+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 3, Issue 24, November 24, 2004. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 24 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: EVALUATION & TESTING. 04: EVENTS. 05: FLASH. 06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 07: JAVASCRIPT. 08: MISCELLANEOUS. 09: NAVIGATION. 10: PHP. 11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 12: TOOLS. 13: TYPOGRAPHY. 14: USABILITY. 15: XML. SECTION TWO: 16: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Web Accessibility and Usability: The Human Factor By Derek Featherstone "WATS.ca cofounder Derek Featherstone presented 'Web Accessibility and Usability: The Human Factor' in Ottawa...It included an introduction to web accessibility and how it ties together with many other fields: usability, human factors, and human computer interaction. Another significant theme was that while accessibility is generally seen as something to help 'people with disabilities', web accessibility principles and techniques are helpful to many more people. The common thread connecting all of these related fields and principles together is that they focus on people." http://www.wats.ca/news/oegcapchi/68 Accessible Technology in Computing Examining Awareness, Use, and Future Potential A Research Report Commissioned by Microsoft Corporation and Conducted by Forrester Research. http://www.microsoft.com/enable/research/phase2.aspx +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. CSS: To Hack or Not to Hack By Michael Meadhra "I have several reasons for preferring to shun hacks; some of them are theoretical and others are practical. First of all, every hack that I see in CSS code is an irritating reminder of the browser deficiencies that we have to deal with. It's also an admission that I couldn't find a more elegant cross-browser solution and had to resort to code trickery to single out a specific browser for special treatment. The practical reasons include objections to the added code required to implement the hacks and the time and effort that it takes to apply, test, and maintain them. The practical advantages of clean, uncluttered code are enough to justify searching for alternatives to using hacks." http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-5452786.html Invasion of the Body Switchers By Andy Clarke and James Edwards "Wouldn't it be great if we could update the classic ALA Style Switcher to accommodate multiple users and devices, including some that aren't even traditional browsers, all from a single JavaScript and CSS file? Well, now we can! Enter the Body Switcher." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/bodyswitchers/ +03: EVALUATION & TESTING. Cleaning Up For the Housekeeper Or Why It Makes Sense to do Both Expert Review and Usability Testing By Kathleen Straub "So, doing both ER followed by UT optimizes the return on the usability investment. ER identifies fundamental or generic challenges within the user experience. Usability Testing highlights contextually specific gaps between the user model and the site model. Executed together, UT builds on the ER, providing complimentary feedback supporting focused and actionable design recommendations. Thus, the power of combined usability review techniques is significantly enhances the power of the review." http://tinyurl.com/45ljl +04: EVENTS. 2005 UCDA Design Summit (University and College Designers Association) March 31-April 2, 2005 Victoria, British Columbia Canada http://ucda.com/summit.lasso SOUPS Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security July 6-8, 2005 Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania U.S.A. http://cups.cs.cmu.edu/soups/ +05: FLASH. The Tension Between a Wide and Narrow User Interface By Bob Regan "Most Flash designers are new to the screen reader experience. In my opinion, this represents the single greatest challenge of accessible Flash. Without at least a basic understanding of the screen reader and how people use them, there is very little chance of creating accessible Flash beyond a simple animation or a banner ad. In particular, designers seem to have a hard time adjusting to the lack of control they have over the screen reader itself." http://www.markme.com/accessibility/archives/006359.cfm +06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. A Research Agenda for Information Architecture By Peter Van Dijck "Information architecture is a fascinating field, but for some reason, it lacks research, and now it seems to lack innovation..." http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2004/11/21/2167/ +07: JAVASCRIPT. Accessible JavaScript tip #43: onchange select menu By Cameron Adams "So, you want a select menu without a submit button, but you want it accessible to keyboard users? Here it is." http://www.themaninblue.com/writing/perspective/2004/10/19/ Onload image fades without Flash By Richard Rutter "This technique demonstrates a method of creating a 'fade-in' effect for a photograph using dynamic alteration of the CSS opacity property. Opacity isn't part of the CSS 2.1 specification (although it is covered by CSS 3) so different browsers have different ways of controlling it. Richard's setOpacity() function provides a cross-browser workaround, with code that handles IE, Safari, Konqueror and Gecko-based