That Standards Guy



Search

About

That Standards Guy is the online persona of Karl Dawson, a web developer living and working in Ipswich, England.

I'm a member of the Guild of Accessible Web Designers and the Web Standards Group and team member at Accessites—an awards site to recognise accessible and usable websites.

I specialise as a front-end developer and worry about the minutae of semantic (X)HTML and CSS, accessibility, microformats, typographic rhythm and grid design. I also care about the user experience and remind myself constantly of visitor site goals when working with clients and their aims.

That Standards Guy is proudly powered by WordPress using my own “StrictlyTSG v3.0” theme. Site Policies.

Stay up to date via the RSS feed. What’s RSS?

Failed Redesign: MSN UK Entertainment

January 11th, 2006

After reading Joe Clark’s blog entry on failed redesigns I thought I’d keep an eye out for UK sites failing to meet web standards after a redesign. Well I went looking a moment ago and from the following article Netimperative - MSN redesigns UK entertainment channel trooped off to the MSN UK Entertainment website.

Visually, it’s very clean and simple - under the hood though? Oh my God!

  • No doctype ;)
  • in-line JavaScript
  • JavaScript to give Jeremy Keith a fit (probably)
  • Tables! lots and lots of tables
  • in-line Styles
  • multiple   to force white-space
  • Unescaped ampersands (naturally)

I could probably go on. They have the cheek to say this is accessible? When they are using an 8 point font size somewhere in there?

Pull the other one, it’s got Bill Gates on it.

Technorati tag:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 11th, 2006 at 1:58 pm and is filed under Failed Redesigns.

2 Responses to “Failed Redesign: MSN UK Entertainment”

  1. I searched for recent redesigns on Netimperative and found that nearly all of them were just as bad :-

    Variety Club - a horror of frames and tables.

    CD:UK site - tables, invalid code…

    UK Red Cross - more tables and invalid code

    and lot, lots more besides.

    DerekSays:

    January 12th, 2006 at 3:59 pm

  2. Home Page Validation returns with this:

    Result: Failed validation, 808 errors

    AltanSays:

    January 16th, 2006 at 9:27 pm