+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 2, Issue 49, May 27, 2004. 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: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. 03: COLOR. 04: DREAMWEAVER. 05: EVENTS. 06: JAVASCRIPT. 07: MISCELLANEOUS. 08: NAVIGATION. 09: PHP. 10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 11: TOOLS. 12: TYPOGRAPHY. 13: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 14: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Blind for a Day By Tom Werner "It's a sad fact that one day I'll be blind. Or at least, considering how crappy my eyesight is right now, I assume that it is a fact. As such, I decided to take a brief excursion into my future by downloading a screen reader and experiencing first hand what it's like to use the interweb without eyeballs..." http://www.mojombo.com/archives/000034.html The Sad State Of Accessibility On Municipal Websites Kirk Biglione "Alt Tags recently conducted a series of accessibility tests on 408 municipal websites throughout the state of California. Ninety-one percent of the sites tested failed Section 508 compliance. Eight-Nine percent did not pass WCAG Priority 1. While not surprising, our findings were not encouraging. It appears that web accessibility is not yet on the radar of most municipalities." http://www.alttags.org/archives/2004/05/22/34/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Persistent Page Indicator By Stephanie Sullivan "...we've used a simple method of placing unique IDs on both the menu items, and the body element, and we created a group of descendant selectors to style the page indicator. This simplifies the application of the page indicator, whether you've created a site by hand or used a tool like Dreamweaver and its template functionality." http://nemesis1.f2o.org/aarchive?id=9 Responsible CSS - Recycle your background images By fiftyfoureleven.com "An idea for recycling background images used with CSS, allowing you to speed up your site and keep a consistent look and feel." http://tinyurl.com/ysv7a Contained Floats By Tony Aslett "There is a large and growing movement by web developers and designers towards web standards. Part of that movement focuses on clean mark-up, which has many long term benefits such as easier maintenance, lighter pages and better support by browsers of the future. One thing that has bugged me was the need to add clearing elements to the mark-up to keep a container wrapped around a floated element. Most people use a division, horizontal rule or a break and set it to clear both to keep the container around the float. Well now there's another way that will free us from the need to add extra clearing elements..." http://www.csscreator.com/attributes/containedfloat.php 3D CSS Box Model By Jon Hicks Jon Hicks has a useful 3D visual hierarchy of the CSS Box Model. A good reference for those learning CSS. http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/2004/05/3d_css_box_model/ +03: COLOR. Color Scheme Methods By Dave Shea Dave Shea posted a good article about color schemes. http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2004/05/14/colour_schem/index.php +04: DREAMWEAVER. Introduction to CSS Positioning in Dreamweaver MX 2004 By Adrian Senior "In this tutorial, I review Positioning page elements with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). I cover the use of margins and the positioning properties of absolute, relative, and static positioning. The aim of this tutorial is to avoid getting overly complex or complicated. I cover just enough so that you can understand these positioning options. I hope this tutorial gives you the boost you may be looking for to experiment with and to discover more about positioning elements with CSS for yourself." http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/mx/dreamweaver/articles/intro_cssp.html +05: EVENTS. SITE 2005 Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education International Conference March 1-5, 2005 Phoenix, Arizona U.S.A. http://site.aace.org/conf/ +06: JAVASCRIPT. Sons of Suckerfish By Patrick Griffiths "These articles (suggested for intermediate to advanced readers) explain how to apply various neat effects to a web page with just a tiny little bit of JavaScript." http://www.htmldog.com/articles/suckerfish/ +07: MISCELLANEOUS. Ten questions for Nick Finck By Russ Weakley "Nick Finck is the publisher of Digital Web Magazine, and the author of numerous web-related articles. He has been a judge for the Webby Awards, Philippine Web Awards, Everyday Life design competition and the South by Southwest Web Awards. He has also presented lectures to groups including the American Society for Information Science and Technology, The Society for