+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 4, Issue 07, August 10, 2005. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 07 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: COLOR. 05: EVALUATION & TESTING. 06: EVENTS. 07: FLASH. 08: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 09: JAVASCRIPT. 10: MISCELLANEOUS. 11: NAVIGATION. 12: PHP. 13: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 14: TOOLS. 15: TYPOGRAPHY. 16: USABILITY. 17: XML. SECTION TWO: 18: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Zoom Layouts (references) By Joe Clark. "I didn't invent the zoom layout, but I have popularized it, and this page is a repository of information on the topic." http://joeclark.org/access/webaccess/zoom/ Accessibility: It's Just About Customers By Mike Butcher. "The debate about building web sites which are fully accessible to disabled people is being framed in the wrong way, according to industry figures at a Netimperative event this week." http://www.netimperative.com/2005/07/13/accessibility_roundtable/view Automated Testing - How useful is it? By Grant Broome. "There are a few good tools on the market for assessing potential technical flaws in the accessibility of a website. The author shares his experience of working with a number of these tools and asks the question 'How useful is automated testing?'" http://www.gawds.org/show.php?contentid=147 Automated Accessibility Testing By Mel Pedley. "There has been a great deal of discussion recently on the role of automated accessibility testing software. Much of the discussion has centred upon whether these tools are really useful and whether they do more damage than good..." http://www.blackwidows.org.uk/wpress/?p=31 +02: ASSOCIATIONS. EDUCAUSE Web Administrators Constituent Group. "This EDUCAUSE constituent group discusses the use of the Web as both a productivity and a public relations tool for institutions. Topics of discussion may include Web site design, development, and maintenance; Web policy issues; training, templates, and support for Web page publishers; building site consistency and cohesiveness; and providing WebÐbased services to university employees and students. It is designed for Webmasters, Web project managers, Web administrators, Web designers, and others who are responsible for their institution's Web presence. This group meets at the EDUCAUSE annual conference and uses the electronic discussion list to discuss issues throughout the year." http://www.educause.edu/WebAdministratorsConstituentGroup/985 +03: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Identifying Classy Semantics By Faruk Ates. "In response to Andy Clarke's Ghost Town Markup post, I wrote an article on the id and class attributes and their semantic value, entitled Identifying classy semantics." http://kurafire.net/articles/identifying-classy-semantics Help The CSS Working Group With Backgrounds and Borders By Kevin Lawver, AOL's representative to the CSS Working Group. "At our last CSS Working Group meeting, I volunteered to ask the design community what y'all want as far as backgrounds and borders go. We spent some time talking about the CSS3 Backgrounds & Borders module and we need some feedback (because none of us are designers). If you're a designer, is this what you want? Is there anything missing from the module that should be there? Is there anything there that shouldn't be?" http://tinyurl.com/ap8sl CSS An Introduction - Part Six: The Basics of Positioning By Adrian Senior. "In this, the sixth tutorial in the beginning CSS series, we are going to look at positioning our page elements with CSS..." http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=3B56F Still Throwing Tables By Douglas Bowman. "On the one year anniversary of the article: Throwing Tables Out the Window, I thought it appropriate to reveal some behind-the-scenes info regarding the Microsoft example discussed in the article...." http://www.stopdesign.com/log/2005/07/27/still-throwing-tables.html That's Why It's Called Beta By Molly E. Holzschlag. "I woke up this morning to find countless emails and IMs pouring into my accounts asking me about the IE 7 beta..." http://www.molly.com/2005/07/28/thats-why-its-called-beta/ IE7 CSS Updates By Dave Shea. "The first IE7 Beta is out. Yes, there are CSS improvements. No, theyÕre not going to change the world." http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2005/07/28/ie7_css_upda/ Standards and CSS in IE By Chris Wilson. "I'm very happy that we've shipped IE 7 beta 1. I wanted to make it clear that we know Beta 1 makes little progress for web developers in improving our standards support, particularly in our CSS implementation..." http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/07/29/445242.aspx +04: COLOR. How To: Design for Color Blindness By Matt Bailey. "If you are using color-based charts and graphs to convey important information, you need to take into account that about nine to twelve percent of the male population suffers from some form of color deficiency. Some estimates place the level of color blindness as high as 20% among