+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 4, Issue 06, August 4, 2005. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 06 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: ASSOCIATIONS. 03: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. 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. Screen-Reader Usability Study By Joe Clark. "In early 2005, an E-commerce site selling hardware and software was evaluated for usability in screen readers." http://joeclark.org/access/webaccess/survey/ The Accessibility Chronicles By Mike Davidson. "So everyoneŐs all of a sudden talking about accessibility again. Just as you thought 2005 was going to be the year of folksonomies, APIs, and Ajax, the discussion over the last two weeks seems to have centered on a 'new' aspect of accessibility." http://tinyurl.com/9uqf4 Default Place-Holding Characters By Gez Lemon. "Why does WCAG 1.0 checkpoint 10.4 require that authors include default place-holding characters in edit boxes and text areas? Is this checkpoint still relevant today?" http://juicystudio.com/article/default-place-holding-characters.php HTML Tables Best Practice By Chris Heilmann. "I gave a presentation in a workshop this morning on the topic of 'HTML tables best practices'." http://icant.co.uk/sandbox/besttables/ +02: ASSOCIATIONS. Higher Education Web Professionals Association "HighEdWeb is an organization of Web professionals working at institutions of higher education. We design, develop, manage and map the futures of higher education Web sites. Established in November of 1999 among scores of colleges and universities in New York State, we have expanded our vision and welcome similar professionals from across the nation and across the globe." http://www.highedweb.org +03: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. How To Style a Restaurant Menu With CSS Alessandro Fulciniti. "As every Italian, I love cooking and most of all eating... so the example I'm going to present here is a restaurant menu with CSS..." http://web-graphics.com/mtarchive/001622.php Learn CSS: Pseudo Elements By Michael Youssef. "We have discussed CSS selectors in the last three articles in this series. We have said that a selector can be a markup element, an attribute selector based on the class and ID attributes, or a structured selector based on the document structure. CSS introduces pseudo elements, which we will be discussing in this article. This is one area of functionality that you can't achieve using HTML, and you will be amazed how easily you can achieve it in CSS..." http://tinyurl.com/e2k2e table-layout By Lachlan Hunt. "Not to be confused with layout tables, this little used, yet wonderful CSS property Ôtable-layoutŐ could have saved me a lot of time recently, had I thought of it. You see, the challenge I had was that I needed all columns of a table (containing tabular data) to be presented with equal width columns..." http://lachy.id.au/log/2005/07/table-layout footerStick By Kay Smoljak. "I'm going to show you all how to force the footer of a webpage to stick to the bottom of the viewport. This is a pretty advanced CSS method and requires that you know a bit about how CSS works. (This technique does not work in Safari or IE for the Mac)." http://solardreamstudios.com/learn/css/footerstick/ Remote Rollover Demo By Andy Budd. "I'm just preparing my slides for Tuesdays training course and thought I'd post up a couple of my remote rollover demos. The basic set-up is very simple. You take a regular unordered list and wrap an extra, non-semantic span around the link text..." http://tinyurl.com/dkcd2 Getting Rid of the Page Shift By Zoe Gillenwater. "If you've built a centered, fixed-width site, or just browsed through any sites with such layouts, you may have noticed a strange left to right shift in the content between pages that doesn't occur in Internet Explorer, but does in other browsers, such as Firefox, Opera, and Safari. Find out why it happens and what to include in your style sheet to prevent it on your own site, as well as how to customize your browser so that you never see the shift again on any site across the web!" http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=528A0 Learn CSS: Introduction to Inheritance, Specificity, and Cascade By Michael Youssef. "In this article (and the next part) we will talk about how the structure of the CSS document can affect Web page design. Actually, there's something that I haven't discussed until now, which is what are the places that we can use to write styles and how it can affect the Web page. This is also related to the cascade, inheritance and specificity concepts which help you to understand how to structure your CSS document. This article is the ninth in a series covering CSS." http://tinyurl.com/92449 +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Usability at 90 Miles Per Hour By Paul F. Marty and Michael B. Twidale. "This article documents the authors' attempt to develop a quick, inexpensive, and reliable method for demonstrating user testing to an audience. The resulting method, Usability at 90 Miles Per Hour, is simple enough to be conducted at minimal expense, fast enough to be completed in only thirty minutes, comprehensible enough to be presented to audiences numbering in the hundreds, and yet sophisticated