+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 3, Issue 20, October 28, 2004. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 20 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: TYPOGRAPHY. 13: USABILITY. 14: XML. SECTION TWO: 15: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. A Quick and Dirty Introduction to Accessibility By Russ Weakley Russ Weakley gives a 'quick and dirty' introduction to accessibility. http://www.maxdesign.com.au/presentation/accessibility/index.htm Techniques for Making Forms More Accessible By Steve Faulkner These are Steve Faulkner's presentation slides regarding accessibility techniques for web forms. http://www.nils.org.au/ais/web/resources/WSG_Oct_04/toc.html Web Usability Checking for Blind and Vision Impaired By David Woodbridge and Robert Spriggs "These documents are a list of questions that Royal Blind Society's Adaptive Technology Consultants will commonly ask when checking websites for accessibility. The questions could also be used as an auditing tool for web designers and developers to assess their sites for accessibility." http://webstandardsgroup.org/go/resource168.cfm VoiceOver By Apple "Introducing VoiceOver, the spoken interface for Mac OS X. The Universal Access capabilities of Mac OS X will soon be enhanced to provide a new way to access the Macintosh through speech, audible cues and keyboard navigation." http://www.apple.com/ca/macosx/tiger/voiceover.html +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Designing a CSS layout with an Interesting Header Treatment By Michael Meadhra "In this project, Builder columnist Michael Meadhra shows how to construct a header that stretches with the page and has overlapping logo, picture, and nav bar elements." http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-5409183.html Printing Tables By Jim Wilkinson "When long data tables are printed, it's often very helpful (from the user's point of view) for the header row to be repeated at the top of each printed page. To do this, you need to define two additional HTML elements and ..." http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=PrintingTables&version=8 +03: DREAMWEAVER. The Relevant CSS Panel By Dave McFarland "Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) can be confusing. Not only do Web developers need to know the different CSS properties, and the sometimes bizarre ways that Web browsers render those properties, there are times when CSS just doesn't seem to behave. You create a new class style - .highlight, for example - that's supposed to change the text color to burgundy. But when you select the text and apply the style nothing happens..." http://www.sys-con.com/story/?storyid=46758&DE=1 +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Dick Dillon's Usability Myths: part 1 By Richard F. Dillon "In this article, Dick Dillon of the HOT Lab debunks common myths, misconceptions and misuses of usability testing." http://tinyurl.com/6jwkf Dick Dillon's Usability Myths: part 2 By Richard F. Dillon "Dr. Dick Dillon expands on his popular December 2003 article on usability testing myths, misconceptions, and misuses. This second installment focuses on who usability test participants should be, issues surrounding the design of tasks in usability tests, the interpretation of usability test results, and a comparison of usability testing with other methods that are used to collect usability problems (including heuristic techniques and keystroke logging)." http://tinyurl.com/6lbou +05: EVENTS. Weaving Meaning: An Overview of the Semantic Web November 20, 2004 Boston, Massachusetts U.S.A. http://www.gbcacm.org/website/semInfo.php?id=1085 +06: JAVASCRIPT. Client-side and Server-side JavaScript By Ibama Supreme Tmunotein "This article explains the three major types of JavaScript, client-side, server-side and the core language. Server-side JavaScript is ideal for creating web applications that can be run on any platform, on any browser, and in any language. See the article for other advantages and disadvantages of each." http://tinyurl.com/6csy3 +07: MISCELLANEOUS. If Architects Had To Work Like Web Designers... By Robert Watkins "Dear Mr. Architect: Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one..." http://twasink.net/blog/archives/2004/10/if_architects_h.html +08: NAVIGATION. Should Links Be Underlined? By Mark Hurst "Should links be underlined? Check out the discussion over at 'This Is Broken.'" http://broken.typepad.com/b/2004/10/yahoos_new_link.html +09: PHP. Practical PHP Programming By Paul Hudson This is an online book. It "This book assumes no PHP programming skill at all - you will be taught from scratch in that respect. However, I will be using terms like 'variable', 'function', and 'loop' freely, so any prior programming experience you have will help enormously." http://www.hudzilla.org/php/index.php +10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. What is a 'Web Standard?' By Molly E. Holzschlag "The grand irony as we debate the importance of validation and what web standards are is this little bugaboo: Web "standards' aren't. The W3C provides specifications and recommendations which have been coined by practitioners as "standards" when they are not precisely standards, but de facto standards. ISO, for example, is a standards organization with a full compliance set that if not met - well, products don't ship, period. With a true