The layout certianly looks convincing, even if it doesn't scale well with screen size. But I see some outstanding, easy to fix problems (in addition to those mentioned in the article):

As I look at the site, two pictures on the right hand side of the page are broken (this may be msn's fault, but it makes the site look quite unprofessional).

None of the scripts have a 'type' attribute. That seems to be very easy to fix.

All the scripts seem to be inline. Is there a good reason not to place the scripts in one or more external files?

The comment declerations are occasionally invalid.

It would also be good if the adserver accepted a reasonable syntax (i.e. not ampersand delimited). Although I guess this is out of ESPN's hands. I also wonder if the remaining presentational html is necessary. Is it used to work around bugs in browsers, or could it be removed?

"Since our front page is always roughly the same length, we don't need to worry about any of our columns creeping down into the footer."

Text zoom.

"Sometimes we dynamically open divs and other tags with document.write and the validator can't figure out why we're closing a tag which appears not to be open."

Simple fix: close the div with a script. HTML should be valid both before and after document.writing, for the simple reason that some users have scripts turned off.

"Our ad server requires us to send ampersand-delimited variables to it which are not URL-encoded and the validator treats any ampersands in your code as invalid."

No, the validator treats ampersands in link hrefs as HTML entities (not to be confused with URL-encoding). The validator only complains because what follows the ampersand is not a recognized entity. If it was a recognized entity, browsers would replace the entity by the character it represents before requesting the URL from the ad server.

There's an easy fix, which is to replace each ampersand in a link href with ampersand amp;. The same URL will be requested from the ad server, and the ESPN front page will be closer to validating.

Isn't it more correct to say "ESPN's table-less redesign" instead of "ESPN's standards-based redesign", because it seems like they argue against using standards..

I can symphatize with this guy on CSS positioning. The CSS positioning model is way too complex and lacks flexibility in key areas. On top of that, non trivial stuff is almost guaranteed to not work across browser because it is a very hard standard to implement as well.

I spent most of today trying to code some, in my view, trivial things. I had set two goals: it had to work in IE 6 & mozilla and no hacks were allowed (i.e. no ugly code to trick either mozilla or IE into correct behavior). This proved to be hard. Stuff like z-indexes, floats, relative positioning only brings tears to your eyes. Figuring out how it supposed to work is a pain, figuring out why it's not working like you think it's supposed to work is even harder and figuring why it's not working in the other browser (either) is a nightmare.

The hoops you have to jump through to get things centered, to get some div to display x pixels below some div with variable height, to display something on top of something else. It is just way too complex. I managed to get the site I was designing to look more or less the way I wanted too. And I even met my preset goals. However, I think it was way too much trouble to get a banner, three columns and a status bar.

Nice new layout. I am extremely impressed. I also like the browser upgrade page. Very good stuff.

ESPN and all other sites should still strive for standards compliance. The problem with not being compliant is that you run the risk that your page is being displayed and read differently by different browsers, especially browsers for blind users. I don't know if blind people are huge sports fans, but that isn't really my point.

I totally agree that the W3C needs to fix the problem with vertical positioning and divs. Is it so hard to allow us to do a footer easily? The W3C needs to get its act in gear