+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 1, Issue 49, May 29, 2003. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 49 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: Books. 03: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. 04: EVENTS. 05: FLASH. 06: MISCELLANEOUS. 07: PHP. 08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 09: TOOLS. 10: USABILITY. 11: XML. SECTION TWO: 12: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. CSS accessibility problems: is markup dead? By Jim Byrne Jim Byrne gives a good reminder in this article to separate structure from presentation. Neither CSS or font tags should mimic proper HTML Markup. As Zeldman also puts it in his new book (see item 02 below), "Classitis is the measles of markup, obscuring meaning as it adds needless weight to every page." http://www.mcu.org.uk/book/cssaccessproblems.html +02: Books. Zeldman, Jeffrey. Designing With Web Standards, New Riders Publishing, 2003. +03: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. The anatomy of a stylesheet By Simon Willison "To start my series of tutorials, I'm going to go over some of the basics of CSS. This is the boring bit: if you already know the difference between rules, properties and selectors you may want to skip this entry." http://tinyurl.com/c3xo Scripting.com, with added CSS By Simon Willison "Today, I'll show how CSS can be used to reduce the amount of code needed for a small part of the design of Scripting.com." http://tinyurl.com/c7j9 Defeating IE5 CSS bugs with the help of jwz By Simon Willison "The theme for today is 'bugs in IE5 for Windows', and jwz's site offers two classic examples that fit this theme nicely. The first is the fact that the design is centered on the page, and the second is his choice of Verdana, a font which requires some trickery to get working well in IE5. In addition, the design of the entries seems to be a natural fit for a table based layout, so demonstrating how much simpler the code can be in CSS will hopefully turn a few heads." http://tinyurl.com/cata Styling blockquotes with CSS By Simon Willison "This time I'm going to explain a clever CSS trick borrowed from Nick Boalch." http://tinyurl.com/ceaf CSS tabs with Submenus By Kalsey Consulting Group Here is an interesting tab navigation technique using only CSS and nested and unordered lists. Each tab has an associated submenu The "you are here" highlighting is adjusted by smart CSS rules. http://www.kalsey.com/tools/csstabs/ http://kalsey.com/2003/05/css_tabs_with_submenus/ +04: EVENTS. MAX: The 2003 Macromedia User Conference November 18-21, 2003 Salt Lake City, Utah U.S.A. http://tinyurl.com/cagl +05: FLASH. Flash and The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines By Sofia Celic and Andrew Arch "Flash developers have traditionally overlooked accessibility, or been unable to address it directly by following the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) recommendations and techniques. In this paper, we describe the application of WCAG checkpoints to the Flash MX multimedia development platform and discuss how accessibility can be incorporated using a variety of techniques." http://tinyurl.com/c74k +06: MISCELLANEOUS. Interview - Bob Regan, Accessibility Product Manager By Nigel Peck Bob Regan is the Accessibility Product Manager at Macromedia, creators of a range of high profile Web development, graphics, and animation products including Dreamweaver, Flash and Director." http://www.sitepoint.com/article/1107 +07: PHP. Basic Primer on PHP Syntax By Gareth Downes-Powell, Tim Green, Allan Kent, Bruno Mairlot, George McLachlan and Dan Radigan A sample chapter from the book "Dreamweaver MX: Advanced PHP Web Development". http://tinyurl.com/c8om Clever forms with PHP By Chris Heilmann "Creating forms that check for mandatory fields and highlight them if they are forgotten can be quite a pain. Learn how to use two small PHP functions to do this job for you." http://tinyurl.com/cisd +08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. W3C makes patent ban final By Paul Festa "Patent foes applaud the Web standards group's policy--which prohibits the use of most royalty-bearing technology in setting standards--but warn against 'submarine patents'." http://tinyurl.com/ce9u Why Standards? By Jim Waldo Here is a harsh take on standards by Jim Waldo. He says, "Common wisdom, especially in distributed computing, says that the right approach to all problems is to use a standard. This common wisdom has no basis in fact or history, and is curtailing innovation and rewarding bad behavior in our industry." http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=4840 Browser bug swatting By Craig Saila "Support for standards is so tantalizingly close." http://www.saila.com/columns/rants/030523.shtml +09: TOOLS. Meazure By C Thing Software Here is a free windows program that "measures, magnifies and captures the screen by providing a battery of features in a cohesive user interface". http://www.cthing.com/Downloads.asp Xenu Link Sleuth By Xenu Link Sleuth is a free windows based link checker. http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html +10: USABILITY. The Quiet Death of the Major Re-Launch By Jared Spool "Entire redesigns have quietly faded away with continuous improvements taking their place." http://www.uie.com/Articles/quiet_death_of_relaunch.htm CHI 2003: New Horizons, But What Are They? By Gerd Waloszek "This article continues my series of personal CHI conference reports. The CHI 2003 conference was held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and had the slogan 'New Horizons.' A slogan like this automatically prompts the question: 'And what were the new horizons?' In this article, I will try to find answers and report new HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) trends Ñ and non-trends Ñ that I picked up." http://tinyurl.com/c790 How You Look at It By grokdotcom "...the Web is a participatory, voluntary medium, and your visitors are in control not only of what they see, but even how they see it...Your Web site is your child. And while you can shape it, you cannot control it. When it leaves you, it takes on an entirely new life shaped by all those who interact with it." http://www.grokdotcom.com/howyoulookatit.htm +11: XML. The Importance of Correct Commenting By devedge "When authoring XHTML or XML, incorrect comments will result in your documents not being able to be displayed at all." http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2003/comments/ Semantic Web and Web Services can live together, says Berners-Lee By Edd Dumbill "In his opening keynote at the Twelfth International World Wide Web conference, the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium explained how the two main thrusts of the development of the web do not compete, but can work together." http://xmlhack.com/read.php?item=1978 [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +12: 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.]