+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 4, Issue 15, October 6, 2005. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 15 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: USABILITY. 14: XML. SECTION TWO: 15: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Accessibility and the Label Tag By Adrian Senior. "In this tutorial we will look at how we can build and lay out accessible forms. In particular we will focus on the label element and we will see how the label can be used to not only increase the focus area of any form element but at the same time be utilized to give our form layouts a little more structure than a simple stacking of form elements in a single column." http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=02310 10 Reasons Clients Don't Care About Accessibility By Christian Heilmann. "So what can we do? Gently prod clients in the right direction. Here are some ideas: 1.) Stop selling accessibility as a technical issue. Address it in the scoping and design phase rather than at delivery. 2.) Make sure you've got your facts straight before releasing another ÒaccessibilityÓ article or blog entry (rounded corners in CSS do not increase accessibility, really, they donÕt!). 3.) Make product presentations and assessments more fun by taking away the clientÕs mouse and changing monitor settings, 4.) If you want to support disabled users, donÕt stop at one group. ÒSkip linksÓ helps blind users and keyboard/switch access users alike, donÕt hide them! 5.) Send emails to companies every time it is hard for you to use their site. Point out that you will buy the product on their competitorÕs site and why. 6.) Step away from the visuals. Embrace Web design as a mixture of good content, proper structure and nice visuals. Start developing sites in the text editor, not in Illustrator." http://tinyurl.com/8z822 Accessibility...Can't We All Just Get Along (Documentation of a Panel Discussion) Panel: Derek Featherstone, Ian Lloyd and James Craig. Moderator: Glenda Sims. "This page documents the South by Southwest Interactive panel, Accessibility: Can't We All Just Get Along?, on Sunday, March 13, 2005. The documentation includes an audio recording of the panel, a text transcript with timecodes, representations of the slides presented, and additional notes added by the panelists. The panelists, from left to right, are Ian Lloyd, James Craig, Derek Featherstone, and Glenda Sims. The intention of this web presentation is to demonstrate that accessible websites benefit everyone, not just those with disabilities. For example, a hearing-impaired person may need to read the transcript, but even non-disabled person will benefit from the additional information provided with the transcript. Those wishing to listen to the audio may download Part 1 (MP3) and Part 2 (MP3) of the audio recording." http://cookiecrook.com/sxsw/2005/panel/ Webnauts Discussion Forum By John S. Britsios. Webnauts has launched a new discussion forum. http://forums.webnauts.net +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. CSS Server-side Constants By Shaun Inman. Current CSS implementations have no support for variables or constants until now. Shaun Inman's 'CSS Server-side Constants' might come in handy if you have several classes, rules or id selectors that would all use the same style. It requires that you have PHP running, and that you edit a .htaccess file. The CSS files get poured through PHP in order to be preprocessed. The end result is that they'll be sent out as regular CSS, with all the constants substituted. CSS Server-side Constants won't do much for smaller sites with only a few rules, but for large application-scale websites it could be quite useful. Detailed explanation: http://www.shauninman.com/plete/2005/08/css-constants Latest version: http://www.shauninman.com/plete/2005/08/css-ssc-quickie Creating a CSS Design from Scratch By Meryl Evans. "Even for experienced Web designers, creating a site in CSS for the first time can be a daunting task. In this tutorial, I'll help you face your first CSS site design without fear by breaking the process into three easy steps, starting with a blank canvas and finishing up with a fully functioning Web site. I used this very process to create an existing site, which I'll discuss more later in this guide." http://www.informit.com/guides/content.asp?g=webdesign&seqNum=221&rl=1 CSS Table Gallery By Christian Heilmann. "Following a request on the list, where a subscriber had unsuccessfully searched for an online gallery of styled data tables, I came up with the following idea...It is pretty much like csszengarden, only for a single marked up data table. What I need now is people participating with an own style for the data table. You can submit it directly on the site and I will check through them when I come back from a training in 3 days, so please don?t expect to see things appearing immediately. http://icant.co.uk/csstablegallery/ ALAÕs New Print Styles By Eric A. Meyer. "Print away, you fiends! Eric Meyer presents the ALA 4.0 print styles and discusses the challenge of translating a complex screen layout into a well-designed and useful printed page." http://alistapart.com/articles/alaprintstyles +03: DREAMWEAVER. Dreamweaver 8 Emerging Issues By Macromedia. "Some users have reported that the following issues are affecting their usage of Dreamweaver 8. Issues described in this document may prove to be platform or system specific, and may not affect all users. Technical support will update this document as we learn more about any of the issues, so check back frequently." http://tinyurl.com/8nn88 +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Confidence Interval for Task Times in Usability Tests (Task Time Calculator) By Jeff Sauro. "This calculator takes raw task times, transforms them using the Natural Logarithm and computes a confidence interval." http://www.measuringusability.com/time_intervals.htm +05: EVENTS. 