If you crow about your redesign,

October 29, 2001 7:26 AM

If you crow about your redesign, claiming your site is now "better-looking and easier to use" (and not, say, "sludgy as Hotmail and nearly as ugly"), and you offer a graphical tour to "show you how all these slick new features work", the link to which is a 404, are you the stupidest monopoly around?

Just wondering.
posted by textist (26 comments total)

Maybe. But it worked when I tried it.
posted by pracowity at 7:31 AM on October 29, 2001

If you post to mefi about a link which is a 404 and it actually works does that make you the stupidest peron around? Just wondering.
posted by suprfli at 7:34 AM on October 29, 2001

Seems to work now. But along the same lines, with the redesign of MSDN, has anyone experienced a rash of broken links to MSDN? It seems that whenever I encounter a support article pointing to MSDN, it has a 90% chance of being bad. This is happened enough times that I'm surprised I haven't read anything about it yet... (for example, check out this article pointing to this dead link).
posted by harrycaul at 7:38 AM on October 29, 2001

If a bear shits in the woods, does it make a sound?
posted by jpoulos at 7:39 AM on October 29, 2001

Mine pops up as a Flash file, is it possible that the HTML version is 404ing? Maybe textist is using one of those "other" (read evil, open source, non-capitalist) OSs without flash support.

Don't jump all over the poor Guy, it could be that Slate only did part of the job.
posted by m@ at 7:40 AM on October 29, 2001

Page you are trying to view cannot be displayed right now.
Contact [e-mail].

Seems like the semantic equivalent of a 404 to me.

But then, I'm running Netscape on Solaris. Given the fantastic quality of the renderer in this thing, it's entirely possible that it's downloading a perfectly fine page and just drawing it like that ...
posted by jacobm at 7:46 AM on October 29, 2001

Netscape = 404-type error
IE = Loads correctly

Funny, I didn't know that a beveled navbar was innovative. (maroon, to boot!)
posted by jragon at 7:55 AM on October 29, 2001

> Netscape = 404-type error
> IE = Loads correctly

fuck me
posted by pracowity at 7:59 AM on October 29, 2001

404 *then* doesn't necessarily equal 404 *now*... Part of that whole constantly updatable web thing...

Still showing up on IE5 Mac, plus some nice JS errors to boot.
posted by jeffhoward at 8:15 AM on October 29, 2001

Not sure I understand, pracowity.
posted by jragon at 8:26 AM on October 29, 2001

fuck me

In case, like me, you were wondering what that was all about:

http://www.textism.com/article/389
posted by mw at 8:28 AM on October 29, 2001

Weirdos, freaks, and other oddballs rejoice as Microsoft shuts them out of corporate mainstream MSN site ... later, terror as some are forced to actually see intended MSN content when Microsoft restores access.

(MSN servers began serving 404-type pages to certain non-Microsoft browsers this week, but inconsistently, and it's easily worked around.)
posted by dhartung at 8:40 AM on October 29, 2001

Whatever, even if I can see it now, it 404ed for days after their redesign launch last week. I was using IE with full Flash 'goodness', too. Lame no matter how you slice it.

They're using .NET now at Slate (someone's got to). I gloatingly imagine a causal relationship.
posted by Sapphireblue at 8:44 AM on October 29, 2001

pracowity's comment was fairly random (but I do love anything to do with textism), but mw? I think people can probably read the status bar by rolling over the link.
posted by xochi at 8:45 AM on October 29, 2001

I think people can probably read the status bar by rolling over the link.

Well, you could click on it, too. But neither would make the comment any clearer.
posted by mw at 9:03 AM on October 29, 2001

Microsoft has a long history of doing this. I remember finding that after one of their break-the-links-every-six-months revisions, all of the MSDN links I had bookmarked 404ed if you were using Netscape; ~50% of them still worked in IE. It was definitely a browser-detect on their end, too, as I made some requests by hand which were identical except for the User-Agent string.

At the same time, I found an interesting speed difference, too - most of the links were taking a very long time to load only in Netscape. After testing several times with both browsers, I found that IE was definitely transfering faster, sometimes by as much as a factor of 20. This didn't seem to happen when their site wasn't congested - my guess was that they filled IE requests at a higher priority than Netscape requests, so it only got ridiculous for Netscape users at peak times.
posted by adamsc at 9:12 AM on October 29, 2001

Still not working two hours later on Mac IE 5 or iCab 2.5.3 so, um, "we stand by our reporting."
posted by textist at 9:14 AM on October 29, 2001

It's because you're in France. Microsoft hates the French.

Hmmm, no 404s, but that Flash tour is damn ugly. Fuck me.
posted by solistrato at 9:18 AM on October 29, 2001

You are indeed a stupid monopoly, particularly if your redesign, tailored to work better in IE than in any other browser, spews dozens of JavaScript errors in IE5/Mac, which is your own product *and* the most standards-compliant browser you have ever made.

Especially if you claim that the deficiencies of MSN.com have anything to do with "standards compliance" instead of admitting your hasty redesign uses invalid markup and oldstyle browser detection to advance a lame marketing ploy that proves you're still fighting the Browser Wars in spite of having won them.
posted by Zeldman at 9:28 AM on October 29, 2001

All I get is "Server Too Busy" errors. Ah, it must be that "scalable" .NET architecture that Microsoft wants companies to adopt for all of their Internet transactions. Yeah, I'm convinced. Yup.
posted by camworld at 10:09 AM on October 29, 2001

I've updated my text-only Slate filter to work with the redesigned site. Mmm, purty.

(Don't thank me — thank Larry Wall for making Perl so powerful.)

The table of contents still hangs up when their crappy Windows servers get overloaded, but there's not much I can do about that!
posted by nicwolff at 11:02 AM on October 29, 2001

Page you are trying to view cannot be displayed right now.
Contact [e-mail]

Opera, IE5 and Netscape 4.7 are displaying this on my Mac currently.
posted by RevGreg at 11:23 AM on October 29, 2001

what's so bad about ATF Garamond?
posted by lotsofno at 6:12 PM on October 29, 2001

If a bear shits in the woods, does it make a sound?

yes. but only hellen keller can hear it, and then only if a tree falls on her.
posted by quonsar at 6:24 PM on October 29, 2001

lotsofno: Just look at it. It's sloppy at best, and there have been hundreds of cleaner, more readable serif typefaces released since 1919—trust me.
posted by Down10 at 6:37 PM on October 29, 2001

Nothing’s wrong with ATF Garamond, as noted here (3rd graf). There is however something wrong with spackling media heat onto it in a desperate lunge to fill column inches and service those who like their art and culture chunked by hacks into digestible little bits.

It’s hard to imagine that someone could write a sentence like “books with buzz by mediagenic young authors” and not immediately commit suicide.
posted by textist at 12:35 AM on October 30, 2001