• IE Design Frustration?

    1 Comment
    • Posted by Melanie
    • 26 September 2009
    • Giggles
    ie sucks IE Design Frustration?

    To IE or not to IE

    While I am not huge Microsoft fan, I have come to accept the web design frustrations that Microsoft has dealt us with relationship to Internet Explorer. While I accept these IE display issues and use IE hacks and stylesheets to solve them daily, Microsoft has always maintained that they are correct and of course FireFox, Chrome and Opera for example are wrong.... Hmmm.

    Yesterday in my email I received an Ad for Microsoft's WebsiteSpark tools with relation to their newest campaign to sell the products bundled under a "Biz" promotion scheme. Curiosity won the email spam battle, and I clicked through to the page (intentional use of poor link text).

    Upon landing I found a fairly normal CMS styled sales page. Since I build websites for a living, I have the "View Source Disease"... Upon viewing the source I was positively falling out of my chair laughing as Microsoft themselves (browser compliant and all) has been forced to use an IE hack to display their pages properly too!

    Not just any IE hack, but 2 separate IE 7 stylesheets were needed just to display their own page in their own browser.... Nice. So today I bring you Microsoft hacking for IE display issues. Notice that no hack or otherwise less than standards addition was needed to display in any other browser... Just IE.

    http://www.microsoft.com/web/websitespark/

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head><meta name='WT.cg_n' content='en-us' /><link href="../App_Themes/Spring/general.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" /><link href="../App_Themes/Spring/navigation.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" /><link href="../App_Themes/Spring/style.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" /><title>
	WebsiteSpark - Home
</title><link id="ctl00_ctl00_AdaptersInvariantImportCSS" rel="stylesheet" href="../styles/Adapters/Import.css" type="text/css" />
    <!--[if lt IE 7]>
        <link rel="stylesheet" href="../styles/BrowserSpecific/GeneralIE6.css" type="text/css" />
    <![endif]-->
    <!--[if gt IE 6]>
    <![endif]--> 

    <link rel="stylesheet" href="../styles/Home.css" type="text/css" />
    <link href="Css/HostSpark.css" rel="Stylesheet" type="text/css" />
    <!--[if lt IE 7]>
        <link rel="stylesheet" href="../styles/BrowserSpecific/HomeIE6.css" type="text/css" />
    <![endif]-->
    <script src="Script/jquery-1.3.2.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="../../scripts/home.js"></script>
    <style type="text/css">
	.ctl00_ctl00_ctl04_PrimaryNav_0 { background-color:white;visibility:hidden;display:none;position:absolute;left:0px;top:0px; }
	.ctl00_ctl00_ctl04_PrimaryNav_1 { text-decoration:none; }
	.ctl00_ctl00_ctl04_PrimaryNav_2 {  }
	.ctl00_ctl00_ctl04_SecondaryNav_0 { background-color:white;visibility:hidden;display:none;position:absolute;left:0px;top:0px; }
	.ctl00_ctl00_ctl04_SecondaryNav_1 { text-decoration:none; }
	.ctl00_ctl00_ctl04_SecondaryNav_2 {  }

</style></head>

    Also, one last dig.... While I am not hung up on web page validation, Microsoft's WebsiteSpark page isn't valid either. I could care less that they have failed to escape ampersands.... But not using a proper "alt" is a usability issue for visually impaired users. The designer of this page might also brush up on proper link attributes as I have never heard of the attribute "runat="... Have you?

  • Microsoft Bing Making a Bang?

    1 Comment
    • Posted by Melanie
    • 01 June 2009
    • Giggles
    image10 Microsoft Bing Making a Bang?

    Bing or Bomb?

    This is no in depth study at all... Just some quick thoughts about the new Microsoft Live Search engine BING!. They even have a rather pleasant and upbeat welcome letter attempting to explain the reasoning and direction... Without exposing much. Big surprise for Live.com users who are redirected.

    Ok, so I'm no real Microsoft fan... But I have some screen shots and thoughts I want to share with you guys.

    As you see below, the interface is rather inviting... Mousing over the balloons will give you trivia to search and guess the location of the scene.... Pretty neat. Ohhhhh, don't miss the icon in the lower right to install Microsoft Silverlight™ if you want to see other images --- UGH!

    bing1 300x112 Microsoft Bing Making a Bang?This is interesting.... Sitelinks?? Ermmm Sitelink search. Okay, thats pretty cool and useful. But is it for everyone? Or just Microsoft?

    bing2 300x174 Microsoft Bing Making a Bang?

    Nope, Google has one too!

    The relevancy and understanding of search terms seems to be hit or miss... We think this one is a hit. But Make sure you checkout that Microsoft is STILL using the WWW in pro-webs.net which is in fact NON canonical.... Matter of fact they have both www and non-www in 2 different SERPs..Next to each other

    zen cart seo1 300x111 Microsoft Bing Making a Bang?

    But this www page doesn't load for 2 years as the www is permanently redirected to the NON-WWW... Here check it http://www.pro-webs.net/ 301 redirects to http://pro-webs.net/.

    So where the hell do you suppose they are get the cached page from?? ....

    cache 300x56 Microsoft Bing Making a Bang?

    Good Question, Huh??

    Ok moving on, the little pop up for the SERP's orange dot is neat, but does this give searchers enough info to stay the need for them to visit your site to get the answer?

    bing3 300x111 Microsoft Bing Making a Bang?

    Not sure the Japanese version of the Zen Cart page is really relevant... You, know... Here in Ohio

    Searching for Green Bananas produces mostly relative results.... Except maybe the #1 listing (apparently organic?) which is for a beach cottage community in the Bahamas....

    green bananas 300x134 Microsoft Bing Making a Bang?The local results are ok.... In searching for sunny Mogadore, Ohio... way below the normal local flair... You get this. Yep, they dropped the ball on this... Google is way better here for certain.

    mogadore 300x158 Microsoft Bing Making a Bang?

    Yep, click it and get a Wiki http://www.bing.com/reference/semhtml/Mogadore%2C_Ohio?fwd=1&qpvt=Mogadore%2C+Ohio&q=Mogadore%2C+Ohio

    Wondering about product search???

    products 300x127 Microsoft Bing Making a Bang?

    Look Familiar?

    New search engine... Yes. Some improvement.. Yes.... Google Yet? No way!

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