CNET News.com Turns 7

dmehus writes "Just as Google celebrated its 5th birthday last week, which was covered by Slashdot, I thought it would be equally appropriate to point out that tech news darling CNET News.com celebrated its 7th birthday this past week. To mark that occasion, its Editor-in-Chief Jai Singh wrote an article, in which he reflects on their founding slogan of 'Tech News First' and their commitment to that going forward. He also announces a brand new redesign that was unveiled yesterday. To that I'd add, here's to another seven more! Thoughts or opinions, anyone?"

Comments

Redesign

[Anonymous Coward]

They removed the investor end of the page it seems, making it seemingly unfriendly to the end user/viewer.

After pushing it for so long as a key component to thier "tech news" package, I wonder if its been thrown on the back burner, or if it was a mistake.

You can still get to it @ http://investor.news.com/

-mason.j

Re:Redesign

[segment]

Gross Profit

• 2002 $90,260
• 2001 $107,720
• 2000 $166,067
• 1999 $68,385

Operating Income

• 2002 ($381,314)
• 2001 ($1,867,125)
• 2000 ($316,858)
• 1999 ($61,138)

( source for financial info)

As you can see they're not making money at all, and it's surprising they're managing to stick around for so long. And you have to admit 7 years is pretty long for the net... They've beat out some pretty big guys too... Prodigy, Compuserve, Tymnet, shit the list could on for Eons... As for the company financial-wise I wouldn't touch their stock even at the low rate of $8.99ps

Can't remember what the old design was like?

[a.koepke]

If you want to compare the new site design to the old one check out the archived copy provided by Archive.org Wayback Machine.

Or why not check out some of the previous designs... Nov 17, 1999 or why not go right back to Dec 23, 1996.

CNet censors opinions they don't like?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well this person does not like them... Take a look Wrap and Flow

new design

[zeekiorage]

I am not sure if the new look is good or bad but one positive is that the new site looks exactly _same_ in mozilla under both Linux and Windows. Previously under Linux I either used to get fonts too large or too small.

Pro Microsoft

[mantera]

They used to be my favourite source of news, along with zdnet, back in the nineties until I noticed they were too often pro-Microsoft; My observation was confirmed when I realized that Paul Allen, Mirosoft's co-founder, was a major, major investor in Zdnet/Cnet.

Image scaling issues

[yerricde]

it would have been a better solution to use em rather than px to set the width, or even %

I understand your point about setting text column widths in ems, but images on web sites can't easily be set to sizes in ems because the nearest-neighbor image resizing algorithm used on the most popular browser engines (MSHTML and Gecko) turns images into pixelated crud. Vote for bug 98971 at bugzilla.mozilla.org if you want this to change.

Re:Yay for tableless design.

[Ben Hutchings]

CNet pages are now written/generated in XHTML. They include tags such as <meta name="description" content="Tech news and business reports by CNET News.com. Focused on information technology, core topics include computers, hardware, software, networking, and Internet media." />. In HTML the slash is not allowed before the closing greater-than. Most HTML browsers will ignore this error, but it does make the page invalid as HTML and makes a mockery of the whole web standards campaign to pretend that XHTML can be substituted for HTML. There are also deeper semantic differences between HTML and XHTML, such as capitalisation of names in the DOM, that make XHTML unsuitable for general use.