+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 2, Issue 29, January 10, 2004. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 29 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: DREAMWEAVER. 04: EVENTS. 05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 06: JAVASCRIPT. 07: MISCELLANEOUS. 08: NAVIGATION. 09: PHP. 10. SITES AND BLOGS. 11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 12: TOOLS. 13: USABILITY. 14: XML. SECTION TWO: 15: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Sites Slowly Seeing the Need to Make the Web Accessible to the Blind By Mark Thompson "Navigating the Internet with software that dictates text can be an obstacle course. But some enterprising news sites are designing their sites with blind readers in mind -- and finding it's easier than they expected, and it hardly costs a thing." http://www.ojr.org/ojr/technology/1071101847.php Accessibility of text-only websites By isolani "Creating text-only versions of websites to improve accessibility is a double edged-sword. It can remove a limited range of accessibility problems, but at the cost of creating new accessibility problems and destroying other accessibility benefits. It can't correct a number of high-profile accessibility problems..." http://tinyurl.com/2pl4s Accessible Web-based Distance Education: Principles and Best Practices By Laurie Harrison "Achieving universal access to education, reaching the widest possible audience, looking to the future of computer interface and emerging technologies the motivators behind development of accessible Web-based learning resources are many. Improving accessibility begins with increased awareness of the potential barriers. As educators, we must be astute in selection of courseware tools and encourage use of products and methods that allow development of accessible resources based on principles of universal access. Just as wheelchair ramps to buildings have become the norm in architectural design, accessible Web design must become a basic consideration in the design of Web-based learning resources." http://tinyurl.com/2lwpw +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Faux Columns By Dan Cederholm "One of the questions I get asked the most often regarding my personal site's design is the following: 'How do you get the right column's background color to extend all the way down the page?' It's a simple concept, really Ñ one that many of you may already be familiar with. But for those who aren't, the following technique can be a handy little trick." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fauxcolumns/ Stylesheets By Ross Shannon Nice assortment of CSS tutorials. http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/stylesheets/ +03: DREAMWEAVER. Macromedia Dreamweaver MX keyboard shortcuts By Macromedia "Many of the tasks you perform in Dreamweaver have keyboard shortcuts that help decrease your production time and increase your efficiency. Download a quick reference card of frequently used keyboard shortcuts for Dreamweaver MX." http://tinyurl.com/35seu +04: EVENTS. Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo March 1-4, 2004 New York, New York U.S.A. http://www.jupiterevents.com/sew/winter04/index.html +05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Blueprints for the Web: Organization for the Masses By Christina Wodtke "Christina Wodtke shows you how to assure a usable web site organization by doing a simple card sort, a useful exercise to organize your contents into categories for easy browsing. She also reveals how to invite potential users of the web site to participate in the design, thus assuring the web site creator of a usable organization system." http://tinyurl.com/yuhqm +06: JAVASCRIPT. JavaScript By Ross Shannon "Javascript scripts are the ideal way to add special effects and extra bits and bobs to your pages without having to resort to plug-ins or full-on applets. There are a myriad of uses for this most versatile of scripting languages." http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/javascript/ +07: MISCELLANEOUS. Richard Saul Wurman: The InfoDesign interview By Dirk Knemeyer "What is critical is to understand what it is like not to understand. My definition of learning is to remember what you are interested in. If you don't remember something, you haven't learned it, and you are never going to remember something unless you are interested in it." http://www.informationdesign.org/special/wurman_interview.htm Don Norman on PowerPoint Usability By Cliff Atkinson "PowerPoint is NOT the problem. The problem is bad talks, and in part, this comes about because of so many pointless meetings, where people with - or without - a point to make - have to give pointless talks. The problem is that it is difficult work to give a good talk, and to do so, the presenter has to have learned how to give talks, has to have practiced, and has had to have good feedback about the quality of the talks - the better to improve them." http://www.sociablemedia.com/articles_norman.htm +08: NAVIGATION. How to Make a Faceted Classification and Put It On the Web By William Denton "Faceted classifications are increasingly common on the World Wide Web, especially on commercial web sites (Adkisson 2003). This is not surprising--facets are a natural way of organizing things. Many web designers have probably rediscovered them independently by asking, 'What other ways would people want to view this data? What's another way to slice it?' A survey of the literature on applying facets on the web (Denton 2003) shows that librarians think it