+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 1, Issue 44, April 24, 2003. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 44 CONTENTS. SECTION ONE: New references. What's new at the Web Design Reference site? http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/webdesign/ New Links In These Categories: 01: ACCESSIBILITY. 02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. 03: COLOR. 04: DREAMWEAVER. 05: EVALUATION & TESTING. 06: EVENTS. 07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 08: JAVASCRIPT. 09: MISCELLANEOUS. 10: NAVIGATION. 11: PHP. 12: STANDARDS. 13: TOOLS. 14: USABILITY. 15: XML. SECTION TWO: 15: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Why you should use acronyms and abbreviations By Ian Lloyd "...adding the or tag with the appropriate title attribute can benefit you and people browsing your sites in a number of ways..." http://tinyurl.com/a8nh The difference between acronyms and abbreviations By Ian Lloyd http://tinyurl.com/a8ni +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Winer and CSS: enough already By Jeffery Zeldman "Tag soup bloats web pages, slowing their delivery for all users and especially penalizing dialup users. Tag soup corrupts data by yoking it to nonstandard formatting instructions." http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0303a.shtml#ap1803 css filters (css hacks) By centricle http://centricle.com/ref/css/filters/ +03: COLOR. Don't rely on colour alone to provide important information By Jim Byrne http://www.mcu.org.uk/weeklytips/colouralone.html +04: DREAMWEAVER. Download our site template and make the leap to XHTML and CSS2 By Shawn Morton Shawn Morton provides a ready-to-use DreamWeaver template that is standards-compliant and accessible. http://tinyurl.com/a8nk +05: EVALUATION & TESTING. Testing the Three-Click Rule By Josh Porter "If there is a scientific basis to the Three-Click Rule, we couldn't find it in our data. Our analysis left us without any correlation between the number of times users clicked and their success in finding the content they sought." http://www.uie.com/Articles/three_click_rule.htm Using Mozilla in Testing and Debugging Web Sites By Henrik Gemal "Trying to iron out all the wrinkles in a Web site or Web application can be an enormous time sink, but Mozilla can make the job a whole lot easier. Developer Henrik Gemal contributes some great insights and techniques for using and extending Mozilla into a lean, mean Web development environment." http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2003/mozilla-webdev/ +06: EVENTS. IT Accessibility and Usability: Policies and Tools Free seminar on accessibility and usability May 2, 2003 New York, New York, U.S.A. http://tinyurl.com/a8nn Making Collaboration Technologies Accessible for Persons with Disabilities The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) and the Research and Development Interest Group (RDIG) Teleconference April 28, 2003 http://www.w3.org/WAI/RD/ +07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Building a Metadata-Based Website By Brett Lider and Anca Mosoiu "The online world has been flooded in recent years with talk of metadata, structured authoring, and cascading style sheets. The idea of a semantic web is gaining momentum. At the confluence of these two broad categories of activity, new models of websites are emerging." http://tinyurl.com/a6b5 IA Classics: Tools of the Trade in Comic Book Form By Dan Willis "'What I need are highly condensed overviews,' I thought, 'like those comic books that convert great literary works into a few illustrated pages. They condense Moby Dick down to 12 pages and provide a version of Great Expectations that can be read in 15 minutes.'" http://tinyurl.com/a6b2 Differences between Information Architecture and Information Design By Clark MacLeod "Both require different skills. Information architects come from a variety of backgrounds, but I sense that a majority of them display an orientation toward language. Information designers, on the other hand, tend to be oriented toward the visual arts. As a result, the majority of information designers come from exactly one discipline: graphic design." http://tinyurl.com/a8nr +08: JAVASCRIPT. Ensure links work when Javascript doesn't By Jim Byrne http://www.mcu.org.uk/weeklytips/javascriptlinks.html +09: MISCELLANEOUS. The XML.com Interview: Liam Quin By Russell Dyer "Many people have contributed to the development of XML. One contributor and XML expert who stands out is Liam Quin." http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/04/09/quin.html Jakob Nielsen, author & Web site usability guru By Melissa Reyen "The world's leading expert on Web site usability speaks his mind on the future of Web publishing." http://tinyurl.com/a8nu Close-ups on Eric Meyer By Carole Guevin http://netdiver.net/interviews/ericmeyer.php +10: NAVIGATION. Site Navigation: Keeping It Under Control By Indi Young "Navigation is the section of the page that controls what appears in this content area. The beauty of this is that the page content is malleable. The architecture is not, and should represent a strong, extensible foundation that will last at least ten years. It's like building out floors in an office building. You can change the functionality of the floors as needed without changing the structure of the building." http://tinyurl.com/a8nw What is this link doing here? By Mike Thelwall "Analogies between Web links and citations have been used in information retrieval to improve search engine query matching and in information science to develop link metrics for academic and other Web spaces. The purpose of this paper is to begin a fine-grained process of differentiating between creation motivations for links in academic Web sites and citations in journals on the basis that they