+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 2, Issue 10, August 30, 2003. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 10 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: EVENTS. 06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 07: MISCELLANEOUS. 08: NAVIGATION. 09: PHP. 10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 11: USABILITY. 12: XML. SECTION TWO: 13: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Top Airlines Losing Millions by Barring Disabled People From Websites By AbilityNet "The UK's top airlines are effectively barring millions of disabled people from booking flights on-line by failing to meet minimum accessibility standards on their websites, according to a survey released today by national computing and disability charity, AbilityNet." http://www.abilitynet.org.uk/content/oneoffs/e-nation.htm Tooltips and alt texts for image maps By Jukka "Yucca" Korpela "HTML authors often ask how to make browsers show 'alternate texts' for image map hot spot areas. What they typically mean is how to make browsers show those little popup windows with short texts, 'tooltips', when the cursor is over an area in a (client-side) image map. The reason is that authors have noted that 'tooltips' appear for normal images (img) elements when they have alt attributes, and they may expect the same to happen for image maps, but often it won't. This document tries to clear up the confusion, explaining what alt attributes are really for; it also discusses various ways to create 'tooltips' (on some browsers)." http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/mapalt.html The ALT attribute in HTML By Stephen Poley "The aim of this page is to briefly address how, and how not, to use it (The ALT attribute). The writing of good ALT texts is not always easy, and what constitutes a good ALT text is a matter of much discussion. But if you follow the advice on this page, you will at least be doing better than most web authors. " http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmatters/alt.html How to use tables to structurize forms in HTML and about alternatives, like fieldset By Jukka "Yucca" Korpela "Often viewed as a layout tool, tables are more properly treated as a method for expressing structural relations. For example, tables can be used to indicate the relationships between input fields and their explanations within aÊform. This document discusses the technical details involved." http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/forms/tables.html Web Site Accessibility By Sue Bolander "This issue is not a new one, but there is still a great deal of confusion out there about what makes a Web site accessible and why it matters." http://www.webpronews.com/wpn-26-20030711WebSiteAccessibility.html +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. CSS-based zoom By Dan Cederholm Here is a CSS method for zooming images. http://www.simplebits.com/code/photo_zoom.html +03: COLOR. 4096 color wheel By Jemima Pereira Hover the color on the wheel and get the *web-safe*, *web-smart*(triplet pairs) , and *unsafe* matches. Click choice to line up your *web-smart* choices. http://www.ficml.org/jemimap/style/color/wheel.html +04: DREAMWEAVER. Dreamweaver MX 2004 New Features and Benefits By Jennifer Taylor http://tinyurl.com/ldwp Build Accessible Web Content with Dreamweaver MX 2004 By Macromedia "Learn about improvements for users of assistive technologies and for developers building web applications." http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/accessibility/mx/dw/ Designing Dreamweaver Sites for Contribute Users By Joseph Lowery "Learn tips for creating sites in Dreamweaver MX for optimal maintenance and ease of use in Contribute 2" http://tinyurl.com/ldwu +05: EVENTS. OZeWAI 2003 Australian Web Accessibility Initiative December 1-3, 2003 Bundoora, Victoria, Australia http://www.ozewai.org/2003/ +06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Analyzing Card Sort Results with a Spreadsheet Template By Joe Lamantia "This article explains how to quickly derive easily-read, quantitative results from a card-sort activity by entering data into a spreadsheet template that is adaptable to any set of cards and categories." http://tinyurl.com/lcuj AIfIA Annual Report 2002-2003 By Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture "In March of 2002, Louis Rosenfeld and Christina Wodtke invited a group of people to discuss how to advance the field of information architecture (IA). One previous effort, ACIA, provided valuable information but was too closely paired to a commercial company to be sustainable. Another, Info-Arch.org, generated many grass-roots ideas but few concrete results. The new group was large enough to represent diverse opinions yet small enough to stay focused on the task. After eight months of online discussions, phone calls, and a meeting at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in California, the idea of the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture (AIfIA) was born." http://aifia.org/news/000179.php +07: MISCELLANEOUS. An interview with Dave Shea, the CSS Zen Gardener By Bruce Lawson "You might not recognize