+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 3, Issue 44, April 6, 2005. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 44 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: EVALUATION & TESTING. 05: EVENTS. 06: FLASH. 07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 08: JAVASCRIPT. 09: MISCELLANEOUS. 11: PHP. 12: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 13: 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. Innovative Design Inspired by Accessibility By Wendy Chisholm "Innovative design inspired by accessibility will help you create Web applications that change the way we communicate, work, shop, or play and increase the number of people participating in the resulting communities. Don't postpone providing an alternative method or direct access for years or decades. Do it today. You will design an application that will increase the usability and worth of your application for more people, and likely increase your audience and create something truly innovative." http://digital-web.com/articles/innovative_design_accessibility/ Accessible HTML Tables By Neerav Bhatt " elements are often maligned by the web standards savvy developer who equates them with the bad old days of table based layout..." http://www.bhatt.id.au/blog/2005/03/24/accessible-html-tables/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. A CSS Styled Table By Veerle Pieters "Further to my article about the creation of a CSS calendar the thought crossed my mind to show you an example on how you can style a table using CSS. The data of tables can be boring so all the more reason that we need to attract attention to it and make it as pleasant to read as possible. Presentation and design with some basic accessibility rules in mind is the way to go." http://veerle.duoh.com/index.php?id=P315 Tabtastic By Gavin Kistner "This library is a simple way to implement tabs on your page using CSS, a little JS, and semantic markup which degrades gracefully on browsers with CSS unavailable or disabled..." http://phrogz.net/JS/Tabtastic/index.html CSS tips and tricks, Part 1 By Roger Johansson "As I stated in my recent article on CSS shorthand properties, I get a lot of questions about CSS from people who haven't spent quite as much time working with CSS as I have. Their CSS is often not as efficient as it could be, and I come across some mistakes that are easy to make when you're starting out with CSS." http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200503/css_tips_and_tricks_part_1/ CSS tips and tricks, Part 2 By Roger Johansson "This is the follow up to last weekÕs post, CSS tips and tricks, Part 1, where you can find tips on shorthand, default values, colours, inheritance, cascading, and more." http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200503/css_tips_and_tricks_part_2/ Spruced-Up Site Maps By Kim Siever "The clean-n-simple site map gets a nice haircut and a shoe-shine as Kim Siever shows us how to hook custom bullet styles to troublesome nested lists." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/sprucemaps/ +03: DREAMWEAVER. Design and Deploy Websites with Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 and Contribute 3 By Joseph Lowery "The book excerpt linked to below is from Lesson Seven of Design and Deploy Websites with Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 and Contribute 3: Training from the Source by Joseph Lowery, published by Macromedia Press." http://tinyurl.com/5jstm +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Task-Free Usability Testing: Summary of UPA Seminar By Dan Brown "On Monday night, I attended a the local UPA chapter seminar called Task-Free Usability Testing. During the session, three panelists described their experiences with a ÒnewÓ approach to conducting usability tests. All the panelists admitted to having employed these techniques to a lesser extent previously Ð which is why I qualified 'new' Ð but for each this was the first time they had built a structured test around it." http://www.greenonions.com/index.php?p=154 +05: EVENTS. Presenting Data and Information, Edward Tufte April 25-26, 2005 Minneapolis, Minnesota U.S.A. http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/courses +06: FLASH. WCAG 1.0 Techniques for Flash By Bob Regan "I get asked a lot about Flash techniques for WCAG. I have pieces of content but finally wrote down everything I could against the guidelines (p1 and p2) one by one. These are still in draft, but thought I would post it." http://www.markme.com/accessibility/archives/007344.cfm Samples of Accessible Flash By Bob Regan "Here are some publicly available examples of accessible Flash. I posted a similar list a while back. I thought it would be wise to update the list." http://www.markme.com/accessibility/archives/007350.cfm +07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Seb's Open Research on the IA Summit 2005 By Sebastien Paquet "I am at the Information Architecture Summit, blogging the sessions I'm attending." http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/2005/03/06.html +08: JAVASCRIPT. Avoiding Leaks in Mozilla JavaScript Code By David Baron "I've written a document on Using XPCOM in JavaScript without leaking. This is for people writing JavaScript code in Mozilla applications or Mozilla extensions, which is how much of the user interface is written. One might think that JavaScript simply shouldn't leak, but that's not the case. It's possible to cause leaks in all garbage-collected