are very different phenomena..." http://informationr.net/ir/8-3/paper151.html +11: PHP. An Introduction to Arrays Eric Rosebrock "In this article, Eric demonstrates the use of arrays in PHP. This article is mainly for beginner PHP programmers to give them a push in the right direction." http://www.devarticles.com/art/1/524 Basic and Not so Basic "Function" Features Using PHP By Jason Lam "Jason Lam has written this article for people in the need of learning how to use functions in PHP. Covered in this article are issues relating to object oriented programming." http://www.devarticles.com/art/1/523 +12: STANDARDS. Beyond the Browser Upgrade Campaign By The Web Standards Project http://webstandards.org/act/campaign/buc/ Browser upgrade campaign officially retired By Mark Pilgrim http://tinyurl.com/a8pj Ending the upgrades By Craig Saila http://www.saila.com/columns/redesign/030423.shtml WThRemix Winners Here are the winners of the W3C redesign contest and information about the judging. The challenge was to come up with a new design for the World Wide Web Consortium homepage using valid, accessible XHTML and CSS and eschewing tables. The winning site remake is by Radu Darvas. http://w3mix.web-graphics.com/win.php Also Slashdot readers discuss the winners at: http://tinyurl.com/a8ny +13: TOOLS. pnhtoolbar By Chris Casciano Chris Casciano has release a wonderful toolbar add on for web developers using Mozilla/Netscape. Features include: links to most W3C Specifications, automated submission to many validation tools, hide & show style sheets, apply your own external style sheet, highlight many HTML elements, resize Window to specific dimensions for testing, highlight form information, view page cookies. It works great and it is free. (However, because it is based on XUL, it will only work in XUL browsers like Netscape 7 and Mozilla.) http://placenamehere.com/pnhtoolbar/ Acrobot By Ian Lloyd An online tool that generates markup for abbreviations and acronyms. http://tinyurl.com/a8o1 HTML Tidy Online By Jonathan Hedley This is another online implementation of Dave Raggett's original HTML Tidy, a useful tool to help to fix bad HTML. http://infohound.net/tidy/ Section 508 Accessibility Validation By Josh Hughes This is a useful tool, but it is not a validator. http://condor.gmu.edu/josh/validator/ LogValidator By W3C This is a tool that works using a server's logs. It validates the most frequently visited pages. http://www.w3.org/QA/Tools/LogValidator/ +14: USABILITY. Fast-downloading websites are still important By Gerry McGovern People are impatient on the Web. They are function and task orientated. They want to get things done as quickly as possible. The average person is still accessing the Web over a 56 KB modem. You should therefore have a major focus on 'light' webpages if you want to increase reader-satisfaction. http://tinyurl.com/a8o2 The Bandwidth Report By Andy King http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/ Low-End Media for User Empowerment By Jakob Nielsen "Fancy media on websites typically fails user testing. Simple text and clear photos not only communicate better with users, they also enhance users' feeling of control and thus support the Web's mission as an instant gratification environment." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030421.html +15: XML. All That We Can Leave Behind By Mark Pilgrim This article discusses the issues surrounding XHTML 2 migration. http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/04/16/dive-into.html [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +15: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? Accessibility Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/accessibility Association Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/associations Book Listings. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/books Cascading Style Sheets Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/css Color Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/color Dreamweaver Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/dreamweaver Evaluation & Testing Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/testing Event Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/events Flash Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/flash Information Architecture Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/architecture JavaScript Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/javascript Miscellaneous Web Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/misc Navigation Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/navigation PHP Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/php Sites & Blogs Listing. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/sites Standards, Guidelines & Pattern Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/standards Tool Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/tools Typography Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/type Usability Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/usability XML Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/xml [Section two ends.] ++END NOTES. + SUBSCRIPTION INFO. WEB DESIGN UPDATE is available by subscription only. For information on how to subscribe and unsubscribe please visit: http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/webdevlist + TEXT EMAIL NEWSLETTER (TEN) STANDARD. As a navigation aid for screen readers we do our best to conform to the accessible Text Email Newsletter (TEN) Standard. Please let me know if there is anything else we can do to make navigation easier. For TEN Standard information please visit: http://www.headstar.com/ten + SIGNATURE. Laura L. Carlson Information Technology Systems and Services University of Minnesota Duluth Duluth, MN 55812-3009 mailto:lcarlson@d.umn.edu [Issue ends.]