+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 3, Issue 49, May 11, 2005. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 49 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: 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. Leave No Man Behind By Cameron Adams "Seems like some people don't mind seeing JavaScript only applications, some do. But irrespective of which technology we argue about (CSS, JavaScript, Flash), the inherent question is: when is it worthwhile to cater to a minority?" http://www.themaninblue.com/writing/perspective/2005/04/25/ Giving OS X a Voice Tiger boosts OS XÕs accessibility features By Christopher Breen "Apple has long offered help to those Mac users with vision, hearing, and motor skills disabilities via Universal Access. These capabilities, built into the Mac OS, make it easier to manipulate the keyboard and mouse and see whatÕs displayed on the MacÕs monitor. With Tiger, Apple seriously steps up the scope of Universal AccessÕ powers." http://www.macworld.com/2005/04/features/tigervoiceover/index.php Categories of Semantics By Joe Clark "Whenever you choose an HTML element to mark up your content, your choice will fall into one of these categories..." http://blog.fawny.org/2005/05/01/categories/ PDFs Don't Have to Be an Internet Blight By Don Fluckinger "The free Adobe Reader is everywhere! PDFs are easy to make! Everyone's doing it! Because of that, PDFs are getting a bad rep in certain tech circles. The argument goes something like this: Writing in to a Ziff Davis Media sister site, Microsoft Watch, a reader proclaimed PDFs a 'plague on the Internet.' His main beef? Documents in which there's no structure or links, so when a PDF represents one part of a set of documentsÑit's a chapter in a book, a part of a technical manual, one of 10 brochuresÑit often has no context or trail of breadcrumbs for the reader to follow. People who find the document via Google and download it get only a slice when they need the whole pie..." http://www.pdfzone.com/article2/0,1759,1784569,00.asp Easy Read and Other Advice About Writing for People with Learning Disabilities By Caroline Jarrett "For a long while now, I've been worrying about how to design forms for people with learning disabilities. It's not been a pressing problem because frankly, a lot of the forms that I work with don't even work for people with post-graduate degrees and specific training in the subject area of the form. But recently I've noticed a trend: sometimes I come across a form that's really not too bad. So I'm increasingly thinking about how to make forms more accessible Ð and that's restarted an interest in learning disabilities." http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article2409.asp +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. The CSS Anthology: Chapter 3, CSS and Images By Rachel Andrew "Working with images in CSS requires a few simple skills, which can then be combined to create interesting effects. The solutions in this chapter demonstrate the basic concepts of working with images while answering some common questions. However, as with most of the solutions in this book, don't be afraid to experiment and see what unique effects you can create." http://www.sitepoint.com/article/css-anthology-tips-tricks-3 A Floated Page Layout By Maxine Sherrin "A question which was a great opportunity to create a simple little tutorial about using float and clear in a CSS based page layout was recently posted to our forum. As a bonus, I've also thrown in some information about how to work out the width of elements in a fixed width layout. This tutorial shows you how to create a page layout like this, using web standards and CSS..." http://tinyurl.com/7842b The Art of Reading a DTD By Tommy Olsson "We who hand-code our web pages sometimes need to quickly find out which rules apply for a certain element or attribute in HTML or XHTML. Even those who draw their pages in a WYSIWYG tools may need to do this, when the validator is giving them grief. Sure, we can go to a site that offers web development tutorials, or fetch a reference book from the shelf, but there is a quicker and more accurate way: look in the Document Type Definition (DTD) that defines the markup language. A DTD isn't as difficult to understand as you may think at the first glance." http://tinyurl.com/e25sv Learning CSS By Paul Scrivens "When you have been working with CSS for so long it becomes difficult to tell people the best methods for learning it because your methods aren't always what works best for everyone. I definitely encountered my bumps and bruises and still seem to be going through some growing pains in my learning process...The thing with me and CSS is that no matter how much I seem to know, I always feel like there