the white male population. However, less than one percent of women suffer from color blindness..." http://tinyurl.com/a9gst +05: EVALUATION & TESTING. Hotspots and Hyperlinks: Using Eye-tracking to Supplement Usability Testing By M. Russell. "This article discusses how eye-tracking can be used to supplement traditional usability test measures. User performance on two usability tasks with three e-commerce websites is described. Results show that eye-tracking data can be used to better understand how users initiate a search for a targeted link or web object. Frequency, duration and order of visual attention to Areas of Interest (AOIs) in particular are informative as supplemental information to standard usability testing in understanding user expectations and making design recommendations." http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/72/eyetracking.htm Leading Web Usability Evaluations to WAUTER By Sandrine Balbo, Steve Goschnick, and Derek Tong. "The WWW is now ubiquitous, and yet its usability is still of major concern. Usability testing methods are able to identify flaws prior to the launch of a site. However, their application typically involves direct observation, requiring availability of participants and evaluators in a synchronized manner. This, in turn, implies tight schedules with little leeway for flexibility. In this paper, we present WAUTER (Web Automatic Usability Testing EnviRonment), a suite of open source tools to assist in web usability evaluation, capturing and comparing intended vs. actual use of a web site. WAUTER harnesses web user visits to do so and is also intended to support remote evaluation." http://ausweb.scu.edu.au/aw05/papers/refereed/balbo/index.html Evaluating the Usability of Educational Websites for Children By S. Naidu. "This study examined the usability of educational websites for children. Children ages 7 - 11 performed seven search tasks with one of three websites. Overall, participants, especially those less than 10 years of age were not very successful. Terminology, number and organization of links, location of information above the fold, and length of individual pages all influenced performance on the tasks." http://tinyurl.com/dll92 +06: EVENTS. Sharing the Secrets of Web Accessibility September 1, 2005. London, United Kingdom http://tinyurl.com/9s2vm e-Access'05 September 14, 2005. London, United Kingdom http://www.headstar-events.com/eaccess05/ K.M. World and Intranets 2005 November 15-17, 2005. San Jose, California U.S.A. http://www.kmworld.com/kmw05/ +07: FLASH. Unobtrusive Flash Objects (UFO) v1.0 By Bobby van der Sluis. "UFO is a DOM script that detects and embeds Flash objects. It contains several features and best practice techniques that other scripts currently don't have. UFO is inspired by Geoff Stearns' FlashObject." http://domscripting.webstandards.org/?p=15 J.K. Rowling Site Goes Accessible Flash Route By Jeffery Zeldman. "Yesterday the JK Rowling site relaunched in an accessible Flash version designed by Lightmaker Group in collaboration with Macromedia, the RNIB and the RNID. Usability testing by partially sighted test subjects helped fine-tune the site..." http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0705d.shtml jkrowling.com By Bob Regan. "Today, JK Rowling launched a new, accessible version of her site at: www.jkrowling.com. The new version of the site sets the standard for accessibility in Flash. I love this site. Jo Rowling and the guys at Lightmaker deserve tremendous credit for this project. It was the result of a collaboration between Lightmaker, the Royal National Institute of the Blind and the Royal National Institute for Deaf and Hard of Hearing People. More than any other site, it shows what can happen when high end designers partner with accessibility experts." http://tinyurl.com/cch6d Zeldman on Rowling By John Dowdell. "I read Jeffrey's post yesterday, about the "accessible Flash for Harry Potter" site, and thought its objections a little strange..." http://tinyurl.com/coqhj Wild About Harry By Matt Bailey. "However, all of this does make one simple point. At the core of any marketing effort, designing for accessibility at the beginning of a project will prevent additional costs or additional losses in the future." http://www.accessibilityblog.com/2005/07/22/wild-about-harry +08: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 16 Years of Paper Prototyping By Jared M. Spool. "Despite amazing advances in prototyping technology, paper prototyping is still one of our favorite tools for gaining quick insights on new designs. As we look back at how we've used this technique over the last 16 years, we can see that it has adapted well to the new demands from today's design process." http://tinyurl.com/97owq +09: JAVASCRIPT. Best Practices: Implementing Javascript for Rich Internet Applications By Austin Govella. "1.) Separate Behavior from Content and Presentation; 2.) Provide progressive enhancement; 3.) Code for flexibility; 4.) Alter content as little as possible; 5.) Document output, parameters, and dependencies" http://thinkingandmaking.com/entries/63 