+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 3, Issue 15, September 23, 2004. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 15 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: EVALUATION & TESTING. 05: EVENTS. 06: JAVASCRIPT. 07: MISCELLANEOUS. 08: NAVIGATION. 09: PHP. 10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 11: TOOLS. 12: USABILITY. 13: XML. SECTION TWO: 14: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Promise of the Web: Interview with Judy Brewer By the Public Broadcasting System "Judy Brewer, the director of the World Wide Web Consortium's Accessibility Initiative talks about the current status of accessibility online." http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2004/freedommachines/special_thepromise.html What Is Assistive Technology? By the Public Broadcasting System "Find out more about the assistive technology...including alternate keyboards, screen readers and voice recognition." http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2004/freedommachines/special_whatis.html Accessibility Issues Make A Difference By Scottie Claiborne "...I do believe in making sites accessible but I never really bought into the reasons why. I don't know anyone who surfs with images off or who uses a text-to-speech reader so that must be a pretty small group, right? Wrong! Below are a few accessibility issues I've encountered in the past few months..." http://tinyurl.com/49zf6 NHS direct website too complicated for diabetes sufferers By Ann Light "Many diabetes sufferers cannot understand the health advice they are given on the NHS Direct Online website and many other internet pages, a new study concludes." http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article1911.asp +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Effect of z-index value to RP and AP blocks By Aleksandar Vacic Explanation of how different browsers handle z-index on relatively and absolutely positioned elements. http://www.aplus.co.yu/CSSdesign/z-pos/ CSS Zen Garden - Design List By Dave Shea "Due to the growing weight of this list, it has proven necessary to break down the individual categories into their own pages. This page will now track the most recent designs, and link you to the larger lists." http://www.mezzoblue.com/zengarden/alldesigns/ Ruthsarian Layouts By Eric Tribou "In an attempt to save the sanity of myself and others, I offer these layouts that I've put together. Everything here is royalty-free, copyright-free, and warranty-free. Enjoy..." http://webhost.bridgew.edu/etribou/layouts/ Micro Tutorial: Cascading Style Sheets Level One By Miraz Jordan "In this course I introduce you to the ideas behind Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), show you one way to add styles to your website, and look at such things as: colour, margins and padding, fonts, borders, floats, classes, spans and divs as well as validation, specifications and resources." http://www.mactips.info/tutorials/css/index.html Grammar Question By Eric A. Meyer 'I was just recently asked if attribute selectors must use quotes around the value. In other words, are both the following two selectors legal?" http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2004/09/18/grammar-question/ +03: DREAMWEAVER. Web Standards in Dreamweaver Part 3 By Costas Hadjisotiriou "This last part of the chapter on Web Standards in Dreamweaver shows you how to create a layout with a banner at the top of the page and a navigation menu on the left side." http://tinyurl.com/6wecc +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Usability Testing for Findability By Donna Maurer "We may have already gone a significant way along the wrong path, where findability is king, where we spend more time on designing navigation than on designing answers and where we may be missing a major part of information seeking." http://www.maadmob.net/donna/blog/archives/000582.html +05: EVENTS. Web Design World December 6-8, 2004 Boston, Massachusetts U.S.A. http://www.ftponline.com/conferences/webdesignworld/ Digital Design World February 18-20, 2005 San Francisco, California U.S.A. https://www.ftponline.com/conferences/digitaldesignworld/SanFrancisco/ South by Southwest Interactive March 11-15, 2005 Austin, Texas, U.S.A. http://2005.sxsw.com/interactive/conference/ +06: JAVASCRIPT. Resolution Dependent Layout By Cameron Adams Cameron Adams (The Man in Blue) has a solution to the liquid vs. fixed debate. It is ingenious. He uses JavaScript to detect the size of the browser window and swaps in different stylesheets depending on how much space is available. Cameron says, "The solution is to add a little vitamin J. JavaScript can tell you what the width of a browser is, then react accordingly. By default the content is displayed in a single column. Non-JavaScript enabled browsers, or lower resolution ones, will stay that way. But if you're 1024-up, with JavaScript, an alternate stylesheet gets put into action." While most liquid layouts stretch as your browser grows, producing long, lines of text, his example splits the content body into three columns instead of three rows when the browser gets to 1024 pixels wide. http://www.themaninblue.com/writing/perspective/2004/09/21/ +07: MISCELLANEOUS. Ten questions for Jon Hicks By Russ Weakley "Jon Hicks is highly regarded web and print designer based in Oxford UK. Jon is most widely known