a good idea but are unsure how to do it, while the web people who are already doing it are often unaware of S.R. Ranganathan, the Classification Research Group, and the decades of history behind facets. This paper will attempt to bridge the gap by giving procedures and advice on all the steps involved in making a faceted classification and putting it on the web..." http://www.miskatonic.org/library/facet-web-howto.html Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology By Natalya F. Noy and Deborah L. McGuinness "In this guide, we have described an ontology-development methodology for declarative frame-based systems. We listed the steps in the ontology-development process and addressed the complex issues of defining class hierarchies and properties of classes and instances. However, after following all the rules and suggestions, one of the most important things to remember is the following: there is no single correct ontology for any domain. Ontology design is a creative process and no two ontologies designed by different people would be the same. The potential applications of the ontology and the designer's understanding and view of the domain will undoubtedly affect ontology design choices.'The proof is in the pudding' we can assess the quality of our ontology only by using it in applications for which we designed it." http://tinyurl.com/35csw +09: PHP. The PHP Anthology Volume 1, Chapter 1 - PHP Basics By Harry Fuecks "As the wisdom of The Karate Kid dictates, you must learn to 'wax on, wax off' before you can perform the flying kick. It's the same with PHP. Put yourself in the hands of the sensei, as SitePoint's own Harry Fuecks imparts the essential knowledge you'll need to code best practice PHP through Chapter 1 of his new book!" http://www.sitepoint.com/article/1262 PHP coding guidelines By Paul Waring "These are only the guidelines that I personally chose to follow for the code I write. This is not an indication that any other coding styles, guidelines or standards are wrong. Feel free to use this document as a template to manage your own coding guideline and change whatever you wish as you see fit." http://evolt.org/article/PHP_coding_guidelines/18/60247/index.html +10: SITES AND BLOGS. Web Teacher By Virginia DeBolt "Tips, web design book reviews, resources and observations for teaching Web design." http://www.vdebolt.com/webteacher/ HTMLSource: HTML Tutorials By Ross Shannon Articles on html, css, javascript, cgi etc. http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/ +11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Web Page Development: Best Practices By Apple "This article gives some practical hints on how to create standards-conforming websites..." http://developer.apple.com/internet/bestwebdev.html Streamlining with Web Standards By Greg Penhaligon "...the kind souls at the World Wide Web Consortium have taken pity on you, poor Web developer, and in their infinite wisdom have formulated a solution that's so beautiful in its simplicity, so beneficial for all parties involved (developer, client/boss, user)...The solution? So, so simple: Web standards." http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/03/36/index0a.html +12: TOOLS. Euterpe By Vrije Universiteit "Euterpe is a Task Analysis tool developed at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. It is based on an ontology for describing the task world in a structured way. The theory behind it is based of GTA. Euterpe helps to build task trees, object hierarchies and other important concepts such as event and roles. Templates allow detailed information to be specified and multimedia can be attached to concepts to clarify their nature. Documentation can be generated on paper and as HTML pages." http://www.cs.vu.nl/~martijn/euterpe.html +13: USABILITY. Elastic Design By Patrick Griffiths "It can be difficult to move from a static, pixel-based design approach to an elastic, relative method. Properly implemented, however, elastic design can be a viable option that enhances usability and accessibility without mandating design sacrifices." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/elastic/ Comments on 10 Design Mistakes By Meryl Evans "Jakob Nielsen has announced his annual list of top 10 design mistakes for 2003. He says designers are getting better, but he still sees a few annoyances...I haven't seen too many instances of overly detailed ALT text and I always check for them when I'm reviewing sites for awards. He mention that sites have gotten better about using ALT, but now overdo it. I disagree..." http://www.meryl.net/blog/archives/001417.php Part 2 of Web Design Mistakes of 2003 By Meryl Evans http://www.meryl.net/blog/archives/001421.php Key Research Findings Related to User-Centered Design (2002-2003) By Kath Straub Kath Straub gives "the year-end list of key research findings in the field of usability". http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/dec03.asp#susan +14: XML. Converting OpenOffice.org documents to XHTML 1.0 Strict with Writer2LaTeX: a quickguide By Andreas Bovens "A quickguide that explains how to convert (xml based) sxw-documents to valid xhtml 1.0 strict by means of Henrik Just's Writer2LaTeX tool." http://andreas.web-graphics.com/quickguide-sxw-xhtml/ [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. For information on how to subscribe and unsubscribe please visit: http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/webdevlist The Web Design Reference Site also has a RSS 2.0 feed for site updates. + 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.]