+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 3, Issue 17, October 8, 2004. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 17 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: EVALUATION & TESTING. 06: EVENTS. 07: FLASH. 08: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 09: JAVASCRIPT. 10: MISCELLANEOUS. 11: NAVIGATION. 12: PHP. 13: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 14: TYPOGRAPHY. 15: USABILITY. 16: XML. SECTION TWO: 17: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Cognitive Disabilities Part 1: We Still Know Too Little, and We Do Even Less By Paul Bohman "Cognitive disabilities are the least understood and least discussed type of disability among Web developers. As a result, developers rarely design Web content to be accessible to people with cognitive disabilities..." http://www.webaim.org/techniques/articles/cognitive_too_little/ Cognitive Disabilities Part 2: Conceptualizing Design Considerations By Cyndi Rowland "It is an unfortunate fact that the Web accessibility community has struggled for some time to come to a consensus on guidelines that can be applied to Web content for individuals with cognitive disabilities." http://www.webaim.org/techniques/articles/conceptualize/ The Secret Benefit of Accessibility: Increased Usability By Trenton Moss "Web accessibility has a huge number of benefits, one the main ones being increased usability. This article outlines some of the ways accessibility and usability overlap and how enhancing a website's accessibility can automatically improve its usability too." http://tinyurl.com/42tj6 Separate text-only version? No thanks! By Trenton Moss "There are...so many reasons as to why a separate text-only version isn't a good idea. Additionally, there are a such huge number of benefits to having an accessible website that there's no excuse for not trying to make your main website accessible to everyone." http://www.w3reports.com/index.php?itemid=599 +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Zen and the Art of Web Improvement The Web Essentials Conference Keynote Presentation. By Dave Shea "CSS Zen Garden creator Dave Shea kicks off WE04 with a look at his popular project which has helped shape the future of web design. Talking about its creation and his continued involvement in maintaining this collaborative gallery, Dave has plenty of advice to share about working with standards-based design, running a high profile site, managing international collaborations, as well as thoughts on the future of the web browser." http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/pres/we04/keynote/ Designing with CSS: Past, Present, and Future A Web Essentials presentation. By Dave Shea "Dave Shea talks about the potential of CSS design, and how that has changed over the last few years. Starting with the basic layout concepts that had to be discovered before widespread use was ensured, he brings us up to the trends of today, and where we?re going tomorrow with CSS3." http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/pres/we04/designing/ The Beauty and Business of CSS A Web Essentials presentation. By: Douglas Bowman "Building designs with CSS is no longer a fringe activity practiced by standards geeks and early-adopters. CSS provides greater design control, allows more flexibility, and enables sites to become attractive, accessible, and faster-loading, all at the same time..." http://www.stopdesign.com/present/2004/sydney/beauty/ Pushing Your Limits A Web Essentials presentation. By Douglas Bowman "What do you do when you feel like you've hit a brick wall? When it seems your creativity is limited by how much CSS you know how to beat into submission? Understanding how and where CSS fits into the design process is key to knowing how to push your own limits. Reviewing the principles of existing techniques Ð and learning why or how they came about Ð can extend your capabilities and help you gain confidence in solving future problems on your own." http://www.stopdesign.com/present/2004/sydney/limits/ +03: COLOR. How to make figures and presentations that are friendly to color blind people By Masataka Okabe and Kei Ito "Here are some comments on how to make figures and presentations colorblind friendly..." http://jfly.iam.u-tokyo.ac.jp/html/color_blind/ +04: DREAMWEAVER. Accessibility and Dreamweaver MX 2004 By Rachel Andrew et al. "An accessible website is compatible with the assistive technologies used by people with disabilities. Dreamweaver MX 2004 automates many elements of creating accessible sites and prompts designers to provide information when necessary. It has also been modified to provide better keyboard access and to work with screen readers." http://tinyurl.com/5s623 Switching Styles With Dreamweaver MX 2004 By Justin Kozuch "With the number of web surfers and web sites growing at an exponential rate, you can bet your bottom dollar that some of the users out there have some sort of physical disability, like vision, mobility and other such limitations. More and more, we are dawning on a new era of design: creating accessible web sites with individuals in mind. How can this be done you ask? Well, there are many ways that you can do this, in fact, I could go on for hours on end, detailing all the ways you can make a website accessible. Today, however, I will make things a bit easier for you. I am going to show you how to create a stylesheet-switching program that will allow your visitors to change the size of the type on your site without having to use any browser features." http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=392E9 +05: EVALUATION & TESTING. Mind the Gap... On the appropriate use of focus groups and usability testing in planning and evaluating Interfaces By Kath Straub "The method you need to use depends on the goals of the exercise. If you want to explore possible directions for increased functionality and test market interest, use a focus group. If you want to evaluate and improve the effectiveness of a current application or site, use usability testing." http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/sep04.asp#kath Response: Why Readability Testing is not Enough By Matthew Goddard "The recent press coverage of the Bath University research paper "Readability Assessment of British Internet Information Resources on Diabetes Mellitus Targeting Laypersons" (including UN's own story: NHS Direct Website too complicated for Diabetes Sufferers) has raised interesting questions about some of the methodologies used to measure users' experience on the Web. " http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article1925.asp +06: EVENTS. Web Content Management and Web Services and Workshop November 12-14 2004 Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S.A. http://www.joinwow.org/websummit/ Information Architecture Summit 2005 March 4-7, 2005 Montreal, Quebec, Canada http://www.iasummit.org/2005/ STC Society for Technical Communication Conference May 8-11, 2005 Seattle, Washington, U.S.A. http://www.stc.org/conference.asp +07: FLASH. My Favorite Accessible Flash Sites By Bob Regan "I often get requests for samples of accessible Flash. There are some terrific examples out there. Over the next couple of weeks, I thought I would write a bit about some of these examples and what they have done..." http://www.markme.com/accessibility/archives/006073.cfm +08: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Using a "Strawman" for Page Layout Design By Donna Maurer "Designing the page layouts for a new or redesigned intranet can be complex. One of the most difficult aspects is creating the first layout. Starting with an empty screen, you need to determine what will go on each page and where it will go. Using a strawman design - a design that is created with the intent of discarding it - can help to overcome many of the difficulties in the design process. " http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/cmb_strawman/index.html +09: JAVASCRIPT. S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System By Eric Meyer Eric has published a simple standards-based slide show system. It is a JavaScript/CSS answer to PowerPoint. Each slide is a simple