browsers." Richard's blog entry provides further background information about the technique. http://clagnut.com/sandbox/imagefades/ Also see his related blog entry. http://clagnut.com/blog/1299/ +08: MISCELLANEOUS. Ten questions for Cameron Adams By Russ Weakley "Cameron Adams, aka the Man in Blue, talks about standards, his amazing site, design, CSS Scrabble, the Web Standards Awards, accessible forms and more." http://webstandardsgroup.org/features/cameron-adams.cfm Jeffery Zeldman Interview By iStockphoto Inc. "The main problem is that Internet Explorer's development was frozen, on both the PC and Mac platforms, before it was truly good enough. (Not that the other browsers are perfect.) What happens is that you get a layout working beautifully in Mozilla or Safari within a few hours ... and then spend a few days debugging it in the other browsers. You have to jump through your own sphincter to get it to work right. It should not be that hard. It wouldn't be, if we had a competitive browser market. Opera, Mozilla and Safari are continually improving their standards support. IE should be too, but Microsoft doesn't think it has to, and it's hard to argue with a gigantic market share (however that market share was earned)...So CSS adoption has room to grow in two ways: 1.) Those who aren't using it yet eventually will. 2.) Even for people who use it constantly, there is a learning curve, not so much about how the CSS language works, but more about how different CSS rules fail in different browsers for no very good reason. (Recently we had to turn off ITALICS in MSIE/Win to keep it from ripping a layout apart. Italicized words are italicized in all browsers except MSIE/Win, where they are bolded. Stuff like that is unfortunate.)" http://www.istockphoto.com/article_view?ID=24&Page=1 +09: NAVIGATION. Choose URIs wisely By Olivier Thereaux "Obvious as this advice may seem, it is not always well and fully followed. For instance, in addition to being attentive to quality of the resource, one should also be careful in choosing a publication location that is well adapted to its style and purpose." http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/uri-choose Accessible Links By Christopher Phillips "Some guidelines for accessible hyperlinks that I emailed to someone awhile ago..." http://tinyurl.com/663da +10: PHP. Build A Simple Style Switcher in CSS By Laurence Veale "If, like many SitePoint readers, your Website relies on CSS, this article is for you. In it, I'll show you a simple technique that will allow your visitors to choose the way they see your site. As well as adding a powerful 'WOW!' factor, this technique can also provide great accessibility benefits to your site. While I'll use PHP to illustrate this technique, the concepts are simple enough to be applied to other languages such as ASP, Java or even client-side JavaScript." http://www.sitepoint.com/article/css-simple-style-switcher +11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 By W3C "The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group has released an updated Working Draft for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. This draft focuses on guidelines, attempts to apply guidelines to a wider range of technologies, and uses wording that may be understood by a more varied audience. Following WCAG checkpoints makes Web content accessible to people with disabilities and to users of a variety of Web-enabled devices." http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-WCAG20-20041119/ Zeldman's Video Keynote By Jeffery Zeldman Directed By Eric Etheridge Here is Zeldman in a 9 MB QuickTime video which was played at the Web Essentials conference in Australia. Notable excerpts: "I believe web standards are just going to be what you do...if you know what you're doing, itŐs just going to be just a tool. ItŐs just going to be a tool that you use...and I think the focus of web design will go back to things like content, design, usability." http://www.happycog.com/mov/ Patrick Lauke has captioned the video as QuickTime SMIL 1.0. http://www.splintered.co.uk/experiments/archives/we04_zeldman_captioned/ An Introduction to Using Patterns in Web Design By Ryan Singer "I'm going to show you how to sidestep your habits and assumptions and use patterns to make better design decisions. A lot of fancy stuff has been written about patterns. To be simple and clear in this introduction, I'll just call them chunks." http://37signals.com/papers/introtopatterns/ +12: TOOLS. Favelet Suite By Steve. G. Chipman "This is a favelet that combines most of my development favelets. When invoked, a div element will appear in the top left corner of your browser window with a list of all the favelets I've included. Simply click the link you want to invoke the favelet." http://slayeroffice.com/index.php?c=/content/tools/suite.html +13: TYPOGRAPHY. Typography: How It Affects Your Web Site's Success By Janis Joseph "Informed choices of typeface, letter sizes, line lengths, line spacing, character spacing, and word spacing greatly affect a visitor's ability to easily read -- and remember -- the information on a Web page." http://www.atartec.co.il/articles/oct04.asp +14: USABILITY. Debunking Miller's Magic 7 By Bryan Eisenberg "George A. Miller penned a research paper in 1956, 'The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information.' It was groundbreaking in its time. In it, Miller hypothesized the human working memory can hold up to seven bits of information, plus or minus two, at once. Often referred to as 'Miller's Magic 7,' that theory is the basis of many Web page design decisions. Below, some modern day extrapolations and design conclusions rooted in Miller's research..." http://www.clickz.com/experts/crm/traffic/article.php/3427631 Secrets of Great Web Headings and Summaries By Gerry McGovern "Your website success will increase the better you write headings and summaries. People are very impatient, so the heading and summary really needs to be compelling. Here are some key tips for writing better headings and summaries." