[ cross posted from Lockergnome ]

Microsoft has taken several rather large baby steps this week with the release of a new homepage and website. As Douglas Bowman notes, “A huge drop in the number of tables used to lay out the page, not a spacer gif in sight, all the proprietary attributes and identifiers in the links are gone, most of the bulky JavaScript the previous home page used is stripped out, and the HTML now weighs in at a lean 11 KB.”

The general response to the change has been a muted “ho hum” from the design community. Hopefully this change signifies an overall shift in the perception of standards at Microsoft, as they are also only serving one version of the page to all browsers instead of a cut-down one for non-IE users.

Where are they going with this? Bowman’s signoff is telling of the overall design and standards’ community response: “Nice work Microsoft. Please… just don’t stop here.”