the name, but if you're a serious web professional, you'll know the site: CSS Zen Garden. It's a simple idea; provide the mark-up and allow people to submit various CSS designs to style the page. It immediately mirrored the zeitgeist, and has attracted some top graphic designers and inspired hundreds of web professionals to learn CSS. Why? Now we can see what artists and graphic designers can do with CSS, rather than the early, rather boxy designs that the mark-up freaks were using. Thus, The ZenGarden is both gallery and manifesto..." http://www.dmxzone.com/ShowDetail.asp?NewsId=5442 Can Programmers Do Interaction Design? By Kim Goodwin "Most programmers tend to think they're the best-qualified people to design the form and behavior of a product. In the absence of trained interaction designers, they may be right, but is a development process without an interaction designer really viable? Should executives count on getting interaction design for free from their programmers?" http://tinyurl.com/kwhs +08: NAVIGATION. Synonym Rings and Authority Files By Karl Fast, Fred Leise and Mike Steckel "In part 3 of the continuing series on controlled vocabularies and faceted classification, the authors explain synonym rings and authority files and how their use can bridge the gap between natural language and complex controlled vocabularies (taxonomies and thesauri)." http://tinyurl.com/lcpz +09: PHP. Email in PHP By PHPGuru "This tutorial will show you how to send email in PHP. It'll go over the basics of how the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) works, then how to send email using PHP. After that it will show you how to send HTML emails in PHP. Finally, it will introduce you to an email class from the PEAR repository which will make your life much easier for sending emails, and allow greater functionality such as including attachments in your email." http://www.phpnoise.com/tutorials/12/1 A Few Tips for Writing Useful Libraries in PHP By Kellan Elliott-McCrea Kellan makes the interesting observation that PHP encourages a culture in which most development occurs in the context of either full applications or C extensions, with few people devoting themselves to releasing libraries. http://laughingmeme.org/archives/001055.html File And Directory Manipulation In PHP (part 2) By icarus "Now that you know the basics of reading and writing files, this second segment of our tutorial on the PHP filesystem API takes you into deeper waters, showing you how to copy, delete and rename files; scan directories; work with uploaded files over HTTP; perform pattern matches on file names; and read and write to processes instead of files." http://www.devshed.com/Server_Side/PHP/File_Manipulation2/page1.html +10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. University of Minnesota Duluth Home Page Andrew Manteuffel, Web Development Professional The homepage and second level pages of the University of Minnesota Duluth website have been redesigned. They use CSS, Valid XHTML and Dreamweaver templates. http://www.d.umn.edu/ http://www.d.umn.edu/base/templates/ http://www.d.umn.edu/base/templates/benefits.html University of Texas Home Page at San Antonio Home Page Joseph McBride, Webmaster The homepage and some second level pages of the University of Texas at San Antonio's website uses CSS for layout (no tables) and XHTML for structure. http://www.utsa.edu/ ReUSEIT Contest By Bob Sawyer "ReUSEIT is, to borrow a quote from the W3Remix contest, 'a design challenge for coders, and a coding challenge for designers.' Here's the idea: create a redesign of Jakob Nielsen's useit.com. Design a usable, intuitive layout and navigation, organize the content with usability in mind, and create a work of art which still reflects the importance and influence of Nielsen's work." http://www.builtforthefuture.com/reuseit/ +11: USABILITY. Usability 101 By Jakob Nielsen "What is usability? How, when, and where can you improve it? Why should you care? This overview answers these basic questions." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030825.html The Origin of Personas By Alan Cooper "Ever since Alan Cooper's brief discussion of personas in The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, personas have become a popular tool in the software industry. In this article, he details the events leading up to the birth of personas and highlights various examples of their effectiveness." http://tinyurl.com/kwhd +12: XML. RSS Resource By Lockergnome Chris Pirillo has started a new RSS site. http://rss.lockergnome.com/ XForms Essentials By Micah Dubinko http://dubinko.info/writing/xforms/book.html Why I don't like RDF By Simon St.Laurent "I've written before about What's right with RDF, but I have to admit that overall I'm deeply unhappy with RDF on a number of different levels. While I think the kinds of things that RDF does are useful at times, I think RDF gets a number of things painfully wrong. Not only does RDF get them wrong, but RDF's getting things wrong screws up other things as well." http://simonstl.com/articles/RDF.html [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +13: 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.]