for his personal website - Hicks Design - where he regularly writes about web standards, css and browsers. As well as producing a range of successful browser resources, Jon has also produced logos for Firefox and Thunderbird." http://webstandardsgroup.org/features/jon-hicks.cfm Tim Berners-Lee, Director, W3C By Ryan Naraine "Moments after delivering a keynote address at the SpeechTek Conference in New York earlier this week, Sir Tim sat down with internetnews.com to discuss the state of the Web browser market, the growth of the Semantic Web and some of the challenges facing the W3C." http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3409621 Developer Spotlight: Jakob Nielsen By Brendon Chase "...The value systems are kind of opposite for what average users need and what open source developers want to do. As long as they are designing for other people like themselves it works quite well. But as soon as they try and design for the average person it breaks down and you have to have the more hierarchical project manager, you have to do user testing and you have to do documentation. No developers like to write documentation. The second problem is that open source when they turn to the general tools they tend to be in the line of ?let's implement what we already know- so they will take Microsoft Office and they will clone it. Since we've been criticizing Microsoft for years for cloning Apple it is only fair to criticize open source for cloning Microsoft. The point being that you don't move ahead but you have to do something new." http://www.builderau.com.au/program/0,39024614,39130602,00.htm Searching for answers on the Web By Kristie Lu Stout "Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen talks to CNN's Kristie Lu Stout about what makes a good Web site stand out, and what he believes is the future of the Internet." http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/08/09/jakob.nielsen/ +08: NAVIGATION. Guidelines for Linking By D. Keith Robinson "...So, I'd like to throw out a few of my own guidelines, some ideas and hopefully get your take on linking." http://www.7nights.com/asterisk/archive/2004/09/link-guidelines.php +09: PHP. PHP Tutorial By Gez Lemon This is a standards-based PHP tutorial for beginners. http://www.juicystudio.com/tutorial/php/index.asp +10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Client Guide to Web Standards: What they are and why they are important. By Andy Budd "Sites which use web standards are fast loading, can be used on many different devices and are found more easily by search engines. They are faster to develop, easier to maintain and don't lock you into a single supplier. All these things add up to more visitors, a better user experience, increased flexibility and lower costs." http://www.message.uk.com/articles/web_standards.php Like a Phoenix From the Ashes: X3D and the Rebirth of Reason By Tony Parisi "Standards don't matter because it's the applications that matter...But try to scale these applications up, and try to reuse your content, across an enterprise or over the Internet, without standards. Just try. And even if you don't want to use standards, your customers will eventually make you, because by now they have gotten tired of paying you too much money to rewrite the same content over and over and over again for each new application use, each new platform." http://flux.typepad.com/the_flux_papers/2004/08/project_phoenix.html +11: TOOLS. Html Validator (with Tidy) 0.2.4 By Marc Gueury This is a tidy extension for Firefox that "adds HTML validation to the View Page Source of the browser. The validation is done by Tidy from W3c". It works on Windows with Mozilla 1.7.x, 1.8.x and Firefox 0.9.x, 1.0PR. http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/ +12: USABILITY. Less is More for University Websites By Gerry McGovern "Many university websites are poorly organized, and filled with out-of-date content that has been directly published from print. Delivering a better service to students and staff faces challenges because of decentralized management structures and concepts such as academic freedom." http://tinyurl.com/5umlu Grammar and Punctuation for the Web: What's Proper? By Amy Gahran "Most of us were educated to believe that there is one 'correct' (and fairly formal) version of English grammar and punctuation, and any deviation from that is mere sloppiness. Not true! The whole point of grammar and punctuation is to enhance understanding - not to enforce rigid conformity." http://tinyurl.com/3tb72 Instructions not needed By Garrett Dimon This article is a repeat from last week. For some reason, the tinyurl ( http://tinyurl.com/47zfo ) stopped working for a while. Hat tip to Cynthia Oshiro, University of Hawaii. So if you need it, the long URL (be careful of the line break) is: http://www.yourtotalsite.com/archives/usability/instructions_not_needed/Default.aspx +13: XML. RSS Feeds -- Summary By D. Keith Robinson "The first thing that became obvious is that there is no doubt that RSS and related technologies have significantly changed the way many of us use the Web. Web content will never be the same, and I imagine as these technologies mature, the future of Web content will change even more strikingly..." http://tinyurl.com/6mngy [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 + 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.]