is a better way to code it, which is probably true..." http://9rules.com/whitespace/learning_css.php CSS 102: Borders and Backgrounds By Mark Newhouse "Last time, we looked at using CSS to control typography and white space. This time we'll look at borders and backgrounds." http://digital-web.com/articles/css_102/ +03: DREAMWEAVER. Dreamweaver Compatibility with Macintosh OS X v10.4 (Tiger) By Macromedia "Macromedia and Apple are working together to ensure compatibility between Macromedia products and Mac OS X v10.4 'Tiger'. Before choosing to install Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger", users should review the following known issues to determine if they are relevant to their workflow. Macromedia and Apple are working together on these issues..." http://tinyurl.com/dkoxn Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 Accessibility Overview By Macromedia http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/accessibility/mx/dw/overview.html Adobe Aims at Microsoft By Stacy Cowley, Martyn Williams and Laura Rohde "Adobe Systems Inc.'s agreement this week to acquire Macromedia for approximately US $3.4 billion will give the company a formidable collection of Web publishing and document management software ? and will place it squarely in the path of tools rival Microsoft..." http://tinyurl.com/ajtmw Troubleshooting FTP Problems in Dreamweaver By David Alcala "In this recorded Macrochat, Macromedia Product Support Engineer David Alcala covers a wide range of troubleshooting tips and techniques for Dreamweaver users encountering FTP problems. Learn the troubleshooting techniques most commonly recommended by Macromedia for users that can't connect to their FTP server, can't modify files on their server, as well as other problems." http://tinyurl.com/dw3t3 +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Fast-tracking Research with Paired Interviews By Iain Barker "A paired interview is a method of collecting information from several people at the same time who represent the target audience. The paired interview is not two interviews being conducted simultaneously. The emphasis of the paired interview is to create a dynamic in which the participants interact with each other. In so doing, they validate or clearly identify differences in working practices and terminology." http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/cmb_pairedinterviews/ Writing Memorable Scenarios For Usability Testing By Donna Maurer "One of the most important aspects of running a successful usability test is getting the scenarios right. Making a mess of scenarios will, more than anything else, result in a usability test that is worthless or highly biased." http://www.maadmob.net/donna/blog/archives/000623.html Number One Skill for Managing a Website By Gerry McGovern "People read on the Web but they read like they're driving down a motorway. They are reading at high speed; they are reading by gut instinct. If you want to understand their behaviourÑif you want to understand what makes them clickÑyou need to observe. That's because when people tell you what they want to do, or what they did do on a website, they are probably not being accurate. It's not that they are deliberately lying. It's more that what they think they did is usually not what they actually did. That's why usability is such a powerful concept. It's about observation. It's about learning to design based upon what people actually do on your website, not what they say they do. " http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2005/nt_2005_04_25-gut-instinct.htm +05: EVENTS. Web Essentials 05 September 29-30, 2005 Sydney, Australia http://we05.com/program.cfm User Interface 10 Conference October 10-13, 2005 Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A. http://www.uie.com/events/uiconf/ +06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Card Sorting - Part 1 By Mark Boulton Card sorting basics. http://www.markboulton.co.uk/articles/detail/card_sorting_part_1/ Card sorting - Part 2 - Facilitation By Mark Boulton This article discusses closed and open card sort procedures. http://www.markboulton.co.uk/articles/detail/card_sorting_part_2/ Card sorting - Part 3 - Analysis and Reporting By Mark Boulton "Card sorting won't always give you the answer - it may just give you more questions. This is where the analysis comes in." http://www.markboulton.co.uk/articles/detail/card_sorting_part_3/ +07: JAVASCRIPT. More Usability Frosting for Your Accessibility Cake By Aaron Gustafson "Windows users can feel like second-class citizens when Mac users rave about the elegance of Apple's operating system and applications. Aaron Gustafson demonstrates how, with a little JavaScript in the behavior layer of our Web cake, we can transform half-baked