enough to produce relevant design recommendations, thereby illustrating for the audience the potential value of user testing in general. In this article, the authors present their user testing demonstration method in detail, analyze results from 44 trials of the method in practice, and discuss lessons learned for demonstrating user testing in front of an audience." http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_7/marty/index.html BeginnerŐs Guide to Moderating a Usability Study By Kevin Cheng. "Here are some considerations and steps I usually take when I'm moderating a usability test. For those who are experienced, I encourage you to add your thoughts. For those of you who are learning, I encourage you to ask questions of the other readers here. This article does not discuss the screening for candidates, setting up the test scenarios, nor the reporting of the data. If this type of article is helpful to you, do let us know and we'll do more of them." http://tinyurl.com/cgcws Focus Group Conversations - Are They Dead? By Dina Mehta. Dina Mehta discusses some disillusions in using focus groups and other qualitative methods. http://radio.weblogs.com/0121664/2005/07/12.html#a653 Customer Storytelling at the Heart of Business Success By Experience Planning Group, edited by Parrish Hanna. "As most of us know by now, customer personas and scenarios are vehicles for helping an organization continuously keep their customers in their line of sight. Traditional segmentation identifies and categorizes a current or potential audience based upon common characteristics, including demographics, attitudes, behavior, transactions, frequency of interaction, spend, and more. They are discovered by 'doing the math,' which may include data aggregation, cluster analysis, factor analysis, and other statistical methods applied to large sample sets. And then segments are given catchy names like Savvy Skeptics, Active Balancers, Indulgent Nutritionist, or Trade-Uppers. When done right, segments are statistically derived from the analysis and synthesis of quantitative data and are a solid foundation for customer understanding." http://tinyurl.com/9rf27 +05: EVENTS. HighEdWebDev05 (Higher Education Web Professionals Conference) November 6-9, 2005. Rochester, New York This year's keynote speaker is author and usability expert Steve Krug. http://www.highedweb.org/2005/ PHP Conference 2005 November 6-9, 2005. Frankfurt/Main, Germany http://www.phpconference.com/ +06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Paper Prototyping: First Experiences and Lessons Learned By Guy Sangwine. "Paper prototyping is a method for the design, evaluation and improvement of user interfaces. This paper describes my first experiences of using paper prototyping in order to test elements of an user interface for an Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC). A number of lessons that I learned during this process are recounted, focusing on my experiences and my use of the Microsoft Visio application to create medium fidelity interface prototypes." http://ausweb.scu.edu.au/aw05/papers/edited/sangwine/index.html +07: JAVASCRIPT. AJAX: Usable Interactivity with Remote Scripting By Cameron Adams. "If your bookmarks contain even one Web development blog, you'll undoubtedly know that remote scripting is being touted as the new 'future of the Web'..." http://www.sitepoint.com/article/remote-scripting-ajax Using Ajax for Creating Web Applications By Joshua Porter. "In the past few years, developers could choose between two approaches when building a web application. The first approach was to create a screen-based system with very rich interactions using a sophisticated, powerful technology such as Java or Flash. The alternative approach was to create a page-based system using easier-to-learn core web standards like XHTML and CSS whose more basic capabilities force less-rich interactions. A new technological approach, dubbed Ajax, might just be the right mix between the two." http://www.uie.com/events/uiconf/articles/ajax/ The JavaScript Diaries: Part 6 By Lee Underwood. "This week we go a little deeper into our study, a process that will last for several weeks. Some of the topics covered are JavaScript objects, object properties and methods, the constructor function, and more." http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/diaries/6/ The Power of Javascript: Basic Types of Data By Michael Youssef. "Javascript interpreters understand two different, basic types of data: numbers and character strings. But interpreters only understand these data types when they are presented in certain ways. This article, the third in a series, will explain what these types of data are, and how to handle them..." http://tinyurl.com/a5vpl +08: MISCELLANEOUS. WaSP Interviews Dr. Vito Evola By Chris Kaminski. "The web has long since moved out of the IT and design departments and become a pervasive communication medium. As a result, top-notch minds in other disciplines have begun to add their input, making it more robust, vibrant and just plain useful than before. Dr. Evola has one of these minds and is applying it to the web in part by teaching a course on web standards at the College of Letters and Philosophy at the University of Palermo, Italy. Dr. Evola's linguistics background gives him a