I’m pleased, but I think redoing the page with valid XHTML would be better.

why inline styles! seems like they are displaying different css for different browsers.

I think it’s a bold move in the right direction.

I think the right column “All Microsoft Sites” should align with the top of the main graphics, and the vertical tabs at the bottom should change on click instead of hover.

In in all I think the design is awesome. Clean style, nice graphics, a lot more whitespace than the previous.

Maybe a bit over the top with the DHTML pop-up thing. But “eyecandy wise” I like it a lot.

They did a good job but their code is still quite messy.

@ Erlend: they’re using some sort of CMS, and if you worked with any enterprise CMS, it always spits out cluttered, messy code – Microsoft has been a leader of messy code for like a decade now.

I hope they are eating their own dog food and using Sharepoint…

This sort of navigation is not well working on the web, I think. It’s slow and not quite handy.

And yes, they are migrating everything to SharePoint 2007 (good luck…), but I don’t get why they present this kind of new design before they are even done with it…

The textile parser keeps mangling my attempt at quoting some of the code from the redesign, but see if this looks like best-practice markup/presentation/behaviour to you:

a style=“filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src=’/global/14f63294-2be9-44f8-b908-8dc503fa7a62.png’);” onclick=“WTID;” href=“http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/mcrssitp0150000010mrt/direct/01/”

As far as I’m concerned, the above shows that MS either are still not hiring the right kind of web developer, or they just don’t get best practices.

I like how clean and fresh it is but essentially it’s a bunch of wank. I really like what MS did with the Vista designs & a few others. This is almost in line but already looks outdated somehow :|

All I can say, is “Thank God!” they’re finally embracing CSS and XHTML – even if they aren’t doing a good job at it.

It’s a step in the right direction. And while it’s sad, that’s about all I’ve come to expect from Microsoft these days.

It’s progress, but one cannot be really happy about their (invalid) code on a more than 200 KB homepage [1].

[1] http://uitest.com/en/check/results/?url=http://microsoft.com/

They are still working on..
http://www.microsoft.com/about/mspreview/en/us/abouthomepage.mspx

@Daniel Scrivner

its not xhtml!

didn’t realize a table gets a 1em font setting. ;d