Image previews with DOM JavaScript (and PHP if wanted) By Christian Heilmann. "Sometimes it might be a good idea to give visitors an insight of what is lurking behind a link. Normally this is achieved via a thumbnail, but what about inline links? This article explains how you can enhance a link with a class named ÒpreviewÓ pointing to an image via DOM JavaScript. The enhanced link has a small clickable icon that will show a preview of the linked image. If you have PHP with the GD library enabled, it even creates the preview on the fly." http://icant.co.uk/articles/imagepreview/ The Power of JavaScript: Operators By Michael Youssef. "We have discussed the very basics of Javascript. Until now, we have not written much code. There's still much more to knowing and learning to master the basics of Javascript. In this article, we talk about how we can perform arithmetic operations, comparison operations and increment/decrement operations using Javascript operators." http://tinyurl.com/7z4cp The Power of Javascript: Operators continued By Michael Youssef. "In the last article we talked about some of the unary and binary operators available in Javascript, namely the arithmetic operators, the comparison operators and the increment/decrement operators. In this article we continue our discussion of the Javascript operators; we will discuss how computers represent data, and bitwise operators." http://tinyurl.com/93w9d AJAX: A Fresh Look at Web Development By Edmon Begoli. AJAX enables a dynamic, asynchronous Web experience without the need for page refreshes. Find out how this combination of technologies that you already know and love can reinvent your Web development. http://www.devx.com/webdev/Article/28456 What Every Webmaster and Web Developer MUST Know About Ruby on Rails and AJAX By Matt Lightner. "I wrote this article today because it has become evident that there is a huge gap between the knows and the know-nots when it comes to Ruby, Rails and AJAX. This article provides a cursory look at three of todayÕs hottest web development terms." http://blogs.eng5.com/~mlightner/?p=19 The JavaScript Diaries: Part 7 By Lee Underwood. In our last installment we began our study of objects by looking at how to create custom-made objects using the Object() constructor. We will continue that study by taking a look at browser-based objects. While there are several browser-specific objects, we will concentrate on the more common objects that are compatible with most browsers. http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/diaries/7/ +10: MISCELLANEOUS. Technology Special Report: An Oral History Remembering Netscape: The Birth of the Web By Adam Lashinsky. "Picture a world without Google, without eBay or Amazon or broadband, where few people have even heard of IPOs. That was reality just a decade ago. The company that changed itÑbringing us into the Internet ageÑwas a brilliant flash in the pan called Netscape. For the tenth anniversary of its IPO, FORTUNE recruited dozens of players to tell the story of the startup in their own words..." http://tinyurl.com/boo25 Top 10 Web Fads By Molly Wood. "Internet phenomena...the following 10 Web fads still make us laugh, make us wonder, or make us feel guilty enough to update our blogs." http://www.cnet.com/4520-11136_1-6268155-1.html Louis Rosenfeld Interview: Learning to Haggle: Moving information architecture from design to implementation By David Moore. David Moore talks to information architecture expert Louis Rosenfeld about the problems with search features, why CMS Silver Bullets don't work, and why information architects need to be better at horse trading. http://www.iqcontent.com/publications/interviews/article_57/ +11: NAVIGATION. NavOptim Coding: Web Navigational Construction to Minimize Navigation Effort By Xiaoying Kong and David Lowe. "Web applications have rapidly become critical to the interaction that organisations have with their external stakeholders. A major factor in the effectiveness of this interaction is the ease with which users can locate information and functionality which they are seeking. Effective design is however complicated by the multiple purposes and users which Web applications typically support. In our earlier work we described a model for evaluating the overall navigation entropy of a Web application which provides a measure of the weighted effort required of users. In this paper we describe a navigational design method aimed at minimizing this navigational entropy. The approach uses a theoretical navigational depth for the various information and service components to moderate a nested hierarchical clustering of the content." http://ausweb.scu.edu.au/aw05/papers/refereed/kong/index.html +12: PHP. Object Interaction in PHP: Introduction to Composition By Alejandro Gervasio. "Composition is an important concept in PHP. It occurs when an object creates another object; that is, the first object completely possesses the second object. In this article (the first of two parts), Alejandro Gervasio explains composition, and shows some examples to illustrate his points." http://tinyurl.com/92usn