+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 4, Issue 05, July 28, 2005. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 05 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: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE 06: JAVASCRIPT. 07: MISCELLANEOUS. 08: NAVIGATION. 09: PHP. 10: TOOLS. 11: USABILITY. 12: XML. SECTION TWO: 13: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Screen Readers and CSS Layout By Bob Easton. "Current versions of the three leading screen readers speak page contents in the exact order the content is coded in the HTML source. CSS positioning is irrelevant. Yes, other products and older versions of these same products might perform differently. If anyone has different results, add them to the comments for this article..." http://www.access-matters.com/2005/07/04/screen-readers-and-css-layout/ Doing Web Accessibility for Screen Magnifier Users By Trenton Moss. "All-in-all, there are quite a few things that can be done to improve usability and accessibility for screen magnifier users. The good news though is that all of them improve usability for absolutely everyone." http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article2420.asp Accessible Design Guidelines Can Be Simple By Ben Bywater. "Kevin Carey of HumanITy has boiled down five different sets of guidelines (Nielsen, WAI, etc) into what he considers are the three most basic accessibility guidelines for use by designers in making interactive digital products." http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article2485.asp Made for All of Us By Dave Shea. "Accessible design, unobtrusive scripting, and terrible cell phone browsers." http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2005/07/05/made_for_all/index.php Is Google Shutting Out The Blind? By Susan Kuchinskas. "Accessibility activists charge that search Goliath Google shuts blind people out of many of its services...The problem is the 'captcha,' the distorted letters that users must decipher and type into a box before they register for a service." http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3518741 +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Learn CSS, Selectors, Part 3 By Michael Youssef. "This will be the last discussion about CSS selectors in this series. In this article we will discuss the descendant, child and sibling selectors, with numerous code examples." http://tinyurl.com/9faa8 Selector Specificity By Gez Lemon. "Selector specificity is a process used to determine which rules take precedence in CSS when several rules could be applied to the same element in markup. It's a simple enough process, but has caught out a lot of developers at some point in their career." http://juicystudio.com/article/selector-specificity.php Learn CSS: Pseudo Classes By Michael Youssef. "We met pseudo elements in the last article. In this article we will discuss pseudo classes, which give you the ability to apply certain styling rules on specific states of an element. In this part we discuss the following pseudo classes: :link, :visited, :hover, :active and :focus, :root, :first-child, and :last-child. Note that with CSS 3 there are many new pseudo classes. Not all of them are implemented, however, so I will discuss only the pseudo classes that have been implemented by the major browsers..." http://tinyurl.com/cgdv4 Is Image Replacement Really Worth It? By Robert Nyman. "I've been wondering if image replacement and the promotion of it is really a good idea. But letÕs start from the beginning: what is image replacement? Image replacement is a common name for a technique to use images for headings and their likes from an external CSS file, as opposed to in the XHTML/HTML. The general approach is to hide the text content (one way or the other) of the element and instead show an image through CSS" http://tinyurl.com/9ta3p Borders With Curves By Trenton Moss. "In a previous CSS article, CSS and round corners: Boxes with curves, we outlined a method for creating boxes with rounded corners through the power of CSS. A similar technique can be applied to making borders with round corners..." http://www.webdevtips.com/webdevtips/style/border.shtml How to Style an Unordered List with CSS By Stu Nicholls. "In this article you will learn how to style an unordered navigation list using CSS, then take it a step further and add a pop-up information box for each link item so that your visitors will get an indication of the content for the page link." http://www.webreference.com/programming/css_style2/ +03: EVALUATION & TESTING. Common Industry Format for Usability Reports By Alan James Salmoni. "The Common Industry Format is an open standard for how usability reports should be structured. Similar to the academic style of reporting, there are nonetheless important differences. For academics wanting to get up to speed with how the industry would like their information, this article should help." http://articles.milui.com/index.php?p=70 What is the Common Industry Format? By usabilitynet.org. "The Common Industry Format (CIF) for usability test reports specifies the format for reporting the results of a