
Of course I'm not suprised I got modded down. I was just trying to point out that some/most don't care about MSN Search until it finds a cure for cancer.
Weird. I tried with Firefox AND IE (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Weird. I tried with Firefox AND IE (Score:2)
It is sad that Google gets many more errors.
CSS problems? (Score:2)
Re:CSS problems? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:CSS problems? (Score:2)
However, in Safari the results page is completely without margins which is annoying.
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...
Re:IE 5 Support (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:IE 5 Support (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
I'm using IE 5.1 for Mac... (Score:2)
PS. If anyone knows of a good browser substitute for Mac IE5.1 on OS 9, I'd be thrilled to hear about it.
the death of IE 5 support (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:IE 5 Support (Score:2)
That would suggest that they are actually worried that people will stop supporting it.
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 piti
Re:IE 5 Support (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
XHTML Strict my Arse (Score:3, Informative)
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:XHTML Strict my Arse (Score:2, Informative)
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
Re:XHTML Strict my Arse (Score:2)
But surely the doctype ought to be for the current document, not for some hoped-for version in the indefinite future. Just because Microsoft is hoping to maybe, some day, have it compliant, doesn't mean they should be declaring it to be XHTML Strict today.
Otherwise, every document that might some day get converted to XHTML Strict could have that doctype applied to it now, and then it would be mea
Re:XHTML Strict my Arse (Score:3, Informative)
You do know what the X in XHTML stands for? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:You do know what the X in XHTML stands for? (Score:2)
The Extensibility of XHTML refers to a modular design that allows the standards folks to add new features to the language without breaking existing web pages. It has nothing to do with ad-hoc extensions by implementers. A principle design goal of XHTML is create a consistent user experience, regardless of browser. This is supposed to correct one of the big
Re:You do know what the X in XHTML stands for? (Score:2)
Could you explain what you mean by this? em/ex, %, and even pt sound a lot like non-pixel measurements.
Re:XHTML Strict my Arse (Score:2)
Re:XHTML Strict my Arse (Score:3, Informative)
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:Addendum: Usability (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:Addendum: Usability (Score:2)
And maybe it should thus work just fine regardless of which OS you use. Actually, no maybe involved there.
Or which font you use. Unless your font file is f'ed up.
Monitor size doesn't matter either, nor does resolution, the location of the Next link should be fine and the size of the text should be almost the same as Google's.
Sure, like I said, I'm not claiming he's not seeing problems and is just making things up.
But, again, considering nobody else is pointing the
Go Standards! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Go Standards! (Score:2, Funny)
Whoa! (Score:3, Funny)
If they can be strict with this standard, that can only mean they have pre-emptively co-opted it! They have embraced and extended it before anyone else had a chance to simply follow it. They must have bribed the committees. This has to have been an inside job.
This cannot be allowed to stand. We must stand up and fight for our rights to unpoluted standards. It is time to find a new standard.
Re:Whoa! (Score:2)
Re:Whoa! (Score:2)
MSN Criticism (Score:5, Funny)
Yep, they did a search in their own search engine for "Miscrosoft Criticism" and found this website.
No I am not trolling (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No I am not trolling (Score:2)
I assume everyone remembers the MSN/Opera fiasco [opera.com]?
Re:No I am not trolling (Score:2)
Re:No I am not trolling (Score:3, Insightful)
Moogle Whack! (Score:2, Offtopic)
But the REALLY interesting thing about this is that the results are different - how about THAT for a Moogle Whack?!
Re:Moogle Whack! (Score:2)
MSN: 747 results [msn.com]
Google: 146 results [google.com]
MSN wins again. Not surprising.
I'm very disappointed with MSN news look! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:No I am not trolling (Score:2)
Slashdot, but only when the coding is bad.
Slow news days? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Slow news days? (Score:2)
Mobile device consideration (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Faster load times... (Score:5, Informative)
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:Faster load times... (Score:2)
I've heard it said that Microsoft hires "hackers" and not necessarily good engineers. From visiting, I'd tend to agree with this. There is very much an emphasis on late night coding binges and not so much on spending the time to make sure designs are sound, standards are adhered to, etc.
Re:Faster load times... (Score:2)
Re:Faster load times... (Score:3, Interesting)
However, it references a 1K gif file, a 16K
I just tried it with lynx (Score:2, Funny)
Broken? How bout kills IE5 (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Broken? How bout kills IE5 (Score:2)
Re:Broken? How bout kills IE5 (Score:2)
What's with all the MSN Search articles ? (Score:4, Insightful)
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 ?
One word (Score:2)
Or, if you prefer, Slashvertisemnet.
Re:What's with all the MSN Search articles ? (Score:2)
Though Google news bits are typically about them expanding into areas. E.g. the domain registration thing.
