Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Who cares about the UI? How good are the searches?
love is just extroverted narcissism
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.
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.
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 - 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 - 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 - 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 ?
JavaScript has zero (zilch, zip, nada, nothing, nowhere, nohow) to do with XHTML compliance. Also, compliance doesn't test ugliness or clutteredness.
The search is fast, the results are good, and the layout is clean(er). Maybe they are beginning to get it. Competition works.
Um.... why is everyone whining that Microsoft has 8 xhtml errors? Go try and validate Google's page.
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.
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