“The news menu fly-outs now work in Safari mac/win and Camino.” This was a recent update in our issue-tracking database by one of our star coders, letting everyone know that the left-side navigation will work as expected on Macintosh browsers when we re-launch the site. It doesn’t sound like much, but that simple status change represents a sea change for msnbc.com.
It’s no secret that in years past, we haven’t always been the best online citizen when it comes to playing nicely with others. Conspiracy theories abound (Microsoft, purveyor of Windows and Internet Explorer, is one of our corporate parents, after all) but the facts are far more simple.
The vast majority of our users come to msnbc.com on a Windows PC with Internet Explorer, thanks in no small part to our friends at MSN.com, the default homepage when so many of you first click that blue ‘e’ on your desktop. Fully supporting Internet Explorer, while giving alternative browsers a short shrift was, quite simply, a matter of expedience for the first decade of our site’s existence.
When the redesign efforts began in earnest over a year ago, however, we decided to rethink that approach. We started by retooling our browser support matrix to include both Firefox and Safari as “top-tier,” meaning that if our work didn’t work in those browsers, it didn’t get released. We armed ourselves with an arsenal of 17-inch Macbook Pros, not just for testing but for actual development work (much of the HTML and CSS was initially written using TextMate). We re-engineered our content management system to allow for maximum flexibility and then completely rewrote the markup of the site from scratch.
The result is a website that doesn’t just look better but is fundamentally different from the inside out. If you’re the kind of person who likes to click View Source in your browser, give the new site a look when it launches. We’ve finally entered the 21st century by moving towards what web designers call semantic HTML, which doesn’t use tables for layout. We rewrote our CSS to do more than just replace font tags. When it came to so-called alternative browsers like Firefox, we didn’t just test for them, we actually targeted them and then went back and fixed problems with buggy browsers. The code isn’t perfect — starting with the noticeably absent doctype declaration — but it’s an evolutionary leap from the days of old.
These changes don’t just mean that the site looks consistent across different browsers and platforms, either. By using semantic markup, and separating the content of our pages from the style of the display, the new msnbc.com will be more accessible to the visually impaired as well as to search engines.
Of course, all of this technical jargon and insider talk misses one of the most important improvements — our ability to deliver news and information to as many people as possible. The new site was built not by coders and designers but by journalists, all of whom share a simple goal of helping people better understand their world. We didn’t set out to build a more accessible website as part of a long list of features; we worked hard to create the best experience for everyone because it’s the right thing to do.
So, if you’ve perhaps shied away from our site because of the ‘ms’ in ‘msnbc’ or because we’ve treated your browser as second-class in the past, consider this a mea culpa and an invitation to give msnbc.com a second look.
Update: Regarding video support in Safari. Unfortunately, our video provider, MSN, recently redesigned their player and, subsequently, dropped Safari support. Fear not, though, we've got an amazing team hard at work on a completely redesigned video player that will work on any browser and platform that supports Flash 9. We're also bringing the whole operation in house so that we don't have to deal with the whims of a third party. Watch this space over the coming weeks for more news, I guarantee it will be worth the wait.
Jim Ray is an Editorial Concepts Producer at msnbc.com.
