+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 3, Issue 05, July 23, 2004. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 05 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: MISCELLANEOUS. 07: NAVIGATION. 08: PHP. 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. Assessing the Accessibility of Fifty United States Government Web pages: Using Bobby to check on Uncle Sam By Jim Ellison "This study evaluates the current accessibility of U.S. Government Web pages for people with disabilities. Several Federal laws, and specifically Section 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act, require Web pages of government agencies to be accessible to people with disabilities. This investigation built on past studies that used the Web accessibility evaluation tool Bobby to assess various types of Web sites. The home pages of fifty U.S. government agencies were reviewed for accessibility based on Section 508 guidelines. This study establishes that the U.S. government has not met its accessibility goals." http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_7/ellison/index.html A Comparative Assessment of Web Accessibility and Technical Standards Conformance By Carmen Marincu and Barry McMullin "This paper presents results of a comparative survey of Web accessibility guidelines and HTML standards conformance for samples of Web sites drawn from Ireland, the United Kingdom, France and Germany. It also gives some recommendations on how to improve the accessibility level of Web content." http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_7/marincu/ Accessibility in the User-Centered Design Process By the Georgia Institute of Technology "This resource is designed primarily for usability professionals who know User-Centered Design (UCD) processes and techniques, including the principles of usability testing, and have a basic understanding of accessibility. Design team managers, ergonomists, human factors professionals, advocates for product accessibility, accessibility practitioners, and marketers might also benefit from the information in this resource." http://www.ittatc.org/technical/access-ucd/ Changing the Face of Web Surfing By Robert Andrews "Many who are fed up with high-profile design mess-ups are taking it upon themselves to publicly correct conspicuous corporate faux pas, right under embarrassed proprietors' noses. These volunteer make-over consultants receive neither a paycheck nor permission for their efforts. Regarded as Good Samaritans in Web circles, many can instead expect the threat of a day in court. Oxford University math graduate Matthew Somerville was only trying to do fellow movie fans a favor when, flummoxed by the 'highly inaccessible' website for Britain's Odeon cinema chain, he decided to redesign the service himself..." http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,64253,00.html/wn_ascii +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Positioning Web Elements in the Background Using CSS By Eric A. Meyer This is a sample chapter from Eric's book, 'More Eric Meyer on CSS'. http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.asp?p=174322 Floating Points By Eric A. Meyer "I didn't mean to suggest that nobody should use floats for layout, or that using them in that manner is somehow wrong; my apologies if I did so...One could argue that all three options are non-layout technologies that have been bent to layout purposes, but positioning at least was intended to be a layout mechanism from its inception. It suffers from enough glaring flaws and browser bugs that it can't be considered any better an option than the others, though." http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2004/07/21/floating-points/ Applying CSS to forms By Trenton Moss "Forms are an essential part of interaction on the Internet but they can look rather drab. With CSS we can position form items so they all line up nicely and add a bit of color to jazz them up." http://www.webdevtips.com/webdevtips/article.php?item=63 Clickable Link Backgrounds By Dan Cederholm "The Goal: A bulletproof unordered list of links, each with a unique (purely decorative) left-aligned icon that is referenced with CSS Ñ but that is also clickable." http://www.simplebits.com/notebook/2004/07/18/clickable.html +03: DREAMWEAVER. Planning the Site By Tom Muck and Ray West "This article features a step-by-step guide to working with the Site Map to create the basic outline of the siteÊso you canÊvisually framework your site and the relationships between the pages. Also learn how Dreamweaver makes it simple to ease into server-side work. (This is from the book Dreamweaver MX 2004: A Beginner's Guide." http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/Web-Graphic-Design/Planning-the-Site/ +04: EVENTS. Introductory Information Architecture Canberra, Australia October 13, 2004 and Sydney, Australia October 27, 2004 http://www.steptwo.com.au/columntwo/archives/001345.html +05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. First Things First: IA and CSS By Christina Wodtke and Nate Koechley A Web Visions Presentation. http://natek.typepad.com/blog/2004/07/web_visions_pre.html +06: MISCELLANEOUS. Peter Merholz: The InfoDesign profile By Peter J. Bogaards "Share that talent with others. Nothing has been as fulfilling for me as sharing what I've learned with others. Publish a blog, join mailing lists, speak at conferences. Never hoard what you know." http://www.informationdesign.org/special/merholz_profile.php +07: NAVIGATION. Ambient Findability By Peter Morville "Peter Morville asks 'In a world of tangible bits and total information awareness, what happens to learning, decision making, and trust?' as well as other disturbing questions about the future." http://www.digital-web.com/articles/ambient_findability/ +08: PHP. Migrating from PHP 4 to PHP 5 By Zend "PHP 5 and the integrated Zend Engine 2 have greatly improved PHP's performance and capabilities, but great care has been taken to break as little existing code as possible. So migrating your code from PHP 4 to 5 should be very easy. Most existing PHP 4 code should be ready to run without changes, but you should still know about the few differences and take care to test your code before switching versions in production environments..." http://www.zend.com/manual/migration5.php Tutorial - Writing Classes in PHP By Brian Haase "Some consider classes one of the hardest components of PHP to figure out, but the reality is that classes are extremely straightforward and easy to use. The trouble comes from the fact that not all programmers have worked with Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) before. Classes are little more than a container for variables and functions affecting those variables, but they can be very useful for building small components - almost miniature programs..." http://www.php-editors.com/articles/simple_php_classes.php +09: STANDARDS. Can Your Site Survive Firefox? By y Brian Livingston Sophisticated computer users are switching from Internet Explorer to competing browsers in greater numbers than statistics indicate. That makes this the perfect time for your company to put cross- browser compatibility on the top of your to-do list. http://tinyurl.com/3kg9g +09: TOOLS. Infohound Color Schemer By Jonathan Hedley "A simple tool to help you experiment with various color schemes for your next web or print project." http://infohound.net/colour/ +10: USABILITY. Site use - insights from user research By Donna Maurer "Some interesting insights from a day of user research into an intranet..." http://www.maadmob.net/donna/blog/archives/000565.html Usability - ignore it at your peril! By Sarah Agarwal "Trying to make sure that websites and applications are useful and usable for their users is not a 'nice thing to do', it's straight up common sense (though it's not common). Particularly in the not-for-profit sector, where the information available can make a real contribution to people's lives, it's disingenuous to ignore them. It's relatively easy and cheap - massively cheaper than making a system that is ineffective. In my experience of doing usability consultation, service teams who are party to such activities are deeply appreciative of what they find out, and become instant devotees of usability exercises." http://www.freepint.com/issues/150704.htm#feature ROI Is Not a Silver Bullet: Five Actionable Steps for Valuing User Experience Design By Scott Hirsch "For years now, the 'ROI of User Experience' has been sought as a means to justify larger corporate investments in web design. Although ROI methodology can be a useful tool for prioritizing possible web development projects, by itself ROI is not the answer to building a stronger user experience design competency..." http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000338.php +11: XML. HTML and XHTML Frequently Answered Questions Editor - Steven Pemberton This is a new FAQ, that addresses the differences between HTML and XHTML. http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/2004/xhtml-faq [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. 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 + SIGN OFF. Until next time, Laura L. Carlson Information Technology Systems and Services University of Minnesota Duluth Duluth, MN 55812-3009 mailto:lcarlson@d.umn.edu [Issue ends.]