MSN launched a new homepage today that boasts a completely CSS-based layout, accessibility features, stripped-down markup that's friendly to mobile devices, a theme switcher, and a total of only 2 validation errors. With this launch, MSN joins a host of other major commercial sites that have embraced web standards, including Yahoo, AOL, ABC News, Wired and ESPN, to name a few.

One notable thing that sets the MSN homepage redesign apart from the others I named is the paltry number of validation errors. I know validation isn't everything, but still, when you've got ESPN topping out the list with a whopping 1910 errors, and MSN has 2? That's impressive, no matter how you cut it.

A word of warning: if you're like me, the first thing you do when you visit a web site is view the source. Well, good luck dissecting MSN's; they've removed all the whitespace, so it's damn near impossible to read. But that's where Web Developer and X-Ray come in handy. Be sure to view the site with styles disabled.

Hopefully this move by MSN will be another nail in the coffin of the myth that web standards aren't realistic for large sites. If Yahoo wasn't the final nail, perhaps this can be!

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Well, it only took a month, but finally my interview with Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman, and Jason Santa Maria at An Event Apart Atlanta is available for download, via the Georgia Podcast Network.

I spent about 10 minutes speaking with Eric, Jeffrey, and Jason bright and early that morning, and they are some of the nicest, most down-to-earth guys you could meet. So consider this a public thanks, y'all, for taking the time to talk with me. And if any of you readers have the opportunity to attend An Event Apart in your city, you absolutely should; it was a day well spent, to say the least.

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Yes, you read the headline correctly. CSS Love Child is a geeky take on Conan O'Brien's "What if they made it?" shtick, thanks to a little Perl magic and some time to kill. And it is very entertaining - so entertaining that I can even forgive it for using the word "mashup." I can't really think of any practical application for it, but so what? It is labeled, "Another ridiculous experiment by The Man in Blue."

This fabulous tool of procrastination is also a means for gauging one's popularity in the sometimes high school-esque world of standards-oriented design. If your URL appears pre-filled in the "body of" or "face of" drop-down, you're one of the webdev elite! Everyone wants to wear your letterman jacket or take you to the prom. (Note to the Man in Blue: why the hell is Molly Holzschlag not listed?)

But enough of my rambling. Go spend the rest of this lovely Friday afternoon clicking that "Procreate" button!

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Surely we're all familiar with the nearing-last-call karaoke hit, "Hands to Heaven," by the 80s band Breathe. Well, now there's a remake for all us web standards geeks. Via boagworld.com, it's "Hands to Boag," a love song about web standards. You can download the mp3 and listen every night before you go to bed, and every morning when you wake up.

Behold, a sampling of the brilliant lyrics:

Tonight I need your CSS, coding in the darkness.
From now on no more tables nest; you will meet web standards.

Two thumbs way up... it brought a little tear to my eye.

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First Evolt, now Slashdot. They're having a CSS redesign contest, and it's about damn time. I was over their current look-and-feel six years ago. Not like I read Slashdot, but whatever, I can still  have a snarky opinion about their design.

All snark aside, though, the really awesome part of this contest is that the winner gets a MacBook Pro! Commence salivating. It makes me want to enter soooo badly, even though I know I already have a serious deficit of free time as it is. Oh, and the runner-up gets $250, which ain't too shabby either.

So go to it - and if you end up winning, be sure to send me photos of your new MacBook Pro so that I can live vicariously. (And whatever you do, please increase the line-height of their threads; that's my one special request.)

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Robert Scano takes us on a guided retrospective through the past 10 or so years of web development, with a focus on accessibility and its evolution (or lack thereof, if you want to argue that point). Remember HTML 3.2? NCSA Mosaic? Ah, memories...

The article is at once discouraging and heartening. It's kind of annoying to see how little progress has been made in making the web-at-large accessible to all; you'd think that with 10 years to work on it, we'd have done a little better. But then, I'm a perfectionist and I tend to try to rush things, so maybe I shouldn't expect such advances in a decade...?

Which brings us to the heartening aspect - there's more of a push for standards and accessibility than ever, and guidelines set forth by WCAG, ATAG, etc., can only make things better.

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New in town: CSS Showcase, a gallery of CSS navigation menus. Skip trying the theme switcher on the home page and go straight to the meat of the site: "Showcase" and "Technique." (Both of these links are located, appropriately, in the CSS navigation menu just under the header.)

CSS Showcase has taken the idea of Listamatic (which I love, and have had bookmarked for over a year) and done it one better. It shows actual, real-live CSS menus, along with downloadable code for each.

Now that this kick-ass site exists, can we finally put to rest the myth that CSS-based design is boring?

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Ha! Check out Eric Meyer's new article on Vitamin, "Making Popular Layout Decisions." It has the best lede ever:

Every time you make a layout decision - fluid vs fixed, scaled vs percentage, a few more people hate you.

Reminds me of a little bit of wisdom that was handed to me at the tender age of 18, when I was interning at an independent weekly newspaper. The music editor told me, "Remember, no matter what you write, you're going to piss someone off." That's certainly true of writing, and it rings true in the cut-throat* world of web development, too.

To have a big name like Eric Meyer stating a fact that few admit makes me very, very happy - maybe a little too happy, in a way that is at once vindictive and guilt-ridden. What, that doesn't make sense? Well, here's the deal: I used to be one of those people who was always going around emailing webmasters about their horrible designs, and how they're alienating users, and how poorly it reflects on their company, and so on and so forth. Then I got a job at a large web-based company and was confronted with the reality of how these organizations work: slowly and laboriously, like any large organization. One "easy change" that could result in 50 million more users often isn't such an easy change, because there are process flows and change requests and CMS limitations and so on to be dealt with.

Does that mean I now give large web sites carte blanche to do as they please with user-unfriendly designs and poor code? Of course not. But I've learned that wagging your finger in someone's face isn't the way to influence positive change; it only makes you look like a jerk.

  * Surely you can spot sarcasm, right?

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Does MySpace give you horrible flashbacks of mid-1990s "home pages" with tiled image backgrounds, animated gifs, and auto-play MIDI files? Yeah, me too. But now you can at least attempt to fight back from within; Mike Davidson has written a tutorial for creating a more tasteful MySpace profile. As you can see for yourself, his profile looks downright decent.

Bonus for Mac OS X users: Mike credits Xyle Scope with helping him learn the nature of a MySpace profile in the wild.

So, if you have the time and inclination, get to redesigning your MySpace profile. You too can have 53 billion friends.

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