summative usability evaluation." http://www.usabilitynet.org/prue/cif.htm What is the Common Industry Format? By Avi Parush and Emile Morse. The Common Industry Format (CIF) is a standard method for reporting usability test findings. The format is primarily for reporting results of formal usability tests in which quantitative measurements were collected and is particularly appropriate for summative/comparative testing. http://tinyurl.com/c9xxv +04: EVENTS. WWW/Internet 2005. Association for Development of the Information Society (ADIS) International Conference October 19-22, 2005 Lisbon, Portugal http://www.iadis.org/icwi2005/ Eight Annual Accessing Higher Ground Conference: Accessible Media, Web and Technology Conference November 8-11, 2005. Boulder, Colorado U.S.A. http://www.colorado.edu/ATconference +05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. High Fidelity or Low Fidelity, Paper or Computer? Choosing Attributes When Testing Web Prototypes. By Miriam Walker, Leila Takayama, and James A. Landay. "Interface designs are currently tested in a mixture of fidelities and media. So far, there is insufficient research to indicate what level of fidelity and media will produce the best feedback from users. This experiment compared user testing with low- and high-fidelity prototypes in both computer and paper media. Task-based user tests of sketched (low-fidelity) and HTML (high-fidelity) website prototypes were conducted in each medium, separating the testing medium from other factors of prototype fidelity. We found that low- and high-fidelity prototypes are equally good at uncovering usability issues. Usability testing results were also found to be independent of medium, despite differences in interaction style. Designers should choose whichever medium and level of fidelity suit their practical needs and design goals, as discussed in this paper." http://guir.cs.berkeley.edu/projects/fidelity/pubs/Walker_HFES_2002.htm +06: JAVASCRIPT. The Power of Javascript: Basic Concepts By Michael Youssef. "The best way to learn any programming language is by practice. Javascript is not an exception to this rule, so we will introduce a lot of code in the articles of this series. In this article, you will be introduced to the very basic concepts of the Javascript language. We discuss comments, keywords, identifiers, statements and the semicolon, case sensitivity and white spaces. Note that our examples at this time are limited and we will focus more on the concepts, but after a few articles we are going to discuss many examples on each concept. To make the concepts easier for you to grasp we will have only one example for this article to explain the concepts we need to discuss. So let's take a look at our simple example." http://tinyurl.com/ayz4b Core JavaScript Reference By the developers at Netscape Communications. "Since the beginning, this book (in HTML format) explains everything you need to know about using core JavaScript 1.5." http://www.webreference.com/javascript/reference/core_ref/ No noscript, mÕkay? By Robert Nyman. "To generalize, there are three different standpoints web developers usually take when it comes to implementing JavaScript in a web page..." http://www.robertnyman.com/2005/07/01/no-noscript-mkay/ +07: MISCELLANEOUS. Ethan Marcotte Interview By Carolyn Wood. "I do think we're still mining the potential of Web standards, if only because our own knowledge is still maturing. With all of the clamor surrounding DOM scripting and AJAX (my Telamonian peoples, holla back), we've old technologiesÑnamely, JavaScriptÑmade new again by intelligent and innovative application." http://www.digital-web.com/articles/ethan_marcotte/ Collaboration Sessions: How to Lead Multidisciplinary Teams, Generate Buy-In, and Create Unified Design Views in Compressed Timeframes By Sasha Verhage. "Over the years, I have developed a framework that I call 'Collaboration Sessions.' Collaboration Sessions encourage multidisciplinary collaboration while creating a unified design visionÑall within a compressed time frame. The benefits of this tool include increased participation, increased understanding of the value of each discipline, and consequently increased buy-in from the team..." http://tinyurl.com/8mdmb +08: NAVIGATION. Less Is More in Web Search Interfaces For Older Adults By Anne Aula and Mika Kaki. "We have previously found the elderly users to face several usability problems with the current search engines. Thus, we designed an elderlyÐfriendly search interface, Etsin. To evaluate the success of the design, a usability study was conducted for comparing the usability of Etsin and Google. The participants faced fewer usability problems when using Etsin than Google and they valued the clarity of the Etsin interface. In conclusion, elderly users benefit from a simplified search engine interface that is easy to understand and that takes into account ageÐrelated issues." http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_7/aula/index.html +09: PHP. Five Habits for Successful Regular Expressions By Tony Stubblebine. "Regular expressions are hard to write, hard to read, and hard to maintain. Plus, they