Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

MSN Search - From A UI Perspective

Posted by timothy on from the competition-tunes-the-world dept.

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."

21 of 297 comments (clear)

  1. XHTML compliant? by drivinghighway61 · · Score: 5, Funny

    So it won't render correctly in IE, then?

    1. Re:XHTML compliant? by FyRE666 · · Score: 3, Funny

      Yes very funny, or at least it was once I managed to read your comment after Slashdot rendered like this in my web browser...

      --
      Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
  2. IE 5 Support by FiReaNGeL · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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...

    --
    Eureka Science News - automatically updated
    1. Re:IE 5 Support by qurve · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:IE 5 Support by filtur · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:IE 5 Support by DaHat · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Help Brendan pay off his student loans
  3. XHTML Strict my Arse by Spy+der+Mann · · Score: 3, Informative
    From the validator webpage:

    Line 6, column 998: there is no attribute "VCARD_NAME" ...ze="20" value="" name="q" VCARD_NAME="SearchText" />


    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.
    1. Re:XHTML Strict my Arse by nazh · · 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/

      More about xhtml and media types: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/
      Explains why msn really should have gone for html 4.01 strict. Since IE doesn't support the right mime type.

  4. But still.... by the_mighty_$ · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...its gone from about 130 errors when it was first released, to eight errors now. Not bad. Not bad at all.

    --
    VI VI VI - the editor of the beast!
    1. Re:But still.... by arkanes · · Score: 4, Insightful

      JavaScript has zero (zilch, zip, nada, nothing, nowhere, nohow) to do with XHTML compliance. Also, compliance doesn't test ugliness or clutteredness.

  5. MSN Criticism by sameerdesai · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  6. No I am not trolling by avandesande · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Who cares about the UI? How good are the searches?

    --
    love is just extroverted narcissism
  7. Try being a little more constructive. by Faust7 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  8. Mobile device consideration by wombatmobile · · Score: 4, 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.

  9. Faster load times... by GillBates0 · · Score: 5, Informative
    Microsoft links to an explanation of benefits of the new MSN where they list the top (first) feature as being "Faster load time". Not sure what the old HTML file size was, but it would be interesting to have as a comparison.

    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
  10. Re:It's not... by Zexarious · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://search.ms n.com the one the article refers to, only has one

  11. Broken? How bout kills IE5 by Bobbysmith007 · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  12. What's with all the MSN Search articles ? by Animaether · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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 ?

  13. They are moving in the right direction by Ars-Fartsica · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The search is fast, the results are good, and the layout is clean(er). Maybe they are beginning to get it. Competition works.

  14. Google by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Um.... why is everyone whining that Microsoft has 8 xhtml errors? Go try and validate Google's page.

  15. W3C Validator fight! by thefogger · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!