Innovative Future Web Design

For a long time you’d have needed to don a hard hat and duck behind the sofa if you asked any self respecting web designer what they thought of the Micro$oft home page as they launch into a rant about Web Standards, code validation, tableless code and best practice. So how’s the new Micro$oft home page fare…

First I will say that I find it hard to extol the virtues of any major corporation and as for Micro$oft…well they do say miracles happen.

On to the new site. It’s a pretty huge change in look to a more “Web 2.0″ look and feel. First appearances, hmmm, I quite like it…actually I like it quite a lot. ouch that hurt

As seems obligatory nowadays they’ve thrown in a bit of Ajax in their navigational overlays. Not necessarily a bad thing and it’s all got a very slick feel-though for me it was a bit slow to load. I’m not sure how Accessible it is to satisfy DDA regulations but it looks ok at first glance but may warrant more investigation.

There’s a couple of small issues with cross browser compatibility but only if really closely examined and far from the end of the world

So far so good. Well done Microsoft-maybe you’re getting there. So now to the meat and bones of it all…let’s take a look under the bonnet (hood for any American visitors)

First glance-yay there’s no tables. It’s all in CSS. Wow, thinks I, maybe they’ve cottoned on! Mind you that Doctype of HTML 4.0 Transitional is pretty loose. You’d hope for HTML 4.0 Strict at the very very least.

Ok-deep breath next step. Think back to how I started. What other problems did web professionals have with their past efforts? Right…Web Standards and Validation of code. Congratulations, you can remember it that long…oh dear…it seems Microsoft can’t.

A quick check on theW3C validator. Well knock me down with a feather…it doesn’t validate. Run the CSS through the W3C CSS Validator…oh dear not so hot.

Short of sounding like yet another standards obsessed rant there’s good reason for standards compliance which could easily take up a whole series of articles-and probably have on other sites. Essentially web standards are a set of rules for the industry to enable designers/developers producing web sites, browsers, applications etc work in the same way so that ALL end users can use/view the product regardless of how they do it. A simplistic example is to ensure that a web site will display the same, or similar, in any browser, be it Internet Explorer (IE) on Windows, IE on a Mac, Firefox on Windows, MAC or Linux or Opera on any operating system including mobile phones.

I’m not one for rules in general so let’s ignore that for now. A site can have valid code and still look and act horrendously so we’ll move on. How about best practice in the coding. I can fall down on this one I’ll admit. Well there’s a few issues here but the glaring one to me is that there’s a whole pile of Javascript in the code which it would be easy enough to separate to an external file so that people not using Javascript don’t have to download it.

Ok-I’m a long way from perfect to. Please please don’t look at my code-one or other of my sites will break at least one of the above rules. It’s a good leap forward. Valid code isn’t the be all and end all. Good design is a cornerstone and I think they’ve probably cracked that. Cross browser compatibility is essential and they’ve achieved that, though admittedly through a few hacks, but hey we’ve all done that. Yes it’s an advance from the home pages of the past but where I’ve got a big problem is that Micro$oft are trying to look like they’re becoming all good and standards compliant etc etc but then they go and do this. It’s exactly the same as they’ve done with Internet Explorer it’s just not quite there. You can read more on that at 456 Berea Street

So Microsoft think about this. It’s your flagship page on one of the most visited sites on the Internet. You’ve got the resources…why not lead us all…show us how it really should be done next time.