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

Congrats!

[stev3]

I've learned to take CNets news with a grain of salt, since many times they just seem to editorialize stories and add in useless comments etc.

To be in business 7 years is a great accomplishment though, and my congratulations go out to them.

cnet & microsoft expired pages

[Sonnenschein]

I've always enjoyed a particular quirk in cnet/news.com that expires vulnerability stories about microsoft/windows products prematurely.

(Notice that the original page in each of the stories below can be seen, you've gotta keep your eye on it though.)

Worm dupes with fake Microsoft address - May 19, 2003
have allowed a good hacker both to read files stored on the Windows NT-based Internet

descriptions were taken from google, search for more keywords associated with worms/viruses/etc + windows and you'll end up with expired pages on news.com

Blame me for being paranoid, fuck it.

Fixed-width layouts are good for text-heavy sites

[starvingartist12]

A static/fixed width layout isn't a bad thing, depending on when it's used. And I'm sure the people at CNet thought about the pros and cons of a liquid layout in their design process.

For a text-heavy site such as News.com, a fixed-width layout is very ideal. If you happen to have a very high resolution, the text in a liquid/expanding design would run past the optimum line length of about 60 characters or so. Sure, you can have the browser sized to a reasonable size, but it's an added hassle. With a fixed-width website, however, the line length is much shorter. Your eyes won't get as tired from traversing the whole width of a page in a liquid layout.

It's also the same reason why newspapers run multiple narrow columns, rather than having it go across the whole page.

As a side note, Simon Willison has a nice Narrow Bookmarklet that lets you convert a website's liquid design to a fixed 500 pixel width page with one click.

Not even /. is HTML valid

[bazik]

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://slashdot. org

Not that I care about as it displays fine :)