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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."
So it won't render correctly in IE, then?
and the layout is fine on either browser.
Great to see that even Microsoft 'admits' that IE 5 is non-standard on many things by dropping support for it on MSN search... trust me, building a layout compatible with IE 5, IE 6 and mozilla is a true nightmare. If at least they could patch the bad implementation of the box model...
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...
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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.
With any luck this also implies that the next release of Frontpage won't create pages in a magical mystical microsoft invented language similar, but importantly different from HTML or XHTML...
XHTML strict
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.
Infuriate left and right
They said they were *working* towards XHTML strict. Just as you (hopefully) wouldn't say that about a beta with a work in progress feature.
...its gone from about 130 errors when it was first released, to eight errors now. Not bad. Not bad at all.
From TFA: Some of you may be interested to know that folks from the MSN team have definitely seen this page, and are aware of the feedback, compliments, and criticism
Yep, they did a search in their own search engine for "Miscrosoft Criticism" and found this website.
Who cares about the UI? How good are the searches?
love is just extroverted narcissism
From the weblog:
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.
The coolest voice ever.
How the design principles used on a web page that is basically a textbox and a submit button is news is beyond me.
I'm a big tall mofo.
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.
According to the Wayback machine, file size doesn't seemed to have changed (or reduced) that much. This old version from July 2004 is actually smaller (33.95kb) than the current one 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.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://search.ms n.com
the one the article refers to, only has one
And it will never be XHTML Strict valid if they still use IFRAMEs...
They'll probably have to go down to transitional in the end.
that's because the original poster chked msn.com, not search.msn.
We were curoius how broken it would be in IE 5. In IE5.5 everything was mostly ok. In IE 5 it hard crashes IE. I dont know if I've ever seen anything quite so beautiful as that browser going down in flames on its own homepage.
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 ?
re: do a search for linux... The "first thing" you're referring to is an ad. Do a search for Linux on Google, and you get the same exact link as the first result on the right-hand side under "Relevant ads" or whatever they're called - MSN just calls them "sponsored sites". I'm not advocating trusting Microsoft, but I really think you were not being objective here and felt the need to.....object.
The result you cite is obviously a placed result, not among the real search results. It's in a little block that says "Sponsored sites". Compare the first few results from MSN and google:
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
Karma: Bad (mostly due to all those "In Soviet Russia" jokes)
hmmm.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
The search is fast, the results are good, and the layout is clean(er). Maybe they are beginning to get it. Competition works.
Why use an Extensible HyperText Markup Language if you can't extend it?
Do people check this out when modding things Interesting ?
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 lowercase letter 'o' (baseline, basically) of the results' excerpt as 8px wide by 8px high. For Google, I measure the same as 7px wide by 7px high. Oh yes, incredibly huge.
Now, I'm not saying that you're not having problems with MSN Searh. But maybe, just maybe, it's something on your end ?
its not like you can explain to a client that your page is the one that's complient and IE is wrong
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.
Eh.
I was hoping for a friendly 3D animated Clippy to help me decide where i want to go today!
Um.... why is everyone whining that Microsoft has 8 xhtml errors? Go try and validate Google's page.
Google vs. MSN Search
Round One!
Fight!
Google Validation: 44 Errors
MSN Search Validation: 1 Error
Google Wins! Eh...
Um... I didn't do it!
One good thing to come out of the nightmare of malware is that more people will be upgrading their browsers to the latest versions. Supporting ugly old browser versions won't be as necessary.
Obviously MS is not ready to drop support for IE5/Win, which is still an unfortunately major browser--certainly well above Firefox in marketshare if you lump 5.0 and 5.5 together. Rather they have dropped support for IE5/Mac, which is still somewhat surprising considering it is the "current" version of their Mac browser (unless you count an upgrade for MSN customers only).
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.
Microsoft has now purchased all rights to HTML/XHTML and effectively redefined the words "standards compliance."
Warning: Could be fatal if taken seriously
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!
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 the parsing.
Using JavaScript to fancy up a page has absolutely no effect on this. Unless the website is actually placing useable data on the page via JavaScript (**ahem**), then the JavaScript has ZERO impact on either the compliance level or the utility of XHTML. And from what I can see, this is exactly what MSN Search (and what most websites) are dong - using JavaScript to write fancy navigation and whatnot, none of which is really useful to a non-HTML user agent.
From the article: "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."
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.
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