Technical Communication (STC), SXSW Interactive and Web Design World to name a few." http://webstandardsgroup.org/features/nick-finck.cfm Ten questions for Andy Budd By Russ Weakley "Andy Budd works as senior web designer for Message Digital Design Ltd. In his spare time he runs SkillSwap.org, a project that provides free training for his local new media community. He is most widely know for his blog, where he writes about a wide range of subjects including web design and web standards." http://webstandardsgroup.org/features/andy-budd.cfm +08: NAVIGATION. Findability.org By Peter Morville Peter Morville has launched a new site called Findability.org. To quote: "Findability refers to the quality of being locatable or navigable. At the item level, we can evaluate to what degree a particular object is easy to discover or locate. At the system level, we can analyze how well a physical or digital environment supports navigation and retrieval." http://www.findability.org/ +09: PHP. Top 21 PHP programming mistakes - Part I: Seven Textbook Mistakes By Sterling Hughes "This article is intended for the PHP programmer interested in avoiding some of the most common mistakes when applying PHP. The reader is expected to at least be familiar with PHP syntax, but should have a working knowledge of PHP functionality." http://www.zend.com/zend/art/mistake.php PHP Tutorial By tizag.com "A PHP tutorial that covers 15+ areas of PHP, from echo function to associative arrays." http://www.tizag.com/phpT/ +10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Non-Standard Code Hurts The Bottom Line By D. Keith Robinson "It is time to talk Web standards again. I've been bitten hard by the non-standard code bug and it's time to roll out a few more big benefits of going with Web standards! This time by talking about how non-standard code can hurt your bottom line." http://tinyurl.com/2qc2j Separating Behavior and Presentation By Peter-Paul Koch "This column deals with the third separation, that of behavior and presentation." http://tinyurl.com/yt22y Separation: Thoughts and Illustration By graphicPUSH "The way I see it, a web page breaks down into four layers: Structure + Content + Behavior + Presentation = da site. The only necessary elements are the first two; Behavior and Presentation are bonus layers that add non-critical functionality and cosmetic styling. Without them, a web page is still 100% accessible and usable „ it may look like Netscape 3, but it works just as well as a fully tricked out page in Firefox." http://www.graphicpush.com/archives/000070.shtml +11: TOOLS. Ye Olde Lorem Ipsum Generator By Marek Moehling "116 words of the original 16th century Lipsum plus 384 additional words, carefully chosen from Cicero's very own 'De Finibus', bonded by superior scripting and utmost linguistic accuracy guarantee for the web's most random...ah, randomness - 500 times sheer bliss for the typographically inclined. Ipso facto." http://www.lorem-ipsum.info/generator2 Google Rank Calculator By Cameron Adams "It's a dream of mine to work with the uber-boffins at Google (not least of all because of the stock options). But for the moment, I'll have to be satisfied with access to the Google Web API ? an interface which allows you to query Google's database of over 4,000,000,000 pages and do what you will with the returns." http://www.themaninblue.com/experiment/GoogleRank/ +12: TYPOGRAPHY. How to size text using ems By Richard Rutter "Text for the screen is sized with CSS in terms of pixels, ems or keywords. As most of us know, sizing with pixels is easy: get your selector and give it a font-size ? no more thought required. Sizing with keywords is more complicated and requires a few workarounds, but you're in luck as the techniques are well documented. That leaves ems. At this point people often leg it. 'Ems are too inconsistent,' they say, 'they're too hard; they never work.' Well that may be the received wisdom, but if ever the was a case of FUD then this is it. I will now attempt to show you how ems can be as quick and easy to use as pixels." http://www.clagnut.com/blog/348/ +13: USABILITY. Design Eye for the Usability Guy By Andrei Herasimchuk A team of web designers take a playful look at the Jakob Nielsen AlertBox article on styling links. http://www.designbyfire.com/000094.html Design for rule, not exception By Gerry McGovern "If your website tries to be all things to all people, it will fail. It's very easy on the Web to try to do too much. You need to relentlessly focus on what most of your readers do most of the time. Don't let anything else get in the way." http://tinyurl.com/3fzq5 æ [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +14: 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.]