languages. But there are also a few extra things to beware of when dealing with XPCOM through JavaScript, mainly due to the underlying reference counting model. I've tried to give a general summary of some of the basics of memory management before delving in to the Mozilla specifics. I hope this is accurate (and that the terminology I used is correct), since I'm not an expert on that." http://dbaron.org/log/2005-03#e20050315a +09: MISCELLANEOUS. Interview with Hakon Wium Lie By Molly E. Holzschlag "Hakon Wium Lie is the CTO of Opera Software and in 1994 proposed the idea of CSS. Hakon is as deeply involved with the Web and with CSS as anyone can possibly be. Recently, he contacted WaSP to ask whether we could host the Acid2 test, which we agreed to do. Our role is to help build, publish, and promote the test for all browsers for CSS 2.1 compliance. Acid2 will be a free and public resource for any browser or user agent developer and any web developer as we all move toward improving CSS support and fixing existing bugs in our work." http://www.molly.com/2005/03/31/interview-with-hkon-wium-lie/ Aaron M. Leventhal Interview By Marco Trevisan "Marco Trevisan interviews Aaron Leventhal, who is working to help make the Firefox browser more accessible to more audiences. Many of the examples focus on screenreaders, although there's also discussion about keyboard input." http://www.bazzmann.com/en/aaron-leventhal-interview.html +10: PHP. Being a PHP Lumberjack By Daryl L. L. Houston "There are better ways to hunt down logical errors in your code. Tools (like Zend's debugger and profiler) aren't an option for everybody, so I'd like to focus on a more generalized practice that can help you watch your code's execution. Get out your double-bladed axe we're going logging." http://digital-web.com/articles/php_lumberjack/ +11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Scripting away Validation Concerns By Gez Lemon "Scripting techniques are becoming more and more popular in an attempt to work around validation errors. Scripting is incredibly useful for improving the usability of a document. Validation is relatively useful for ensuring there are no obvious errors in the document, but cannot ensure that a document is structurally correct. Does scripting around validation issues bring any real benefit?" http://juicystudio.com/scripting-away-validation.asp MSN's Standards Compliant Layout Revisited By James Jackson "I only touched briefly on the Web Standards compliant MSN page before, so I'd like to touch a bit more on it." http://css.weblogsinc.com/entry/1234000287036598/ That Acid Buzz By Eric A. Meyer "The creation of a tough CSS test suite is a fantastic undertaking, something that is to be applauded and is probably long overdue. But to cast it as an effort being undertaken as a challenge to Microsoft not only starts it off on the wrong foot, it has the potential to taint not just the Acid2 effort, but the entire organization." http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2005/03/23/that-acid-buzz/ +12: TOOLS. Like Your Colors By Owen Winkler "Use this tool to extract the colors from the HTML and CSS of any web site. Compare the colors easily using hue groups." http://www.redalt.com/Tools/ilyc.php + 13: TYPOGRAPHY. The Non-Typographer's Guide to practical Typeface Selection By Cameron Moll "Warning: This article contains nothing nearly as meaty and complex as my dissertation about chiasmi from a few weeks back. But I promised I?d follow up with a more detailed report of my five minutes of fame at SXSW 2005, so here she goes." http://www.cameronmoll.com/archives/000240.html Debunking myths about ClearType fonts By Joe Clark "Would everyone please stop linking to that Poynter article by Anne Van Wagener about the upcoming Microsoft ClearType fonts? First of all, while I cannot claim to have broken the story, I was there weeks in advance, as dedicated readers will be aware. Van WagenerÕs article is so full of mistakes that even her correction has a mistake. http://blog.fawny.org/2005/03/27/poynter/ +14: USABILITY. Evangelizing Usability: Change Your Strategy at the Halfway Point By Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox "The evangelism strategies that help a usability group get established in a company are different from the ones needed to create a full-fledged usability culture." http://useit.com/alertbox/20050328.html Designing Embraceable Change By Jared M. Spool "It's not that people resist change whole-scale. They just hate losing control and feeling stupid. When we make critical changes, we risk putting our users in that position. We must take care to ensure that we've considered the process of change as much as we've considered the technology changes themselves. Only then will we end up with changes that our users embrace." http://www.uie.com/articles/embraceable_change/ Is 'User Experience', for all intents and purposes, dead? By Peter Merholz "Reading the notes from a recent panel on UX disciplines, and remembering the notes from an earlier, similar, panel, I am left with the thought that the phrase 'user experience,' as a meaningful term describing practice and concern, is dead. Dead dead dead." http://www.peterme.com/archives/000467.html +15: XML. XForms By Elliotte Rusty Harold Eliotte Rusty Harold's XForms slides from SDWest http://www.cafeconleche.org/slides/sd2005west/xforms/XForms.html [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). 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.]