element. All of the formatting is done with external style sheets, and transitions between slides are done with DHTML in a separate JavaScript file. You can turn off the styles and behaviors and view the entire presentation as the simple HTML it contains. It runs on just about any computer with a recent browser, and it eliminates the need for bulky tools like PowerPoint. http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2004/10/07/s5-final-candidate/ How to Use JavaScript ++ By Guyon Roche "One of the problems facing JavaScript developers is that the core features are only supported in the latest browsers. In this article, users will learn how to use JavaScript to solve this problem." http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/gr/column9/index.html +10: MISCELLANEOUS. Sir Tim Berners-Lee By Mark Frauenfelder "Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, but he had something bigger in mind all along. He tells TR how his 15 years of work on the 'Semantic Web' are finally paying off." http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/04/10/frauenfelder1004.asp Eric Meyer: Turning the Tables Using CSS By Nancy Eaton "Have you noticed web pages loading a bit faster than usual? You might thank Eric Meyer. Meyer is an expert and author on the subject of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), a standards-based method of coding websites to make them work more efficiently with todayÕs Internet browsers..." http://www.apple.com/pro/words/meyer/ +11: NAVIGATION. Designing for Web Revisitation: Exploiting Structure from User Interaction and Navigation By Natasa Milic-Frayling, Rachel Jones, Kerry Rodden, Gavin Smyth, and Anthony Frayling "High percentage of Web access are visits to pages that the user has already seen in the past. Currently available support for page revisitation, through standard browser features, and suggested improvements have been based on simple history models which do not fully incorporate information about the userÕs interaction with the Web and the resulting navigation structure. In our research we propose a syntax for parsing navigation history into structural elements that has proven useful for identifying patterns in the history and building features for supporting habitual Web usage. This approach is motivated by our exploratory user observation study which revealed the need for effective revisitation of key pages in the short navigation history and for supporting user in recurring Web activities observed over the long term history. We designed SmartNavigation features that address both scenarios and evaluate their usefulness through a contextual user study. Findings of the study provide further guidelines for designing revisitation support and validate the history model that we advocate." http://tinyurl.com/3wogh +12: PHP. Building and Installing PHP, Apache on Mac OS X 10.3.5 with GD By James Pelow "To start we must download the libjpeg and libpng source distributions..." http://phpmac.com/articles.php?view=203 +13: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. An Introduction to Web Standards A Web Essentials presentation. By Russ Weakley This is Russ Weakley's presentation from the Web Essentials Conference. It was for people unfamiliar with web standards or those just starting to use web standards. http://we04.com/resources/we04-introduction/ Does W3C Validation Help In Search Rankings? By Chris Richardson "Validating the html and other codes in your website can be a time consuming task. Because validation simply checks the mark up language for proper syntax, some have wondered if using this process will benefit a site when it comes to search engine rankings, and as such, is it worth doing?" http://tinyurl.com/6zxf5 CNet Discovers Browser Incompatibilities By Chris Kaminski "Bottom line, if IE/Win were brought up to snuff on standards, browser incompatibilities would largely be a non-issue. And even as it stands, devoting 5% of costs to support a group of browsers that comprises more than 5% of the audience (according most recent web statistics I've seen) looks like a bargain to me." http://www.webstandards.org/buzz/archive/2004_10.html#a000451 +14: TYPOGRAPHY. Manipulating Space with CSS By Christopher Schmitt "One of the main strengths of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is how the technology handles web typography. In this article, Christopher Schmitt shows how to use CSS's letter- and word-spacing properties to easily adjust the space between two letters or to separate whole words within a paragraph. Chris is the author of O'Reilly's recently released CSS Cookbook." http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2004/09/21/CSSCookbook.html +15: USABILITY. The Piece of HTML created just for Me: Reset By Caroline Jarrett "If you truly believe that some of your genuine users are likely to want to throw away their work and start over, then include a button that allows them to do that. Give it a clear name such as 'THROW AWAY ALL INPUT' or 'CLEAR FORM AND START OVER'. Place it well away from the SEND button. If you don't think your users want to trash their entries, then scrap the RESET button." http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article1944.asp Creating Bulletproof and Easy to Complete Web Forms By Jason Fried, Matthew Linderman "Effective form design is a great way to boost conversion rates. Jason Fried and Matthew Linderman share with us the secret of how to create attractive and functional forms." http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.asp?p=170288 Server Side Usability: How to make web servers behave By Henrik Olsen "Most usability professionals don't have a driver's licence to web servers and are not aware of the steps that can be taken to make servers behave in a user-friendly way. In this article, we'll take a look at how to avoid that server technology becomes an obstacle to usability." http://tinyurl.com/4w5wj Bulleted Lists: The Online Writer's Friend By Amy Gahran "Here is my advice for using bulleted lists in most nonfiction writing- especially business, academic, news, or government documents, whether in print or online..." http://blog.contentious.com/archives/2004/09/17/bulleted-lists +16: XML. Don't Believe RSS Hype By Jim Rapoza "The technology is promising, but overconfidence could sack it." http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1645599,00.asp [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +17: 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.]