2006 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces January 29 - February 1, 2006. Sydney, Australia http://www.iuiconf.org/ +06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Don't Finalize the Site Structure Until You've Created Page Layouts By Iain Barker. "There is a worrying trend emerging in the field of information architecture: organisations are attempting to finalize site structures without evaluating their effectiveness in the context of a web page. Card sorting and card-based classification provide excellent insights into the inherent structure behind content. Both are excellent tools for defining strict taxonomies, but they do not necessarily generate the most approachable structure for a site. Content centred design is not necessarily user centred design. http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/cmb_dontfinaliseia/index.html Should You Finalize Site Structure Based on Card-Sorting? By Rashmi Sinha. "...the problems with creating structures based on card-sorting, mentioned in the article, are not really problems with card-sorting. The problems are more with half-baked understanding or usage of the technique. For example, the article mentions that browser pages cannot accommodate too many top-level headings, long titles etc., and how this impacts structural decisions. But these and other issues can easily be handled with good card-sorting practices and more better analysis." http://tinyurl.com/7alyv +07: JAVASCRIPT. Dom Scripting Best Practices By Jeremy Keith. Chapter 5 from Jeremy's new book is available online. http://domscripting.com/book/sample/ Unobtrusive Behavior Layer By Steve Chipman. "Steve Chipman gave a talk to his colleagues at AOL about DOM Scripting and unobtrusive JavaScript. You can now listen to the presentation and view the slides. He does a good job of explaining the benefits of good JavaScript." http://tinyurl.com/8wdra Is Javascript Dead? By Kurt Cagle. "...Now, on the face of it, the question seems a little extreme, given that in its latest incarnation, AJAX, Javascript appears to be quite lively, doing jigs and acrobatics that seem nothing short of incredible for a language which has recently just celebrated its tenth birthday (Javascript and Java were both created in the same year, even though Javascript bears only the most superficial language to that grande dame of the programming world). However, as is usual with these questions, there was a very pressing problem that underlaid the casual query. I'd say that the question, revised slightly, can be articulated more as, "Are we asking Javascript to be a language far beyond its capabilities?" The answer to this one is a little harder, in part because I've had my own suspicions on that thought as well...." http://www.understandingxml.com/archives/2005/09/is_javascript_d.html Improving Link Display for Print By Aaron Gustafson "Some time ago, Eric Meyer showed you how to add URIs to the printed version of your pages using print styles. Sometimes, though, too many inline URIs can make pages hard to read. Aaron Gustafson comes to the rescue with a JavaScript add-on that'll have you loving your linkage again." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/improvingprint +08: MISCELLANEOUS. Centralized or Decentralized Authoring? By James Robertson. "There is no 'correct' answer to this question. To get the best business outcomes, you must understand the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches." http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_decentralised/index.html Why Web Managers Are Leaders By Gerry McGovern. "The Web requires leadership if it is to achieve its full potential. That leadership will rarely be given by senior management. So that means it's up to you." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2005/nt-2005-09-12-leadership.htm +09: NAVIGATION. Hypertext Links By Paul Bohman. "When using a screen reader, it can sometimes be a little difficult to tell when link text ends and when another begins. JAWS says 'link' before each link, which minimizes this problem, but it can be a little more difficult with Home Page Reader, which uses a female-sounding voice for all of the links. It is a good thing that the voice changes from a male-sounding voice to a female-sounding voice, but if there are five links in a row, the voice will not change at all in between links, which can lead to some confusion. One solution is to provide a non-link character between each link. The vertical bar ( | ) is used quite often for this purpose. Another solution is to put the links in an ordered or numbered list. Screen readers tend to pause between list items, helping the user audibly distinguish between separate links." http://webaim.org/techniques/hypertext/ +10: PHP. PHP 101 (part 5): Rank and File Everything you're ever likely to need to know about dealing with external files from a PHP script. By Vikram Vaswani. "In this segment of our ongoing saga, I'm going to teach you how to do something that's definitely not for kids. It involves getting down and dirty with files on the disk: meeting them (shock!), reading their contents (shriek!) and (horror of horrors!) writing data to them. All of these exciting activities will take place under the aegis of PHP's very cool file manipulation API, which allows you to view and modify file attributes, read and list directory contents, alter file permissions, retrieve file contents into a variety of native data structures, and search for files based on specific patterns." http://www.zend.com/php/beginners/php101-5.php PHP 101 (part 6): Functionally Yours All about functions, arguments, passing by reference, globals and scope. By Vikram Vaswani. "In this tutorial I'm going to introduce you to a new way of doing things, where code doesn't run in a straight line, but twists, leaps and bounds across the landscape of your script. Most of this activity is accomplished through a programming construct called a "function", and this tutorial teaches you how to build them (once), use them (many times), pass them arguments and have them return values, and generally make your scripts more compact, efficient and maintainable..." http://www.zend.com/php/beginners/php101-6.php How to Decide What Bugs to Fix When, Part 1 By Scott Berkun. "In part 1 of this two-part essay on making smart bug decisions, Scott Berkun covered triage and making smarter piles." http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/08/11/fixingbugs.html How to Decide What Bugs to Fix When, Part 2 By Scott Berkun. "In part 2, Scott covers