Unveiled Oct. 10, 2002, the site revives classic look-and-feel features with modern functionality, built to conform to Web standards. Wired News is now easier to use, quicker to access and much more streamlined for producers to update and modify.
The backbone of Wired News' design is a landmark undertaking for a heavily trafficked, content-heavy website. We have rebuilt the site to comply with Web standards set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The site now relies entirely on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for all page layout and design details. Tables and spacer GIFs, often used to set up and control page structure, are gone. All font tags have been stripped out. The markup language we use to describe the content of these pages now adheres to strict Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) rules, ensuring Wired News will be compatible with past and present Web browsers, as well as future browsing applications.
CSS is a simple but powerful mechanism for defining the style and presentation (fonts, colors, margins, and borders) of Web documents. It was formalized as a W3C recommendation in 1996, but has faced resistance from large content-based websites because of poor Web browser support. The recent release of newer, standards-compliant browsers provides a more consistent platform where CSS can be used to achieve predictable formatting results.
XHTML combines the power and versatility of XML (Extensible Markup Language) with the familiar Web language of HTML. XHTML is the next version of HTML, and is designed to allow for richer Web pages capable of displaying on a widening range of browser platforms, including mobile phones, PDAs, and televisions.
Content based in XML and XHTML can be easily modified to be read by the new browsing applications emerging on a variety of Web devices. Through the use of CSS, the content can be set up to render differently in each device according to its inherent capabilities.
By switching to XHTML and completely adopting CSS, Wired News pages now load faster, and are at once more accessible to all Web browsers and specialized browsing environments used by the visually or physically impaired. By stripping out font, color, and margin rules from the markup, and aggregating all those style rules into just a couple of CSS files, design changes can be propagated to thousands of pages instantly.
This isn't the first website to be converted to XHTML and utilize CSS in such a powerful way, as many personal web logs and designer's sites have painstakingly converted to these standards for the Web's greater good. But the well-designed example that Wired News now provides can hopefully embolden other large content sites to follow and join the Web Standards Project in the campaign encouraging users to upgrade their browsers. Doing so will help pull the Web out of the Dark Ages, and allow us all to progress forward.
XHTML and CSS exist as W3C standards to bring consistency, predictability, and accessibility to both Web browsers and the content produced for viewing in those browsers. Competition between Netscape and Microsoft during the late 1990s forced the browser companies to jump ahead of Web standards claiming unique support for their own features. Web developers had to code separate versions of pages that could work in specific browsers, or even worse, restrict the functionality of their site to only one browser. This required a huge amount of extra engineering and development time, and continues to fill pages on the Web with code optimized for one browser or another.
Complex nested HTML table hacks are still used by a majority of websites to control columns and margins around blocks of text and images. This holds back advancement in accessibility for the Web. The glut of useless markup tags often confuses older browsers, as well as the screen readers which help the visually and physically impaired use the Web.
Older browsers weren't built to support CSS, and only recent versions of the major browsers support CSS adequately enough to avoid unpredictable layout problems. To get around this challenge, CSS can be effectively hidden from browsers incapable of displaying the content properly. The shiny details of the new Wired News design are only visible in newer standards-compliant browsers.
Our content, in its entirety, can still be accessed from every available commercial browser -- even the first versions of Netscape or IE. Our statistics show that as many as 86 percent of our regular audience use supported browsers. Those who continue to use older browsers will see a much simpler Wired News -- one that offers the full content in a stripped-down design.
With this design, and the standards we've used to build it, we hope to push Web evolution in a positive direction.
We would have loved to keep our site pure and free of work-arounds that fix obscure rendering issues in specific browsers. We admit that this is not entirely the case. In a perfect world, our implementation of Web standards would render flawlessly in every single browser. However, the fact remains: past browsers were not built for -- or held to -- the same standards of today's browsers. Even recent browsers thought of as "standards-compliant" carry slight discrepancies which create differences in the appearance of our pages. Imperfections are bound to show up. We've done our best to ensure our site renders as consistently as possible, despite browser differences. We apologize if the content is rendered in a way that somehow makes it inaccessible.
To report significant bugs with our new design, or send us feedback, please use our Contact Form. If you'd like to ensure Wired News is displayed as we've intended it to look, we encourage you to visit the Browser Upgrade Campaign page from the Web Standards Project to learn how and why you should upgrade your browser.
Here is a list of standards-compliant browsers for your system. All are FREE. Click to download, then run the installer and begin using your new browser:
You
must be using a standards-compliant web browser.
