MSN Search Standards
Asides
Sam Waudby writes in that the new MSN is (almost) standards compliant. That is really nice. There is one or two silly things, but I think it’s significant that 99.9% of the page including the advertising is XHTML 1.0 Strict. I’m going to point to that the next time someone whines about an ad system messing up their validation. “If Microsoft can do it…”
heh, if anyone has weight to swing against advertisers, I would expect it to be Microsoft. The little guy may have some troubles
Oh dear… I ‘wrote in’ too soon. Click the “See your message here” link below the adds. How ‘browserist’…
I still don’t understand the obsession people have with labelling non-compliant pages as compliant. “A few errors” is not “no errors”. Say that it’s close if you like. Say that it’s a good attempt if you like. Say it’s an improvement if you like. Say that it’s better than its competitors if you like. But don’t say that it’s compliant, because it isn’t. Why do you say that it is?
You’re right, I’ve updated the entry.
The ‘If Microsoft can do it…’ bit sounds most gratifying. That means that one of the few remaining excuses for not producing standards-compliant markup has now disappeared…
Actually, their browser detection script would seem to be messed up…
Doesn’t Mozilla (Seamonkey or Firefox) come under NN4+?
Too bad it still looks like crap. Seriously, I’d think they’d be able to hire a decent designer… the search engine actively drives me away with it’s design (front page). Not to mention terrible usability blunders (Scrivs points out the tinks, not quite tabs – not quite links above, as well as labeling “Advanced Search” “Build a Search”).
Sorry Microsoft, sometimes you just can’t reinvent a wheel and make it better.
The “If Microsoft can do it” part should give a good kick to the people who are not using web standards because the think that it’s hard to use them.
The search engine doesn’t work. I was searching for some stuff for a research project and it gave me THREE results (compared to nine for Google and Yahoo, seven for AllTheWeb). Its ads might be almost-but-actually-not standards-compliant, but the core business (ie the search engine) is as abominable as it ever was.