Blog

I subscribe to the SitePoint TechTimes newsletter, and today’s discussed the new microsoft.com launch (I think it’s a bit old by now). One newsletter reader sent in the following letter, which sheds some very interesting light on SharePoint, and Microsoft’s development practices. It makes me want to drop ColdFusion today and convert everything to SharePoint! 😉from .NET developer Rick Mason:”One of the big new features of the new microsoft.com home page (big from their point of view anyway) that you missed is that it’s built on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS), which was just released along with Office 12, Vista et al. The last version of SharePoint was too slow for a high-traffic public web site, and the new homepage is an advert for MOSS, a way of saying, ‘look, if it can handle a site this busy, it can handle yours’.The sad thing is that, out of the box, the HTML produced by MOSS is awful. We’re talking layout tables nested five deep, invalid attributes all over the place, alt text for images strictly optional, table headers marked up as td even when it’s styled with a class called “header”, menu items in a completely different part of the page to the menu header, even font elements for goodness’ sake! The list goes on.Clearly, to get the new home page up to the standard it is they have gone to a lot of effort to bend SharePoint to their will. The frustrating thing is that they didn’t do that work in the base product, so every savvy web developer working with SharePoint has to repeat it all themselves. This is an example of one department of Microsoft starting to “get it”, and another part remaining as clueless as ever despite a lot of badgering.This also makes your comment about the lack of RSS more interesting, because, like IE7, MOSS is riddled with RSS feeds. It’s not just that they didn’t get around it, they must have consciously decided to turn them off.I’m a .NET developer working on a new MOSS-based extranet, trying to produce a standards-based site as best I can.”