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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."

7 of 297 comments (clear)

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

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

  2. 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!
  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. 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
  7. 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!