+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 3, Issue 33, January 22, 2005. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 33 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. Accessibility From The Ground Up: A Primer for the Web Designer By Matt May "The best tool you can have for Web accessibility is education. In this week's issue of Digital Web Magazine Web accessibility specialist for the World Wide Web Consortium, Matt May, presents a quick introduction to Web accessibility for the modern designer." http://digital-web.com/articles/accessibility_from_the_ground_up/ Guidelines for Accessible and Usable Web Sites: Observing Users Who Work With Screen Readers By Mary Frances Theofanos and Janice (Ginny) Redish "The Communication Technologies Branch of the United States National Cancer Institute (part of National Institutes of Health and Department of Health and Human Services) has been conducting usability testing with people with disabilities, specifically blind and lowvision users, to understand the relationship between accessibility and usability understand how blind and low-vision users work with Web sites; develop research-based guidelines for accessibility and usability; and assess the usability of specific Web sites for blind and low-vision users." http://redish.net/content/papers/interactions.html What is the Relationship Between Usability and Accessibility and What Should it be? By Dey Alexander "In this presentation, my aim is to generate discussion about the relationship between usability and accessibility based on an examination of what each is about and what practitioners in each field do. I will use this as a basis to consider whether usability and accessibility are compatible design approaches, whether accessibility improves usability, and vice versa, and how practitioners in each field are--and should be--affected by the relationship between accessibility and usability." http://deyalexander.com/presentations/usability-accessibility/ Introduction to Web Accessibility By W3C "Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can use the Web. More specifically, Web accessibility means that the Web is designed so that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with it effectively, as well as create and contribute content to the Web." http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/accessibility.html Adobe Acrobat 7.0: First Look from Planet PDF Adobe announced acrobat 7.0 with 'advanced accessibility features'-- see bottom of page two. http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/22186-2.html +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Tabular Weirdness By Eric A. Meyer "Recently I was doing some table styling for a client and ran into what I can only call tabular weirdness. There were two different things that I stumbled across, and interestingly, they were the kinds of problems you wouldn't be likely to encounter in layout tables. These would come up much more often in data tables." http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2005/01/11/tabular-weirdness/ Are You Too Classy? By Virginia DeBolt "When learning Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), some beginners get carried away by the idea of creating classes. While classes of styles certainly have their place, they should not be used to replace the logical page structure that HTML can create." http://www.vdebolt.com/ht/classy.html Redundancy vs. Dependency By Dave Shea "When coding larger sites, CSS inheritance is both friend and foe. The choice is yours: redundancy, or dependency?" http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2005/01/20/redundancy_v/index.php Margins and Padding Douglas Livingstone "Interactive Flash demo of the CSS box model." http://www.redmelon.net/tstme/box_model/ +03: DREAMWEAVER. North Pole: A Structural CSS Positioning Study By Adrian Senior "In this tutorial we will clear away all the elements that are used to style the North Pole JumpStart so that we are only left with the structure of the document. We will then investigate how the layout is structured and the techniques that are used to position the structural elements of the layout." http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=33662 +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Six Steps to Ensure a Successful Usability Test By Janice (Ginny) Redish "In the early days of usability testing, most design teams waited until the end of production to test. They were doing what they thought of as "validation." They hoped users would sail through the tasks and their design would emerge as a resounding success. Designers equated success in the usability test with success in the design. If you wait until the end to do usability testing, however, you are almost certain to find serious problems in the product. And then you have the frustration of neither time nor resources to fix the problems..." http://tinyurl.com/62hr5 +05: EVENTS. IADIS International Conference Web Based Communities 2005 February 23-25, 2005 Algarve, Portugal http://www.iadis.org/wbc2005/ The Other Dreamweaver Conference (TODCON) April 25-27, 2005 Los Vegas, Nevada U.S.A. http://www.todcon.org/ +06: JAVASCRIPT. Building Rounded Corners With CSS and JavaScript By Alejandro Gervasio "Rounded corners give your website a professional, polished look. Unfortunately, the old school way of building rounded corners is rather messy and involves a lot of redundant markup. This article explains a much cleaner way of achieving the same effect." http://tinyurl.com/3m8m2 +07: MISCELLANEOUS. Management by Design By Richard Farson "Have you ever noticed the difference between a meeting held at a long rectangular table and one held at a round table? The time spent, the agenda, and the participants may be exactly the same, but the meetings are completely different. The discussion at the round table is more informal, the leadership is shared, the communication more personal..." http://www.wbsi.org/farson/com_mgtbydesignr.htm +08: NAVIGATION. Design Your Web Site to be Search Friendly By Robert L. Bogue "Learn the basics of how to control search