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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."

12 of 297 comments (clear)

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

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

  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...

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    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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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
  6. 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.
  7. 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.

  8. 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
  9. 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.

  10. 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...

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    Um... I didn't do it!