fresh perspective on web standards: The first lessons deal with the "need" for XHTML and CSS, moving towards a more advanced knowledge of CSS1 and CSS2, keeping in mind that standards means nothing less than "speaking correctly" with our target. Read the rest of the WaSP Education Task Force's excellent interview for more from a linguist turned standardista..." http://www.webstandards.org/act/campaign/edutf/interviews/evola.html Don Norman Interview: When Norman Meets Chinese... By Christina Li. "Dr Norman has changed the way a generation of designers in understanding people and technologies. His philosophy of usability and emotion has been widely used in designing products for people's everyday life in the west and is now also starting to have an impact upon Chinese design practices. What is Dr Norman?s view on Chinese design and usability industry then? Christina Li, on behalf of the uiGarden editorial team, brings us the experience of questioning Don Norman." http://tinyurl.com/c4ot7 +09: NAVIGATION. Navigation and Content on University Home Pages By Margaret L Ruwoldt and Claire Spencer. "The home page is the most visible online representation of a university's style, activities and reputation. We studied the home pages of 68 universities in Australia, Canada, the United States of America, south-east Asia and Europe, looking for emerging industry standards and opportunities for improving our home page's quality and usability. We identified key audience groups, an emerging standard for the content and information architecture of a university's home page, and some additional features that could distinguish an institution from its competitors." http://ausweb.scu.edu.au/aw05/papers/edited/ruwoldt2/index.html +10: PHP. Secure Programming With PHP By Ian Gilfillan. "While working on this article, I received a Security bulletin highlighting a critical flaw in phpBB. This is a fairly mature open source forum written in PHP, and one that's had its fair share of critical flaws. The fact that there are still more being found, and more likely to be found, shows you how difficult it is to write completely secure software, even for an experienced team of developers." http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/ian_gilfillan20050707.php3 Ask Tim: Is Perl Still Relevant? Tim O'Reilly comments. "With the emergence of .NET, J2EE, Python, PHP, et. al, has Perl lost its niche as a scripting glue language? The buzz is all around PHP these days and also around Python. The complaints about Perl 6's complexity are only getting louder. Besides, Perl does not occupy the central position in O'Reilly's offerings that it once did. Is Perl on its way out?". http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/ask_tim/2004/perl_0707.html +11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Web Standards, Microsoft and You By Dean Edwards. "A few months ago I was invited to join the Web Standards Project (WaSP). The WaSP and Microsoft were to cozy up and talk about web standards and I was invited to the party. Some high level politicking by Robert Scoble and Molly had opened a channel. Microsoft wanted to talk about standards and the WaSP wanted to talk to Microsoft. And now itŐs official...The purpose of this post is to open the dialogue further to include all web developers. Post your questions and suggestions here and I'll do my best to filter and pass them on. I want this to be a continuous process. That means for as long as I represent the WaSP on this task force I am open to your input. The channel is open." http://dean.edwards.name/weblog/2005/07/mstf/#comments Agenda Microsoft: Is it a Sellout when the ProstituteŐs Paying? By Molly E. Holzschlag. "If anyone expects any Microsoft version of IE7 to solve the worldŐs problems, much less those of us working the web, get over it. Any changes to browsers will be incremental and WaSP can't fix that for now. For now. For now. Think long term my friends. My agenda is simple. Work with, not against." http://tinyurl.com/79le9 +12: TOOLS. Show Headers of a Web Page By Brian D. Davison. "To see exactly what headers are included with your page, use our Show Headers Tool." http://www.web-caching.com/showheaders.html Tidybot By Leo Breebaart. Tidybot is a cross-platform batch XHTML syntax-checker and report-generator. It traverses a directory tree of XHTML files on your hard disk, and generates a web page listing all the errors and warnings it encounters. Tidybot can be used in two ways: from the command-line, or through a user-friendly GUI application. The output will be identical in either case. http://www.kronto.org/tidybot/ +13: TYPOGRAPHY. Is Multiple-Column Online Text Better? It Depends! By J.R. Baker. "This study investigated the effects of multi-column displays and justification on reading performance and satisfaction of an online narrative passage. Participants read a short story displayed in one of six formats (one, two, or three columns, in either a full or left-justified format). Results showed a significant column x justification interaction with reading speed significantly faster for the two-column full-justified text than for one-column full-justified, and significantly faster for one-column left-justified than for one-column full-justified or three-column full-justified text. Post-hoc analyses