standard, compliance is mandatory. With de facto standards, what we have are browser compliance problems up our collective wazoo. What we also appear to have is confusion as to what qualifies as a 'web standard'." http://www.webstandards.org/buzz/archive/2004_10.html#a000463 Living in a Dream House: Or How to Bring Web Standards to Your Web Sites By Sheri German "We hear the phrase 'Web Standards' frequently these days, but what does it mean, and why should we care? There are many advantages to using XHTML, CSS, and 508 accessibility, and we'll look at some of them in this article. We'll look at how structuring and designing web pages has evolved to its current "best practice" of separating content and presentation. Finally, after looking at a few of the problems involved in using CSS for layout, we'll wander through the CSS Zen Garden to look at a few inspiring examples of what can nonetheless be achieved when designers code for standards compliant browsers." http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=9E84E +11: TOOLS. jslint The JavaScript Verifier By Douglas Crockford "jslint takes a JavaScript source and scans it. If it finds a problem, it returns a message describing the problem and an approximate location within the source. The problem is not necessarily an error, although it often is. jslint looks at some style conventions as well as structural problems. It does not prove that your program is correct. It just provides another set of eyes to help spot problems." http://www.crockford.com/javascript/lint.html +12: TYPOGRAPHY. Apple Fonts By Wikipedia "As a company that arguably did more to jump-start the desktop publishing industry than any other in the mid-1980s, Apple Computer has always paid great attention to the typefaces used in its marketing, operating systems and industrial design. It has also been a leading player in font technology development, and controls several patents important to the implementation of high-quality typeface rendering on computers." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_fonts +13: USABILITY. Devising a New Paradigm for Usable, Maintainable Web Applications By Ka Wai Cheung "This article assumes the reader has a working knowledge of basic object-oriented paradigms. In the Web community, usability engineering is often discussed but rarely implemented. It's pretty clear that software works better when it is well-designed and user-centric. It's also evident that too many of today's Web applications are harder to use than they should be. Experts tend to focus on why usability is important and how to improve usability on the Web. However, they rarely address what makes usability on the Web difficult to implement and maintain." http://www.digital-web.com/articles/devising_a_new_paradigm/ Panic! How it Works and What To Do About It By Bruce 'Tog' Tognazzini "Many users who hit one 'bump' during their exploration of a website or application will panic and back off. As anyone who has worked in tech support will attest, they immediately lose their ability to read, resulting in RTFM (read-the-manual) syndrome, reducing them to a quivering mass barely able to dial the 800 number. Most websites don't suffer from this tech support problem. Why? Because users just simply go somewhere else. The penalty for these bumps in the road is not only instantaneous and permanent, but invisible. They typically don't bother to let you know why they are leaving, and even if they do write a complaint in that cute little postage-stamp-sized box on your customer-support form, your people are usually offering the now-long-gone user a work-around, instead of reporting the problem to you." http://www.asktog.com/columns/066Panic!.html Web Content Management Depends on Trust By Gerry McGovern "You must be able to stand over everything that is published on your website and say that it is all accurate and up-to-date. Trust is a fundamental building block of professional web content management." http://tinyurl.com/5opkx User Education Is Not the Answer to Security Problems By Jakob Nielsen "Internet scams cannot be thwarted by placing the burden on users to defend themselves at all times. Beleaguered users need protection, and the technology must change to provide this." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20041025.html Under Gmail's Hood By Jon Udell In this article Jon Udell looks at some of Gmail's UI features and how they were implemented. ItŐs a good read if you are a Gmail fan or if you are interested in JavaScript web applications and their usability. http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/10/22/43OPstrategic_1.html +14: XML. Don't CSS your XML By Jesper Tverskov "CSS should not be used to present homemade XML as web pages. You end up with nothing but style. Neither man nor machine can understand the structure of your document. CSS should only be used for widely supported XML applications like XHTML...XHTML has a known set of elements and attributes. The DTD of XHTML is public and part of a standard (Recommendations). The browsers, search engines like Google, screen readers, etc., know the markup of XHTML in advance. That is the reason why CSS works for XHTML, and why styling your own XML is just plain stupid...Use XSLT to transform XML." http://www.smackthemouse.com/20041020 [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +15: 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.]