+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 4, Issue 17, October 20, 2005. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 17 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: COLOR. 04: DREAMWEAVER. 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. How Do You Get Your Client to Pay For Accessibility? By Gez Lemon. "Accessibility isn't something you sell as an alternative; building accessible websites is what separates you from those incapable of doing their job correctly. Anything else is immoral. It's what gives you a competitive advantage over your competitors. It lets your clients know that they are dealing with a professional company that will ensure their website is not only attractively promoting their corporate image, but is usable by the widest possible audience. Who wants a shop in the back street of some dingy town? Your clients want you to do what's right by them, not be scared off thinking that accessibility is some magical ingredient that's too expensive to implement..." http://juicystudio.com/article/client-pay-for-accessibility.php No, Your Website ISN'T AAA Accessible! By Dan Zambonini. "OK, maybe I'm misinterpreting what these checkpoints mean. But surely the guidelines should have been written in "the clearest and simplest language" with no room for ambiguity? Especially as the guidelines (http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/wai-pageauth.html) claim to be AAA accessible? (Actually, even without me being awkward about this dodgy argument, I'd claim that 'R&D' towards the top of the document constitutes an acronym, that doesn't have an expansion in the HTML - hence no checkpoint 4.2 compliance. Goes to show how difficult these are to implement consistently.) Having said all of this, I actually think that these guidelines are one of the most important web publications of the last 10 years. No matter how some accessibility experts may argue, they have provided invaluable guidance and techniques for the millions of users who can't afford user testing. Possibly more importantly, they have also raised the profile of accessibility as a core attribute of the web - it isn't an addition, but something that sits at the heart of what the web is. And, in the end, whether you technically achieve an A, AA or AAA is irrelevant, as long as you've made every effort to tackle as many of the accessibility stumbling blocks as possible. I just wish that, some of the public sector in particular, would view accessibility as a real-world problem, and not a points-based award system." http://www.onlamp.com/pub/wlg/7730 +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. CSS Techniques Roundup - 20 CSS Tips and Tricks By Pete Freitag. "I never cease to be amazed at what problems can be solved with pure CSS. Here are 20 CSS techniques, tips and tricks that you may find handy..." http://www.petefreitag.com/item/475.cfm CSS Optimization By Dave Shea. "Some thoughts on how to go about writing a CSS optimizer..." http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2005/09/16/css_optimiza/index.php Design Shack Another inspirational CSS and Blog Design showcase site. http://designshack.co.uk/ +03: COLOR. CSS Color Chart By Shailesh N. Humbad. "This page contains a neutral colors chart and a general-purpose color chart. You can use the colors in the palettes with either HTML or CSS. Click on the color code to select it, then you can copy and paste it. Click on the Toggle button to convert from Hex to RGB and back. The charts are printed in tabular fashion so you can narrow your browser window with the palette and compare the colors to your design side-by-side." http://www.somacon.com/p142.php +04: DREAMWEAVER. Teaching Dreamweaver the Web Standards Way By Sheri German. "I have been teaching Dreamweaver in various training venues since version 2. Each new upgrade adds more features and makes my job more complex. How does a teacher help beginners make sense of an increasingly overwhelming interface that includes seemingly endless choices? My syllabus has changed a lot over the years, and this is what I have learned: pare the syllabus to the absolute essentials. Subtract, do not add. Aim for elegant simplicity. Focus on Web Standards. This article gives teachers a syllabus they can use to help their beginning students learn Dreamweaver within the framework of Web Standards...So what can my students expect when they walk into class on day one? For starters, they won't learn a thing about Dreamweaver! After I go over my expectations and review the syllabus, I launch right in with a little html. It saves a lot of time in the long run, and is the straightest path to understanding CSS...As educators, we have a great responsibility to start our students out with proper web development habits...." http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=777DB Dreamweaver 8 Accessibility: Create Accessible Forms By Macromedia. "...Here's how to create accessible forms using Dreamweaver 8..." http://www.macromedia.com/resources/accessibility/dw8/forms.html Changes in Dreamweaver 8 Templates By Stephanie Sullivan. "I've seen a few confused posters on the various Dreamweaver forums since the release of Dreamweaver 8 