opinios

MSN Adopts Web Standards

After years of an attitude of what seemed to everyone else to be "web standards like CSS and XHTML don't matter", Microsoft have finally given their MSN front page and their web search engine a new look. And they've done it with web standards.

Well, almost.

There is plenty to pick apart (the page looks terrible on IE for the Mac, the markup doesn't validate and is frightful to look at, the CSS also is all over the place - although it does appear dynamically generated - and the design itself looks like a rip-off of Yahoo's own search interface), and with all the other sub-sites that they pull in content from and link to, the road ahead is a long one.

But there is plenty of good in there as well. Aside from all the obvious benefits such as faster page load times, ease of maintenance, search engine optimisation and increased accessibility that come with a page that separates content and presentation, Microsoft are making a statement.

This statement is: The W3C and the standards they publish matter.

This is something that the rest of the web community have known for a long time, and Microsoft's stubborn ignorance and refusal to support such standards (many of which they themself invented) has given Linux/Mac-running anti-Gates zealots all the more ammunition to deride the Redmond-based giant. Finally, finally a sign that the software giant might start looking towards the future of the web (one that doesn't include a purely Windows/IE environment) is huge. A huge win for long-time standards campaigners like WaSP and MACCAWS and the people that drive them. And a win for the W3C.

So, well done Microsoft. You have a long way to go, but this is a step in the right direction. The next big step is to upgrade that dinosaur of a browser of yours, so that the pages you publish are easier to create. And then the rest of your network.

Doug Bowman has dissected the topic in detail at stopdesign.