98.4% of our audience uses a standards-compliant web browser, but
you appear not to be using one. We want to help you remedy this situation
and improve your experience on ESPN.com and the rest of the internet.
Click one of the download links on the left to freely upgrade
your browser, or read on for more information on why you got to
this page.
* Or if you'd like to view ESPN's lite site for older browsers and WebTV, click here.
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Why am I here?
The Short Answer:
Web browsers become obsolete over time. The simplest way to think about it is to remember when everyone stopped using cassettes and started using CDs. People made the move to CDs because they provided better sound, were more convenient, and eventually artists stopped releasing cassettes, instead only releasing CDs. Since only about 1.6% of the visitors to ESPN.com use an outdated browser (mainly Netscape 4), we’ve decided it’s time to “stop releasing cassettes” and roll out a faster loading, sleeker, and more informative ESPN.com. Over the next year or so, you will notice other major sites upgrading as well.
Just like making the move from cassette to CD, updating your current browser may be a difficult decision to make... although downloading a browser is free and you can do it right here. We want to help make this as easy as possible for you so we’ve checked your system and provided some links on the upper left side of this page for you to download a FREE new browser. So click a link on the left, download a new web browser, install it, and try it out... we’re sure you’ll be happier with your internet experience because of it.
If you’re still not convinced, click here for the Long Answer (a more technical explanation of why you should upgrade).
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Why am I here?
The Long Answer:
When web browsing became popular in the mid 90s, several companies began battling to develop the most dominant web browser on the market. Since there was no standard on what a browser should really look and act like, these companies all released their own browsers using proprietary methods, and the end result was a slew of browsers which were barely compatible with each other. As a result, anyone who wanted to run a web site often had to write 5 or 6 different versions of each page on their site, just to make sure it worked in all of these proprietary browsers. As a user, you may not realize this is going on, but the end result is a page which is not necessarily presented as it *should* be but rather as a "lowest common denominator" for all the browsers it must be viewed on.
For the last several years, companies (including ESPN) have supported all of these older browsers because large percentages of their audience still used them. The results were heavier pages which took longer to load, longer lead-times on developing and publishing new content, and all sorts of complicated JavaScript to send different people different versions of each page.
Finally, along came a set of open web standards for everyone to use. For the past couple of years, every major web browser released has been built around a set of open standards designated by the World Wide Web Consortium, a non-profit organization charged with overseeing the continuing development of the web. What this means is that one piece of code now looks the same on every modern browser, whether it be Netscape, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera, or others. The only catch is, the majority of users actually have to *use* these modern browsers before sites like ESPN can present content which is optimized for them.
So when we began talking about redesigning the ESPN.com front page, the first thing we did was look at our audience. Our numbers show that about 1.6% of our audience still uses non standards-compliant browsers, and most of that 1.6% uses Netscape 4, which is a non standards-compliant 5-year old browser and is easily, and freely, upgradeable to Netscape 7 (a very nice browser).
So we said to ourselves, “If we can produce twice the amount of content, create faster loading pages, and offer more features to 98.4% of our audience at a cost of having to tell less than 2% of our audience to freely upgrade their browser, then well, that’s a pretty easy decision.” If it was more like 10%, then perhaps we wouldn’t have made the same decision, but the fact is, most people have already upgraded and most of the remaining 1.6% simply don’t realize they are using an outdated browser.
We’d like to make perfectly clear that we are not trying to get you to use Microsoft browsers, Netscape browsers, Apple browsers, or Opera browsers. This is not about telling you what brand of browser to use. It is only about alerting you to the fact that each of the companies above, plus a few more, makes a modern, standards-compliant browser which you can easily (and freely) switch to using the links on the upper left side of this page.
Over the next year or so, you will begin to notice more and more sites concentrating their efforts on supporting open standards and dropping support for older non-compliant browsers. You are free to consider us one of the first, and you may also consider this an invitation from your friends at ESPN to get on board. If your systems administrator has you locked into using a non standards-compliant browser like Netscape 4, then feel free to send him or her to this page. They already know about this issue and we feel strongly that it is in their best interest to get you upgraded.
As an influential site on the internet, ESPN is proud to help further the cause of open standards on the web. Since you are eventually going to upgrade your browser anyway, why not use this as your opportunity? We’re sure you’ll enjoy the new ESPN, as well as every other site on the web a lot more because of it.
If you prefer a simpler explanation, click here for the Short Answer (a less technical explanation of why you should upgrade).