that relate to templates. These templates were created in Dreamweaver MX or Dreamweaver MX 2004 and now they're not acting/updating the same." http://www.communitymx.com/blog/index.cfm?newsid=601 +05: EVALUATION & TESTING. Recipe For an App Dev Disaster Expect trouble when users don't have time to test drive your software. By Anonymous. In a nice post-mortem of a tortured CMS project, an anonymous developer in InfoWorld describes how a lack of user testing nearly doomed the effort. It turns out that --surprise, surprise -- the written functional specifications didn't convey what the editors really needed. Documents almost never can. With usability paramount for CMS success, it behooves you and your content contributors to come up with a plan their active participation in a more agile development process. If they won't test screens out, or you don't give them a chance, there's trouble ahead for everyone. http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/08/30/36OPrecord_1.html +06: EVENTS. South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive March 10-14, 2006. Austin, Texas U.S.A. http://2006.sxsw.com/ +07: FLASH. The New Face of Flash By Andy Budd. "Some of you may be surprised that prior to developing an interest in web standards, I was actually an ActionScript programmer. I used to really enjoy building flash based games and application, although I tried to steer clear of the ubiquitous 'skip intro'. However I became increasing frustrated with the Flash development environment. By the time Flash MX came out, ActionScript was a fairly reasonably formed object oriented programming language. However all of your development happened in an environment designed for visual animation. Frustrating to say the least..." http://www.andybudd.com/archives/2005/09/the_new_face_of_flash/ +08: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. The Web, Information Architecture, and Interaction Design By Jonathan Korman. "The impact of digital technology in all faces of our lives has meant a proliferation of terms for the work people do to define digital products and services. In this article, interaction designer Jonathan Korman unpacks some of these distinctions to help product teams assign the right people to the right jobs." http://tinyurl.com/7opew +09: JAVASCRIPT. WE05: Presentation notes for 'JavaScript and the DOM' By Cameron Adams. "Although you won't be able to get the full effect of my crazy spinning bow tie and manic grin, you can download my presentation notes and example files for 'JavaScript and the DOM' below." http://www.themaninblue.com/writing/perspective/2005/10/05/ +10: MISCELLANEOUS. Web Development Trends for 2006 By Anil Dash. "The Bottom Line...If you have a friend who's looking to change jobs, or know a disgruntled person who's been laid off and Lou Dobbs has convinced him to blame Indian engineers for it, send them this list, and check back with them in a few months to see if they've taken the time to learn some new skills. No whining, just go do some reading. Buy some O'Reilly books or Google up some docs online, and then get hacking. By the time you're good enough to start posting your sample applications, employers will be searching for your blog just to find the talent they need." http://www.dashes.com/anil/2005/09/06/web_development +11: NAVIGATION. Navigation - Our Visitors' Travel Guide By Chris Heilmann. "...Navigation is one of the most important parts of the site; however, the most important part of a page is the content. If our navigation grabs the visitors' attention and distracts from the content, then it failed its purpose. The content should determine the navigation, not the other way around. This is easy to forget, as navigation is one of the few things us web developers and designers can play with. At the start of the project we have a rough idea of the sitemap, whereas the content is not always ready or even planned out. It is up to us to tell the client that the content is what people will look for and come for, not how cool or usable the navigation is. The best navigation on the web are the ones we cannot remember, but pointed us quickly to the right place. If there is a lot of time and budget to be spent, then it should go into proper search functionality and defensive measures - the error pages, warning messages and information pages, not a singing and dancing navigation." http://evolt.org/navigation +12: PHP. PHP 101 (part 8): Databases and Other Animals All about connecting to a MySQL database from PHP, using the mysql or mysqli extensions. By Vikram Vaswani. "In this issue of PHP 101, I'm going to show you how to use PHP to extract data from a database, and use that data to dynamically build a Web page. In order to try out the examples in this tutorial, you'll need a working MySQL installation, which you can obtain from the MySQL Web site at http://www.mysql.com/. If you have some knowledge of SQL (Structured Query Language, the language used to interact with a database server) you'll find it helpful, but it's not essential." http://www.zend.com/php/beginners/php101-8.php PHP 101 (part 9): SQLite My Fire! Introducing another database: SQLite. By Vikram Vaswani. "Built-in SQLite support is new