establishing an exit criteria and early planning, as well as exceptions to all of the rules, frequently asked questions, and some bug-fixing resources. Scott is the author of The Art of Project Management." http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/08/11/fixingbugs2.html +11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Why eBay Needs Standards-Oriented Design: An Interview With Eric A. Meyer By David Poteet. "I'm seeing a growing interest in standards-oriented design as something that should be done by any organization. Various redesigns have certainly helped awareness. As many organizations make the shift to standards, others are starting to realize that they're being left behind and that they need to look into standards-oriented design and figure out how to move forward. The driving forces are interesting and diverse. In many cases, you'll have a web team that has come to realize this is something they need to do. They won't get management onboard by saying "Hey, we need to move to standards," but by saying, "Hey, a standards-based design can make our site more efficient. It'll be faster and more accessible." Development teams can promote their cause by stating all the reasons that standards-oriented design benefits the organization as a whole. For one of my clients, the legal team was the driving force towards standards. The legal team came to the technical team and told them, "Our web site must be accessible." This was not a business where they were federally mandated to be 508 compliant, but they were just coming from an ADA lawsuit..." http://www.uie.com/events/uiconf/articles/ebay_needs_standards/ Firefox Investigation By Robert Nyman. "...What I wanted to do was explain to him that it was dangerous to take on the project with the mindset that it should work in a certain web browser as opposed to following the given recommendations and standards, that by doing it with the general approach it would be a much better guarantee for future compatibility, automatically targeting more web browsers and easier maintenance. Naturally, every web browser have some flaws that there might be workarounds for, but in general, if you write correct code you will get very close to a web site that will work in as many web browsers/platforms as possible. So, I called him up, and it went a bit like this...The problem in our call, as with many Project Managers and System Developers alike, is that they really don't know about web standards and how it should be done. They never heard of the importance of semantic markup. So, for all of you out there whose mindset is still set in the browser war era (Internet Explorer vs. Netscape): Those days are long gone. There's a myriad of web browsers and platforms out there, together with accessibility as well as other factors that need to be taken into regard. Read this line carefully, and then repeat it in every web project you go in to: Do not write your code adapted for web browsers, write it according to web standards. That's your only hope!" http://www.robertnyman.com/2005/09/01/firefox-investigation/ Searching for Standards By Molly E. Holzschlag. "I did a small comparative analysis of markup practices at several major search engines. ItÕs interesting to note that only one engine is using valid markup and CSS layouts, and that would be MSN. Close behind is AOL, whose validation problems are mostly related to ampersands not being escaped, and HotBot, who have a few easily corrected errors. http://www.molly.com/2005/09/08/searching-for-standards/ +12: TOOLS. BBEdit CSS Syntax Checker By John Gruber. "If you work on CSS using either of Bare Bones SoftwareÕs text editors, you might be interested in my latest project: CSS syntax checking scripts for BBEdit and TextWrangler. TheyÕre a combination of Perl and AppleScript that allows you to syntax-check CSS files using the W3CÕs CSS Validation Service. Errors and warnings from the validation service are displayed in a results browser, very similar in effect to BBEditÕs built-in HTML syntax checker." http://daringfireball.net/2005/09/bbedit_css_checker +13: USABILITY. Consistency in Design is the Wrong Approach By Jared Spool. "Why do we gravitate to consistency? Because itÕs easier to think about. You donÕt actually have to know anything about your users to talk about making things consistent. You only have to know about your design, which most designers are quite familiar with. Current knowledge, on the other hand, requires in-depth knowledge of the users. And that takes research time and investigative effort. It doesn't come cheap, like consistency does. But it produces much, much better results." http://tinyurl.com/cljg2 Registration Forms - What To Do If You Can't Avoid Them By Caroline Jarrett. "Last month I looked at a subtle detail on forms, so this month I thought I'd take a step back to look at a whole-form topic: registration forms." http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article2629.asp Forms vs. Applications By Jakob Nielsen. "Once an online form goes beyond two screenfulls, it's often a sign that the underlying functionality is better supported by an application, which offers a more interactive user experience." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/forms.html Avis: Trying Too Hard? By Jared Spool. "Apparently, not to be outdone by their competition, Hertz, Avis.com has chosen the rebellious route and decided to defy standard convention. They've decided that they would demonstrate how hard they try (after all, they do try harder) and change the way people fill out forms. Convention has it that, in a form, a designer will designate mandatory fields with that old standby, the asterisk (*). Not that this is written in stone or anything." http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2005/09/05/avis-trying-too-hard/ +14: XML. An Interview with XML Dan Zambonini. "I pulled a few strings and managed to get an exclusive interview with XML, who's really hot right now. Sitting in a cafe just off Venice Beach, this is what she had to say..." http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/7729?CMP=OTC-TY3388567169 [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +15: 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.]