Heard of Microsoft’s new Online Services initiative? Thought you’d check out the site?
You should. It’s at http://www.mosbeta.com/, and it’s one of the worst recent web sites I’ve seen by a large company.
Firstly, the web page is completely invalid. It’s not just a little bit wrong, as many are – hell, this site fails validation, mainly due to a couple of widgets. But the Microsoft site is hopeless. It doesn’t even have a DOCTYPE, the most basic description of what the page is even supposed to be. Publishing a web page without a DOCTYPE is unfathomable in this day and age – this is a point that is hard to overstate, for those of you unfamiliar with web design. There’s no charset, no meta tags whatsoever. It’s utterly, and incomprehensibly, incompetent.
Secondly, the site contains a “navigation bar” consisting of what appear to be links to other parts of the site: “Microsoft® Exchange Online | Microsoft® Office SharePoint Online | Microsoft® Office Live Meeting”. These are not actually links but merely unclickable text. Again, unfathomable – why are they even there? The CSS file contains classes to style these list items if they are links, but they’re not. Elsewhere, CSS is used partially and inconsistently. Very strange.
Thirdly, the site makes heavy use of a non-standard and rare display plugin, “Silverlight”. The viewer is exhorted to install this plug-in not once but twice on the same page. The viewing areas are iframes served from a third party site – again, unfathomable. Why not use a common video format such as flash or quicktime – or at the very least an image preview if the plugin is not installed? This is easy to do. Adding to the strangeness, the div that surrounds the silverlight window is entitled “flashpiece”.
Fourth, the site makes use of rare, non-standard, outdated tags in strange configurations. Take this excerpt from the code:
Forgive yourself if you had to go look up what
and
even were, I had to as well. wbr is an ancient tag meaning “insert break here if needed”, whereas
indicate to the browser that text included inside those tags should not be broken. The most recent documentation I could even find on these archaic tags was from 1999. Adding to the weirdness, I couldn’t find any reference to the notion that
even needs to be closed. XHMTL would require it to be closed – but wbr is not valid in XHTML anyway, not that the page is XHTML regardless, since there’s no freaking DOCTYPE! But there’s the XHTML-style self-closing
in there? Who on earth coded this website?
I could go on, but I think you get the idea. Microsoft’s new website about its online services platform – beta, no less, implying that it should at least be recently made – is an incompetently written, strangely archaic, and ugly to boot mishmash of invalid, outdated HTML, obscure plug-ins and links that go nowhere. If this is a taste of what’s to come from MOS, Google, and everyone else, can breathe easy.