indicate that the faster readers may have benefited most from the two-column justified format." http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/72/columns.htm Perceived Personality and Uses of Fonts: We Need Your Input! By A.D. Shaikh, J. Slocum, and Z. Zaccagni. Usability News online survey. http://tinyurl.com/b3geg +14: USABILITY. How Usable Are University Websites? A report on a study of the prospective student experience By Dey Alexander. "This paper reports on a study of prospective student experiences of university websites. Thirty-nine participants took part in a usability study which examined 15 university websites (13 Australian sites, one site in the United States and one in the United Kingdom). The participants--all prospective students--were asked to find a course they were interested in taking, the cost and entry requirements for the course, where the course was taught from and whether there were any scholarships they would be eligible to apply for. Only 62 percent of tasks were completed successfully. Participants had the most difficulty trying to find information about tuition fees and scholarships. The study highlighted five key usability problems that contributed to these results: poor information architecture, poor content, poor search results and/or search interface, a reliance on domain knowledge about the higher education sector that many prospective students do not have and negative reactions to or difficulty using PDF documents." http://ausweb.scu.edu.au/aw05/papers/refereed/alexander/ Assuming Knowledge Hurts Users By Ben Buchanan. "I was just reading 'How usable are university websites?'. A report on a study of the prospective student experience and found it struck a chord with my experience enrolling in a post grad course a few days ago...the most frustrating thing is how these issues are so common across the web. We go blue in the face telling people about these problems, but they persist. I tell people to 'assume zero knowledge on the part of the user', I tell them not to use PDFs, I tell them to write simply and clearly with their audience in mind. Still we get confusing crap that assumes you know everything the author knows and you don't mind downloading Acrobat Reader just to get the next bit of information. University websites are clearly still way behind the needs of prospective students .. http://weblog.200ok.com.au/2005/07/assuming-knowledge-hurts-users.html The Effects of Line Length on Reading Online News By A. Dawn Shaikh. "This study examined the effects of line length on reading speed, comprehension, and user satisfaction of online news articles. Twenty college-age students read news articles displayed in 35, 55, 75, or 95 characters per line (cpl) from a computer monitor. Results showed that passages formatted with 95 cpl resulted in faster reading speed. No effects of line length were found for comprehension or satisfaction, however, users indicated a strong preference for either the short or long line lengths." http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/72/LineLength.htm Choosing Your Users By Ann Light. "Extract from 'User Interface Design and Evaluation' by Debbie Stone, Caroline Jarrett, Mark Woodroffe and Shailey Minocha." http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article2556.asp Losability vs. Usability By G. A. Buchholz. "The rules of Web design can be summed up in two words: Whatever works..." http://www.digital-web.com/articles/losability_vs_usability/ Web Content Versus Print Content By Gerry McGovern. "People are extremely task-focused on the Web. That means they are much less open to content that is not directly related to the task at hand. I've just read a very interesting study entitled 'Memory for advertising and information content: Comparing the printed page to the computer screen.' A key finding of the study is that, 'print is consistently better for recall than screen - The central theme to emerge from this study is that individuals have a better ability to recall after viewing materials in print rather than on screen'..." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2005/nt-2005-07-18-web-content.htm Usable Content Manifesto By D. Keith Robinson. "One of the things I've spent much of my time working with is content, mainly the written variety. How itŐs structured, how it's delivered, and how it's designed. As I've talked about recently, content is the hardest part of the projects I work on. ItŐs also the most important. Without it you're left with a hollow shell that is ultimately meaningless." http://tinyurl.com/94wzt +15: XML. Quick Start Your Design with XHTML Templates By Kevin Hale. "Today, I'm going to give you a peak at some templates I use in my workflow to help me get a running start on new web development projects. In addition to the XHTML templates, I'll go over some CSS templates and some XHTML markup examples I've made to help me create style guides for various sites." http://tinyurl.com/a73y7 W3C Proposes XML Identifiers By Paul Festa. "The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) on Tuesday proposed XML:ID as a standard way to uniquely identify parts of an XML document, promising the specification would make the work of XML authors easier." http://tinyurl.com/cvpg8 [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.]