engine indexing of your Web site. Use these techniques to both ensure that all of your pages get indexed and that the indexing is more valuable to the users trying to find your information." http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-5512029.html +09: PHP. Output Caching with PHP By Alejandro Gervasio "Dynamic Web pages take longer to load than static ones, which forces visitors to your site to wait -- and we all know they won't wait for very long. Output caching is a powerful technique you can use to shorten that wait and keep them from leaving." http://www.devshed.com/c/a/PHP/Output-Caching-with-PHP/ +10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Why Standards-Compliant HTML Matters By Raphael Mazoyer "High-quality, compact, elegant and standards-compliant code is one of the most obvious tools of good web development nowadays. However, it is sometimes difficult to convince the client to invest in that kind of quality. Here are some elements that can be used to build a case: outlining abuse patterns and their reasons, the fundamental problem with creative use of technologies, and its consequences." http://evolt.org/article/rdf/17/60446/index.html +11: TOOLS. Complex Table Inspector By Gez Lemon Gez has written a favelet that reveals accessibility attributes for complex tables. http://juicystudio.com/complextableinspector.asp Sharkware, JAWS Screen Reader Adaptation for Mozilla Firefox "Sharkware Development is an S2S project administered by Dr. Vicki Almstrum in the Computer Sciences Department at the University of Texas at Austin. The goal of the Sharkware Development team is to create compatibility between Freedom Scientific's JAWS Screen Reader and the Mozilla Firefox next generation browser. Freedom Scientific has not created scripts that would allow JAWS to function properly in Mozilla Firefox or any other browser other than Internet Explorer. The purpose of our project is to create a bridge between these two software components so that everyone can have a choice of what browser they wish to use." http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/s2s/latest/jaws1/home/index.shtml +12: TYPOGRAPHY The Science of Word Recognition or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bouma By Kevin Larson "Evidence from the last 20 years of work in cognitive psychology indicate that we use the letters within a word to recognize a word. Many typographers and other text enthusiasts I've met insist that words are recognized by the outline made around the word shape. Some have used the term bouma as a synonym for word shape, though I was unfamiliar with the term. The term bouma appears in Paul Saenger's 1997 book Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading. There I learned to my chagrin that we recognize words from their word shape and that Modern psychologists call this image the 'Bouma shape.'" http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ctfonts/WordRecognition.aspx +13: USABILITY. Durability of Usability Guidelines By Jakob Nielsen "About 90% of usability guidelines from 1986 are still valid, though several guidelines are less important because they relate to design elements that are rarely used today." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20050117.html How to Bake Usability into Your Company By John S. Rhodes "Train your designers and developers to do some of their own usability work. This gets them thinking about users while it frees up usability specialists to focus on your more difficult usability issues. Everyone wins." http://oristus.com/resources/bake.html A Taxonomy of Human-Computer Interaction By Saul Greenberg "Human-computer interaction (HCI) is a discipline concerned with the design, evaluation and implementation of interactive computing systems for human use, and with the study of the major phenomena surrounding them. From a computer science perspective, the focus is on the interaction and specifically on interaction between one or more humans and one or more computational machines. This implies far more than a human sitting in front of a terminal." http://tinyurl.com/4nu2u Improving Your Intranet, Task By Task By Tina Calabria "One method that is certain to provide immediate business benefit is to improve the way the intranet supports key tasks. In fact, by selecting only one task at a time, improvements can be made in a manageable and cost-effective manner. " http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/cmb_taskbytask/ +14: XML. Evaluating XML Editors By Dan Wellman "You've learned enough XML that you no longer need to use a simple text editor. You want something that will make your job less tedious, more fun, and help you create what you've pictured in your head. Welcome to the world of XML editing programs and application suites. How do you choose one? Dan Wellman gives you the goods, from the freeware through the most professional offerings..." http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/XML/Evaluating-XML-Editors/ XForms Validator Goes Open Source By Micah Dubinko "I'm happy to announce that the popular XForms validator, including new features, is available under an Apache 2.0 license." http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/6241 Printing XML: Why CSS Is Better than XSL By Hakon Wium Lie and Michael Day "On the web, CSS is the style sheet language of choice. However, the usefulness of CSS is not limited to screens. If you want to transfer web content -- be it XML or HTML -- onto paper, there are good reasons to use CSS. The language is radically simpler than that of XSL, and it is suitable both on-screen and on paper. This means that you probably don't have to write a stylesheet at all but can reuse an existing one." http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/01/19/print.html [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). As a navigation aid for screen readers we do our best to conform to the accessible Text Email Newsletter (TEN) guidelines. Please let me know if there is anything else we can do to make navigation easier. For TEN guideline 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.]