Februari 2005

Goed nieuws van Microsoft: de site van MSN is herzien. Met de nieuwe site maakt Microsoft een belangrijke schuif richting werken compliant aan algemeen aanvaarde web standards.

Stopdesign schrijft hierover:

In conjunction with the launch of Microsoft's new search effort, MSN gets a pretty significant makeover. Significant, not because of the new look, nor because of the multi-million-dollar ad campaign which will attempt to oust Google out of the #1 search spot. But because the underpinnings of the home page represent a considerable move toward web standards.

Now, bear in mind, (in my opinion) the new visual design of MSN is quite uninspired. It's drab and boxy. (No offense to the designer, if there even was one.) Looks like it may have gone directly from a Product Manager's sketch to the developer who coded it. The design certainly offers nothing new or innovative, and looks like it's following Google and Yahoo, obviously trying to play catch-up. (Perhaps some would say the MSN design, particularly the very top portion of the page, is a little too inspired. Looking like a confused mix of Yahoo's pointy tabs combined with a poor Google-simplicity imitation.) The search page's simplicity is so simple, it looks unfinished.

Despite a lack of interest in the visual design, I see several interesting things going on here worthy of mention, and to which we should pay attention:

XHTML 1.0 Strict

Not only do the new MSN pages unashamedly boast the XHTML 1.0 Strict doctype, the home page comes through with — at the time of this writing — only 28 validation errors, and the search page comes through with only 1 error. Not perfect, but so much closer than many other high-profile sites | Lees verder |

Goed nieuws dus van het Microsoft-front. Heel goed nieuws dus. Je kan van Microsoft vinden wat je wilt, zij hebben nu één van de eerste grote, commerciële en invloedrijke websites waarvoor een oprechte poging is gedaan volgens algemeen aanvaarde standards te werken. Chappeau.