I still remember that on the early days of the MSN Spaces, if you wanted to fully experience your Space, you had to use IE6…

Nowadays, Microsoft developers are putting a lot of effort into making their products and webpages more standards compliant. Across the blogosphere, there are many posts about this. Molly H. wrote:

Many readers here also follow the IEBlog (a good practice for contemporary Web developers and designers). Expect significant repairs to most existing bugs, implementation of long-awaited CSS features such as fixed positioning, child selectors, and attribute selectors. Alpha transparency in PNGs? Yes! The XML declaration will now be available without disturbing the DOCTYPE switch, and object handling will be improved with proper fallback.

R. Scoble announced:

Thomas Hawk broke the story this afternoon that Live.com now supports Firefox, but Sanaz Ahari, PM on the Live.com team just told me the news officially minutes ago. She says there’s a minor CSS bug in the search results which will be fixed soon too.

Then again, while I was updating my Space profile in Firefox, I noticed that my contact card didn’t show either my email or my phone numbers… so I opened the page in Internet Explorer, signed in with my Passport account, and was surprised to see that IE was showing 3 JavaScript errors… First one was on line 3, character 18095. As you can see below, my picture and/or contact card isn’t showing:

MSN Spaces have JavaScript Errors in Internet Explorer

I checked on Firefox (using the JavaScript Console) to check out if there were JavaScript errors, and there were none. Though the Console did show a lot of CSS errors (’dropped declarations’). I also decided to check my Space’s source for w3c compliance. There were 424 errors.

Here is a screenshot of the page in Firefox:

Firefox doesn't have JavaScript Errors in MSN Spaces

As a note, I’m using the Flyakite mod for Windows… it shouldn’t have any effect on how pages are rendered in IE, but who knows…

Anyhow, I took the liberty of writing to the IEBlog staff, since trying to locate someone to talk to on MSN Spaces was a bit difficult.

Here’s what I sent them:

Hello IE developers. I’m writing to you since I couldn’t find an easy way to report an error on the MSN Spaces site.

Since I’m from Mexico, my Space is displayed in spanish… unfortunately the templates for spanish language provoque javascript errors… and don’t validate (they are also displayed in quirks mode).

In IE6 this means that some functions aren’t displayed, like my contact card. Ironically, Firefox is able to show the contact card (but doesn’t show more info, like the email and phone).

I just thought you should know. For a screenshot of the errors and a comparison, visit rolandog.com.

I’m thinking it’s the language templates they have, but it really is only up to them to really find out what is going on.