Not a new Google news item anytime they make a special Google logo graphic to celebrate some day. Which would be roughly equivalent to all this crap.
developers developers developers ! (Score:3, Funny)
hmmm.
They are moving in the right direction (Score:4, Insightful)
IEWin CSS hack in use (Score:2)
the death of IE 5 support
I can't get to TFA at the moment to see if this is mentioned, but I did look at the stylesheet for the main page [msn.com] and found that they're using Tantek Celik's IE5 box model hack. [tantek.com]
Does that count as "eating your own dog food"?
Longhorn predictions (Score:2)
Prediction 1:
Microsoft Desktop Search and MSN Search are seamlessly combined and are available on the taskbar at all times.
Prediction 2:
The Google lawsuit against bundling and for inclusion of Google Desktop Search / Web Search with Longhorn is already in the works. (Same will apply for GMail vs. Longhorn bundled Desktop-Hotmail access).
The media-player lawsuit was nothing compared to this one...
Re:Longhorn predictions (Score:2)
Prediction 3
The lawsuit will be filed after Longhorn actually comes out in 2007 and will be tied up in court until 2016. Google will at that point be declared illegal after MS gives the current corrupt leader of the U.S. billions in campaign contributions. Europe and Asia will be running Linux at that point and since MS is not allowed to sell windows there until it pays off its 5 jillion dollars in fines, the courts will not bother trying it there.
Whoopie. (Score:2)
If you can't control the program that accesses the information, control the access to the information.
-Don.
Google (Score:3, Insightful)
Stopdesign coral cache (Score:2)
(Karma whoring accusers: Look at the UID. Statistically speaking, it is likely I've been capped since before you had an account.)
W3C Validator fight! (Score:5, Funny)
Round One!
Fight!
Google Validation [w3.org]: 44 Errors
MSN Search Validation [w3.org]: 1 Error
Google Wins! Eh...
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.
UI is one thing. Content is another. (Score:2)
The single most important aspect of any search engine, for me, is that my own site (Lockjaw's Lair [lockjawslair.com]) show up in it. It should be at or near the top of a specific search, since the title of the site consists of an odd pairing of words, or at least show up.
So, I did a search [msn.com] for my site [lockjawslair.com] on MSN Search [msn.com] to see how I fared. It doesn't bode well for a search site that I can find links to my site on other sites, but the search engine hasn't followed the links to my site. One would think that their spider would
And the front page still looks like crap (Score:2)
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!
Standards (Score:3, Insightful)
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:XHTML (or anything) strict ? kidding right ? (Score:2, Insightful)
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:Try being a little more constructive. (Score:2)
Re:Why so many MSN Search stories? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why so many MSN Search stories? (Score:2)
Microsoft copied just about everything else from Google, you'd think they would copy this better method of di
Re:Why so many MSN Search stories? (Score:2, Informative)
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:Why so many MSN Search stories? (Score:2)
Did you bother trying it on Google? Oh right, same friggin sponsored link. Microsoft Corp. and its marketing unit can buy the sponsored links just like anyone else. That's why they're called sponsored.
Re:Why so many MSN Search stories? (Score:2)
Re:Why so many MSN Search stories? (Score:2)
Well, I got this:
"Learn Linux Online - training.affordablelearning.co.uk
Get trained in Linux using unique training methods and online tutor support. Try our courses for free before joining."
The other two "sponsored links" are similar; the first of the real results is to linux.org.uk. (I'm in the UK; looks like it may give preference to local results)
What was it I was supposed to be getting angry
Re:Why so many MSN Search stories? (Score:2)
As has been discussed ad naseum on /. over the years, Windows absolutely does not outperform Linux except in the most narrow of definitions. For a newbie using MSN Search (why would a Web veteran switch from Google?) to find Linux information, to have that sentence show up be
Boy, has /. changed... (Score:2)
Microsoft PR has really overrun /. I can smell the fresh mowed astroturf...
Re:Why so many MSN Search stories? (Score:2)
Re:Why so many MSN Search stories? (Score:2)
Fascinating. I called it a "sponsored link" and I get lots of responses telling me I'm an idiot for not noticing it's a sponsored link. I wonder who the idiots are here.
Re:Why so many MSN Search stories? (Score:2)
Odd, I never said that, nor do I know of a search site "from Linux." I'm certainly getting emotional responses to my post.
Re:I'm sick of linux fanatics (Score:2)
Re:Not standards compliant. (Score:2)
It's all well and good bitching about other sites, but run
Re:Not standards compliant. (Score:2)
Oops. Better try Yahoo [w3.org].
Oops. Better try Ask Jeeves [w3.org].
Oops. Maybe Teoma [w3.org], the poor man's Google, works.
Oops. Guess nobody in the real world cares about "web standards" [weill.org] anyway.
MOD PARENT UP! (Score:2)