msn.com 9.4 released
Posted Feb 1, 2005 at 12:55 PM
My thoughts on the new version of MSN.com that we released today.
It’s live! While the page takes on a lighter appearance, most of what’s really interesting about this release in my opinion is what’s happening in the source. With this release, we’ve moved from tables to CSS for layout. In fact, the only table on the new page is for presenting the tabular data associated with the stock market module! Of course, this is a good use of a table, presenting tabular data. This is a far improvement from our past implementations, which I discuss in other posts on this site. Another key benefit from my perspective is that we deliver the same HTML and CSS to all requests, rather than forking the markup and styles as we have done in the past. Yes, there are querystrings in the links to the styles, but they’re present for eased versioning and caching, not for alternative style forking. Let me just say that it’s a lot more enjoyable to sit down to write the second stylesheet when it’s a user selectable theme than when its for special-cased browser X.
On a personal note, this was something I’ve been evangelizing and championing for a while now, and it feels extremely rewarding seeing it live. The team really rallied behind it and we were all driven to make the page as good as could be with the time and resources available. There are still some validation issues coming from our Ads, but we’re close. It’s personally humbling that the release is a step towards standards compliance rather than a shining perfect example, but it’s a journey, and so far, a rather enjoyable one. I sure hope we’ll get there. I’d love to hear any and all feedback you might have.
Update 2/7/05: Stop Design has already noticed the change and has in fact put together a rather interesting post that analyzes the change.
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This page contains a single post from Daniel Boerner's blog, of which Boot Camp + Windows Vista = no more Airport Extreme reboots is the latest post.
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