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2004/nt_2004_11_01_web_writing.htm Case Study: Intranets, Usability, and Value By Jeffery Veen "I've long been a fan of the case studies in the Harvard Business Review. Typically, the publication sets out a scenario, then asks other to comment on how they would approach the fictional problem. And I've also always wondered why nobody has applied that model to the problems we face day to day on the Web. To remedy that, I wrote up the fairly typical business case below..." http://www.veen.com/jeff/archives/000653.html Are Usability and Security Opposites in Computing? By Jeff Coburn "Not that Slashdot needs the traffic, but they are discussing something that might be of interest. 'Instinct tells us that computer security and computer usability are inversely proportional to each other...However, there have been plenty of cases where both computer security and computer usability went hand in hand with each other and actually improved together.' They then, without irony, link to a pdf white paper." http://tinyurl.com/52vck Preventing Usability Problems from the Get-go By Jared M. Spool "When a team is focused on making the design work, without looking at making it usable, it's not unusual for usability problems to become baked into the design. It's not that the team *wants* an unusable design. It's that they have no way to know that they've made it so. They are so focused on the technology issues that they don't look for these types of problems. Once the team has succeeded at making the design work, they need to transition their focus to making the design usable. Our research shows this may be a difficult change for many teams...Our research clearly shows, however, that those organizations that make a focus, concerted effort to become usage-centered...will naturally produce a design that both works and is highly usable. If we learned anything from our research, it's that preventing usability problems from the start isn't a one-time activity. It's a philosophy -- an approach to designing -- that separates the truly successful organizations from those that constantly struggle." http://www.uie.com/articles/preventing_usability_problems/ The End of Usability Culture, Redux By Dirk Knemeyer "...Dirk Knemeyer returns with a follow-up article, The End of Usability Culture, Redux. This is the second article in his new column entitled Innovating the Web Experience." http://www.digital-web.com/articles/end_of_usability_culture_redux/ Achieving Greater Simplicity Involves Managing Increasing Complexity By Gerry McGovern "As web designers, we need to be very careful about the lure of complexity. We should not fall into the trap of thinking that if it's hard to design, it must be good; that if it's using the latest technology, it must be good; that if all our friends think it's really cool, it must be good. Yes, we need to manage increasing levels of complexity, but our key challenge will be to hide as much of that complexity as possible. Otherwise, we'll drown people in a swimming pool-full of choices and useless information, when all they want is a cup of water." http://tinyurl.com/6hykq +15: XML. XML,the Web, and Beyond By Edd Dumbill "Welcome to this week's column, in which I'm excited to be able to tell you about changes in prospect for next year's XML Europe conference, and report on a discussion about when multiple schemas for XML documents should be used." http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/11/10/deviant.html Using the DOCTYPE Tag By Lee Underwood "Having trouble with your Web pages? Can't get them to display correctly in your browser? It might be that your page is a little 'quirky.'" http://www.webreference.com/html/doctype/ XML Schema By Anne Van Kesteren "XML Schema is developed by the W3C like other XML things. When I first played with XML I thought it was a replacement for DTDs written in XML and it is indeed something similar. It's not entirely a replacement for them, since you can create entities using a DTD, but XML Schema offers a similar solution...Of course, it's debatable if using elements doesn't pollute the markup and if using entities is actually necessary, but that might be something for another post or something to comment about. One of the advantages of XML Schema is the ability to describe the element contents and attribute contents in much detail..." http://annevankesteren.nl/archives/2004/11/xml-schema [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +16: 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 U.S.A. 55812-3009 mailto:lcarlson@d.umn.edu [Issue ends.]