are often wrong, matching unexpected text and missing valid text. The problem stems from the power and expressiveness of regular expressions. Each metacharacter packs power and nuance, making code impossible to decipher without resorting to mental gymnastics. Most implementations include features that make reading and writing regular expressions easier. Unfortunately, they are hardly ever used. For many programmers, writing regular expressions is a black art. They stick to the features they know and hope for the best. If you adopt the five habits discussed in this article, you will take most of the trial and error out of your regular expression development. This article uses Perl, PHP, and Python in the code examples, but the advice here is applicable to nearly any regex implementation." http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2003/08/21/regexp.html Regular Expressions Tutorial By Mark. "I have searched the web far and near for a good tutorial on PHP Regular Expressions and I have come up with a multitude of sites. However, I needed just a little bit of information from each of the sites and I ended up trying to move between 10 different webpages to get the information I needed at a particular time. This tutorial is a collation of all those bits of information. Some of this is my work, but it is mostly good collection of other tutorials available out there. In order to give authors credit for their work, I have included ALL the links of those pages and if anyone feels like this is an outrage, let me know and I will take down the relevant information. So here goes..." http://weblogtoolscollection.com/regex/regex.php +10: TOOLS. ATRC Accessibility Checker By the Adaptive Technology Resource Center "This is an experimental service that is provided by the Adaptive Technology Resource Center (ATRC) at the University Of Toronto. It is a model system that demonstrates how web pages may be checked for accessibility problems. The accessibility checks in this system are based upon the proposed Open Accessibility Checks which are under development. Evaluations produced by this software program are not yet valid - this is still an experimental service." http://checker.atrc.utoronto.ca/index.html Speakwire - Online RSS Reader "Speakwire news on demand from the latest newsfeeds around the world using PanaVox Speak Perfect Speech Technology." http://www.speakwire.com/ +11: USABILITY. Multi-Select Lists vs. Checkboxes By Garrett Dimon. "Similar to the previous discussion of Checkboxes, Radio Buttons, and Drop Downs the usage of multi-select lists instead of checkboxes makes for a good topic as well. Every type of input has its own unique advantages and disadvantages, but multi-select lists take disadvantages to the next level. Don't get me wrong, they have their place, it's just a very small limited place where real estate is more important than usability." http://tinyurl.com/8nbfj Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful By Don Norman. "Column written for Interactions...This is the authorÕs version of the work, the same as the published version except that I have corrected several typographical errors. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. It may be redistributed for non-commercial use only, provided this paragraph is included. The definitive version was published in Interactions, 12. 4, (July + August, 2005). Pp. 14-19." http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/human-centered_desig.html Amazon No Longer the Role Model for E-Commerce Design By Jakob Nielsen. "Many design elements work for Amazon.com mainly because of its status as the world's largest and most established e-commerce site. Normal sites should not copy Amazon's design." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20050725.html +12: XML. Content-Negotiation Techniques to serve XHTML 1.0 as text/html and application/xhtml+xml By Dominique Hazael-Massieux. "This document is an attempt to gather the known techniques to serve XHTML 1.0 documents following the backwards compatibility guidelines as both text/html and application/xhtml+xml with content-negotiation, thus allowing browsers that do not understand the newest MIME-type to get a version with a MIME-type they understand." http://www.w3.org/2003/01/xhtml-mimetype/content-negotiation .htaccess, MIME Types and Handlers By wats.ca. "An .htaccess file is a special file that can be used to tweak the web server configuration, so that the server behaves differently for the directory it is in (i.e your web site) and all directories below it. Mime Types (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) represent file types as presented to your web browser. If you are using a file format, encoding type, or language that is not already included in your server's configuration, you can use directives in your .htaccess file to enable them for your files. Finally, Handlers perform preprocessing on requested files and may also be modified in your .htaccess file." http://www.wats.ca/resources/.htaccessandmimetypes/32 [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +12: 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.]