+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 3, Issue 11, August 27, 2004. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 11 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: EVALUATION & TESTING. 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. Contradictions in Accessibility - Keyboard Usage and Tabindex By Derek Featherstone "Most standards-based web sites don't need to include tabindex for their links. When they are included along with other techniques such as skip to content links, they can hinder functionality and usability." http://www.wats.ca/articles/keyboardusageandtabindex/62 Contradictions in Accessibility - Hidden Information By Derek Featherstone "Many of the techniques we employ as developers to make our web sites more accessible result in hidden information that may only make them more accessible to a small portion of users rather than more accessible to everyone." http://www.wats.ca/articles/hiddeninformation/63 Olympic Website fails to get Gold for Disabled Users By Helen Petrie "The World Wide Web has revolutionized the availability of information. People are one click away from literally world-wide information. The Olympic Games website is a case in point - www.athens2004.com has up-to-date information on all the events as they happen. But making that information easy to find and interact with is still not easy, as the Olympic site also illustrates." http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article1886.asp +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. CSS 101: Typography and White Space By Mark Newhouse "In this article we'll take a look at a typical resume that has been marked up with valid and appropriate XHTML and apply some CSS to enhance the presentation." http://digital-web.com/articles/css_101/ +03: COLOR. Where'd Ya Get That Color Scheme? By Adam Polselli "Design inspiration can come from anywhere, anything, and at anytime. One of my personal favorites is photographs. They're perfect for scoping out fresh color schemes. I've done some scoping of my own, and have derived the following color schemes from a few of my own photographs. Use the colors themselves, or simply be inspired to create your own." http://www.adampolselli.com/colorschemes/ +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Analyzing a Web design survey By Michael Meadhra "Michael Meadhra analyzes Francois Briatte's recent Web design survey, shares his observations, and draws his own conclusions about the current state of design." http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-5305422.html +05: EVENTS. PHP5 Bootcamp October 18-22, 2004 Atlanta, Georgia U.S.A. http://www.bignerdranch.com/classes/php5.shtml +06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Enterprise IA summary By Gene Smith "I've been referring to Lou Rosenfeld's Enterprise IA presentations quite a bit in the last few weeks. I thought I'd collect them here for future reference:" http://atomiq.org/archives/2004/08/enterprise_ia_summary.html +07: MISCELLANEOUS. Six great ways to ruin a brainstorming session By Paul Sloane "The brainstorming session is the most popular group creativity exercise in business. It is quick, easy and it works. But many organizations have become frustrated with brainstorms and have stopped using them. They say this group ideation technique is old-fashioned and no longer effective. But the real reason for their frustration is typically that the brainstorming meetings are not facilitated properly. A well-run brainstorming meeting is fun and energetic. It will generate plenty of good ideas. But a poor session can be frustrating and demotivating. Let's look at some simple ways to ruin your next brainstorm meeting - so you understand what practices you should avoid." http://www.innovationtools.com/Articles/EnterpriseDetails.asp?a=153 +08: NAVIGATION. It's Not Just About Searching - It's About Findability By Martin White "The current emphasis on content management is not about content management at all but rather about content publishing - and there is a difference. Organizations are aware of the problems in getting current, reliable information into an intranet but feel that their responsibility stops with building the repository and providing some templates for page display. Far too little attention is paid to the fact that unless people can find the information, the effort to add it to the repository and to make the look consistent is wasted." http://tinyurl.com/6khdw +09: PHP. Experiences of Using PHP in Large Websites By Aaron Crane "PHP is a convenient language for rapidly prototyping simple dynamic websites... PHPÕs simplicity makes it a good language for inexperienced programmers...For more experienced developers, though, the languageÕs simplicity rapidly turns into complexity, slowing down the development process. These developers are the ones who have the skills needed to build large and/or complex websites; using PHP for such sites therefore tends to be a net loss. This tendency is reinforced by PHPÕs lack of the linguistic features needed to promote working on large software projects. If your project is at all large or complex, it may be better to look elsewhere when choosing an implementation language..." http://www.ukuug.org/events/linux2002/papers/html/php/index.html +10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Browse Happy A WaSP Initiative Browse Happy is the newest initiative from the Web Standards Project. It is aimed at promoting browsers that do a better job of supporting user experience, security web standards than IE. This isn't a resource for web developers. It's for regular users. No big technical discussions, just some case studies and information about the problems faced by IE users, and how switching to a different browser can be simple, free, and save a lot of problems. http://browsehappy.com/ +11: USABILITY. Don't Want ems, Don't Need ems By Adam Howell "You might remember back when I redesigned, that I made a big to-do about this site being 'elastic'(em-based and thus expandable and contractible - you know, like a Slinky). Well, it isn't anymore. It's pixel-based now, just like every other site out there." http://tinyurl.com/47lox Is Fixing Really the Solution? By Nick Finck "Adam Howell redesigns The Weekly Standards to a fixed width layout. He explains all in his post 'Don't Want ems, Don't Need ems'. Well, to me this is what happens when you try to be pixel perfect like in print in a medium like the web..." http://tinyurl.com/5m5z6 +12: XML. What is Tag Soup? By Dave Winer "I believe the term was coined by Dan Connolly of the W3C when he was talking about HTML parsers that accept anything anywhere. The example he cited is the element. It really only makes sense in the <head> of a document, but apparently one or more browsers would let you set the title of a page in the body of the page! It's not like this makes the earth crumble or the sky fall, everything can proceed normally, but it's wrong to do it there and the world would be a (slightly) better place if browsers didn't allow it." http://essaysfromexodus.scripting.com/whatIsTagSoup Redefining Tag Soup By Faruk Ates "So basically, tag soup is when a document is poorly written HTML - XHTML, XML, and so forth - and the browser will try to make sense out of it using its built-in intelligence (or "crapcode fixing skills" as I'd like to call it). So how are people mis-using the term, you wonder? Well, let's see." http://annevankesteren.nl/archives/2004/08/tag-soup [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. 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.]