* WEB DESIGN UPDATE. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. NOTE: As a navigation aid for screen readers, all headings begin with an asterisk and end with a full stop. All items are also numbered in the contents and throughout the issue, with numbers appearing immediately after the asterisks. Please let me know if there is anything else we can do to make navigation easier. [Issue starts.] * April 2, 2003. * Volume 1, Issue 41. * What's new at the Web Design Reference site? New Links In These Categories: 1: ACCESSIBILITY. 2: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. 3: COLOR. 4: EVALUATION & TESTING. 5: EVENTS. 6: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 7: JAVASCRIPT. 8: MISCELLANEOUS. 9: NAVIGATION. 10: PHP. 11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 12: TOOLS. 13: USABILITY. 14: XML. SECTION ONE: New references. * 1: ACCESSIBILITY. The two models of accessibility By accease.com "There are two basic models of accessibility that have been used to create accessible web sites, lets call them 'Technically Accessible' and 'Fully Accessible'." Is your website accessible? Probably not By IT Analysis This article is about how the United Kingdom's Disability Rights Commission (DRC) is to conduct a formal investigation to focus on web access. "One thousand websites spanning the public and private sectors are to be tested for basic compliance with recognized industry accessibility standards." * 2: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Post One: What is CSS, anyway? By Kynn Bartlett Pure CSS Tabs By Mark Pilgrim This is Mark Pilgrim's CSS technique for using lists for horizontal tabs. He also uses body classes to highlight the current tag. This is a pure text technique, no graphics involved. Turning the Tables By Joe Gillespie "Tableless layouts have become something of a holy grail for forward-thinking Web designers..." CSS backgrounds and transparency By Jeffery Zeldman The "I can't believe it's not a table!" layout By John Gallant AKA "Big John" The key concept of this technique is using a background-left image on the body and a background-right on an all-encompassing div to create the illusion of two columns stretching the length of the page. Big John's layout uses that trick and a few others to get it rock solid across all browsers, then details exactly how it all works. * 3: COLOR. Gray Text Revisited By Aycan Gulez "LCD screens, due to technical limitations, cannot display grayscale text (or graphics for that matter) properly while CRTs can display the grayscale perfectly with infinite intensity levels, and that is the root of the problem." * 4: EVALUATION & TESTING. How (much) to Intervene in a Usability Testing Session By H. M. Tamer "My point is that there are contexts where proactive interaction with test users can be a very effective tool." Comparison of Usability Evaluation Methods (UEMs) By userdesign.com * 5: EVENTS. 2003 Maroon & Gold Awards for Communications Excellence Submission Deadline: April 11, 2003 - Web site entries April 18, 2003 - Print entries University of Minnesota "Maroon & Gold Award entries should represent a marketing, communications, or public relations effort carried out on behalf of a University of Minnesota organization." * 6: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Programming for Information Architects By Andrew Otwell "Both programming and IA are oriented towards abstraction. They both want to find patterns and rules that describe and predict. They both are concerned with handling structured content and metadata. But more often than not, IAs don't know what's going on with code. In this article, Andrew Otwell introduces IAs to the basic building blocks of programming." IA Summit 2003 Wrapup Part 1 By Boxes and Arrows Staff IA Summit 2003 Wrapup Part 2 By Boxes and Arrows Staff Additional Resources from the Information Architecture Leadership Seminar By aifia.org * 7: JAVASCRIPT. Higher Order Programming By Sjoerd Visscher This article examines Javascript's ability to use functions as values and arguments. Event Handlers and Callback Functions By Sjoerd Visscher Here are some tricks with closures that make event handling more powerful. Form Validation Step-by-Step By Robert Dominy An introduction to form validation. * 8: MISCELLANEOUS. Interview - Rachel Andrew, Dreamweaver Task Force By Bruce Lawson Rachel Andrew talks about web standards, Dreamweaver and the next big thing. An Interview With Mike Davidson of ESPN (Part 2) By Eric A. Meyer "Positioning footers is a huge Achilles heel of absolute positioning." Understanding the Psychology of Programming By Bryan Dollery "Writing code is an act of creativity. It isn't science and it isn't engineering, although programmers are happy to apply science and engineering to the creative process, when possible. Therefore to be a programmer one has to be highly creative. This is one of the reasons programmers are happier working on new projects rather than maintenance projects." * 9: NAVIGATION. Conceptual links trump hyperlinks By Kimberly Patch It's the journey and the destination: Shape and the emergent property of genre in evaluating digital documents By Andrew Dillon & Misha Vaughn "Navigation is a limited metaphor for hypermedia and website use that potentially constrains our understanding of human-computer interaction. In the present paper we trace the emergence of the navigation metaphor and the empirical analysis of navigation measures in usability evaluation before suggesting an alternative concept to consider: shape." (Please note that this is an acrobat PDF file. If you do not have acrobat you can download the acrobat viewer from . This download is for people who do not have Acrobat installed on their computers. It allows you to open and view a PDF file. Additional Adobe free tools are available to assist visually impaired users at ) * 10: PHP. Verify a User's Email Address Using PHP By Joe Marini Paginating MySQL Data with PHP By Adrian Portsmouth How To Write PHP Functions By Emmie Lewis An intro to functions. * 11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Why Hiptops are Harmful to Web Standards By Ian Lloyd "In case you are wondering 'What has this got to do with accessibility?'. Well, quite a lot. One of the many guidelines for coding a site for maximum is to make your pages device-independent." * 12: TOOLS. uzReview By Andy Edmonds Andy Edmonds is "approaching a preview release of a tool for heuristic review and the blogshares site is fun to poke around, but fraught with navigation problems. It could be a good test case." * 13: USABILITY. Intranet Portals: A Tool Metaphor for Corporate Information By Jakob Nielsen "Internet portals are virtually dead, but a portal approach can tame the unruly chaos on internal company networks. Intranet portals overcome many Internet portal limitations, and might be the best hope for productivity and a unified user experience" Improving WEB Page Revisitation: Analysis, Design and Evaluation By Andy Cockburn, Saul Greenberg, Steve Jones, Bruce McKenzie and Michael Moyle "In this paper, we distill several years of our research on understanding and improving how people return to their previously visited web pages. Our motivation is that web page revisitation is one of the most frequent actions in computer use, and consequently any interface improvements in this area-no matter how small-can have a very large effect." (Please note that this is an acrobat PDF file. If you do not have acrobat you can download the acrobat viewer from . This download is for people who do not have Acrobat installed on their computers. It allows you to open and view a PDF file. Additional Adobe free tools are available to assist visually impaired users at ) * 14: XML. XHTML Web Design for Beginners - Part 2 By Nigel Peck Architectural Design Patterns for XML Documents By Kyle Downey [Section one ends.] * SECTION TWO: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? Accessibility Information. Association Information. Book Listings. Cascading Style Sheets Information. Color Information. Dreamweaver Information. Evaluation & Testing Information. Event Information. Flash Information. Information Architecture Information. JavaScript Information. Miscellaneous Web Information. Navigation Information. PHP Information. Sites & Blogs Listing. Standards, Guidelines & Pattern Information. Tool Information. Typography Information. Usability Information. XML Information. [Section two ends.] * SUBSCRIPTION INFO. WEB DESIGN UPDATE is available by subscription only. For information on how to subscribe and unsubscribe please visit: * SIGNATURE. Laura L. Carlson Information Technology Systems and Services University of Minnesota Duluth Duluth, MN 55812-3009 mailto:lcarlson@d.umn.edu [Issue ends.]