PHPBuilder.com: 10 Tips That Every PHP Newbie Should Know By Jeffery Vaska. "I wish I had known these 10 tips the day I started working with PHP. Instead of learning them through painstaking process, I could have been on my way to becoming a PHP programmer even sooner! This article is presented in two parts and is intended for folks who are new to PHP." http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/vaska20050722.php3 AJAX and PHP By David Mytton. "I was excited to read the AJAX: Usable Interactivity with Remote Scripting article by Cameron Adams in the hope of finding out a lot more about AJAX, particularly how to actually use it! The article is very good, but is written as a usability guide rather than a technical 'how to' about how to use AJAX within your own applications. Granted, I haven't looked much, but tutorials for making use of AJAX with PHP seem to be lacking (do you know of any good ones?). So I went to Google and searched to see what I could come up with, hoping I'd find some kind of stuff Ruby has." http://www.sitepoint.com/blog-post-view.php?id=283623 +13: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Meeting Microsoft By Molly E. Holzschlag. "Since the announcement of the WaSP / Microsoft Corporation Task Force we've had two face to face meetings. The first was held in Portland, Oregon at WebVisions Ô05. WaSP members DL Byron and myself met with MicrosoftÕs liaison to the Task Force, Brian Goldfarb. In this meeting, we brainstormed potential strategies and discussed how WaSP can be of greatest assistance to Microsoft as it makes its products more standards compliant." http://www.molly.com/2005/07/21/meeting-microsoft/ Seven Benefits of HTML Validation By Herman Drost. "You may not bother with html validation or writing simple and clean code when designing your web site. Later you may find your site is slow loading, appears incorrectly in the main browsers and does not rank well for the major search engines..." http://tinyurl.com/7qgoj +14: TOOLS. IYHY By Benjamin Adam Howell. "IYHY is an attempt to fix the mobile web today instead of one or five years from now. If you sign-up IYHY will keep a running, editable list of your 'mobile bookmarks'. If you don't sign-up, that's cool too, IYHY will just strip all the crap from a web page and give you the good stuff when you're on the go -- the content." http://www.iyhy.com/ Additional info on IYHY: http://tinyurl.com/dpcsu +15: TYPOGRAPHY. How to Find Out the Text Size Setting in IE By Robert Nyman. "If you're reading this, you're probably interested in making your CSS-controlled layouts em-based, to be able to adapt the font, width of elements etc to the text size setting the user has in his/her web browser." http://tinyurl.com/7ul2w +16: USABILITY. Contrived Consistency By Jack Shedd. "One of the key tricks in interface design is understanding that difference between functional consistency and aesthetic consistency. Aesthetic consistency can be defined as every element looking identical. Buttons all look the same, windows all look the same, sliders, et al are perfectly identical application to application. Functional consistency can be defined as every element of similar or exact look behaving in the same predictable way. Click on a button performs an action. Pop-up menus allow you to make a choice...The important consistency of an interface is functional consistency. This is far more important than mere aesthetics." http://www.stolensheep.com/archives/021395.htm Have You Got Too Many Websites? By Gerry McGovern. "Too many websites are nearly always a bad idea. Getting your customer to remember one web address is more than enough of a challenge." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2005/nt-2005-07-25-too-many-websites.htm Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful By Donald Norman. "Human-Centered Design has become such a dominant theme in design that it is now accepted by interface and application designers automatically, without thought, let alone criticism. That's a dangerous state - when things are treated as accepted wisdom. The purpose of this essay is to provoke thought, discussion, and reconsideration of some of the fundamental principles of Human-Centered Design. These principles, I suggest, can be helpful, misleading, or wrong. At times, they might even be harmful. Activity-Centered Design is superior." http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/human-centered_desig.html +17: XML. RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0, Compared By Tim Bray, Paul Hoffman, Sam Ruby, and Rob Sayre. "People who generate syndication feeds have a choice of feed formats. As of mid-2005, the two most likely candidates will be RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0. The purpose of this page is to summarize, as clearly and simply as possible, the differences between the RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 syndication languages." http://www.tbray.org/atom/RSS-and-Atom [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +18: 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.]