to PHP 5.0, and offers users a lightweight database system that is fast, efficient and gets the job done. Since it's enabled by default in PHP 5.0, it provides a viable alternative to MySQL; you can use it out of the box, without spending time on version checks and library downloads; just install PHP 5 and start typing. That's why I'm devoting a whole tutorial to it - so get out of bed, make yourself some coffee and let's get started!" http://www.zend.com/php/beginners/php101-9.php PHP 101 (part 10): A Session In The Cookie Jar Sessions and cookies - how to keep track of visitors to your site. By Vikram Vaswani. "...while built-in database support makes programming with PHP easy, it isn't the only thing that makes PHP so popular. An easy-to-use XML API and new exception handling mechanism (in PHP 5), support for pluggable modules, and built-in session management are just some of the many other features that make PHP rock. And all these capabilities are going to be explored, in depth, right here in this very series, if you can just find it in yourself to hang around a little longer. So close your eyes, take a deep breath, and read on to find out all about this tutorial's topic: sessions and cookies..." http://www.zend.com/php/beginners/php101-10.php PHP Form Validation System: An Object-Oriented Approach By Mike Weiner. A PHP equivalent of Struts ActionForms for validating form data. http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/weiner20050831.php3 +13: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. An Open Letter to WaSP By Robert Nyman and Vlad Alexander. "...We therefore ask that WaSP put together a task force to create a Web Standards Charter. The Charter will define what Web Standards are and recommend a single implementation approach. When necessary the Charter will be updated as dictated by the current state of the art and the latest best practices. The Web Standards community will then be able to direct newcomers to the Charter as a solid starting point from which they can proceed to implement standards-compliant projects with confidence. Once they have gained confidence, newcomers can join us in ongoing debates about Web Standards, adding to the strength and diversity of our community." http://www.robertnyman.com/2005/10/04/an-open-letter-to-wasp/ Government Web Standards Usage: USA By Peter Krantz. "This is the first in a series of articles where we look at how government organisations use web standards. Using the mass validation tool from a previous article Validating an entire site, we have a look at our first contestant: USA. The result: only 14 of 546 government web sites tested use valid HTML." http://tinyurl.com/74hzx +14: TOOLS. ATutor "ATutor is an Open Source Web-based Learning Content Management System (LCMS) designed with accessibility and adaptability in mind. Administrators can install or update ATutor in minutes, and develop custom templates to give ATutor a new look. Educators can quickly assemble, package, and redistribute Web-based instructional content, easily retrieve and import prepackaged content, and conduct their courses online. Students learn in an adaptive learning environment." http://atutor.ca/ ATalker add-on for ATutor "ATalker is a Web-based text-to-speech add-on for ATutor, based on the Festival text-to-speech system. Using synthesized speech, ATalker can read text out loud over the Web. With the ATalker Theme installed, the ATutor interface and feedback messages can be read out loud. ATalker can currently produce English and Spanish voices. The potential for many other languages is available through the Mbrola Project." http://atutor.ca/atalker/index.php +15: TYPOGRAPHY Typography and the User Interface By Daniel Kuo. "While processing speed and computational flexibility have grown at incredible rates, our displays, the most human-facing elements of our digital lives, lag behind. Visual designer Daniel Kuo explores the issues related to selecting fonts that don't just look good on paper, but that work on a wide variety of display qualities." http://tinyurl.com/86btg +16: USABILITY. Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005 Jakob Nielsen "The oldies continue to be goodies -- or rather, baddies -- in the list of design stupidities that irked users the most in 2005." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designmistakes.html The Struggles of Having an Elastic Layout By Robert Nyman. For the moment, I'm working on a fairly big project where the interface design will be elastic. What do I mean by elastic? Basically, there are three ways one can choose to design the interfaceÕs relation to the visitorÕs resolution and web browser window size. http://tinyurl.com/9eec5 Liquid Designs By Christian Montoya. "The purpose of Liquid Designs is to promote the use of liquid layouts in CSS based design. There are a lot of gallery websites out there, and most of the websites featured are less than 800 pixels wide, while a few are 1000 pixels wide...Liquid Designs exists to showcase those websites that have succeeded at liquid design, and serve as a resource to those exploring it. Liquid Designs includes layouts that are purely liquid (also called fluid), mixed liquid and fixed, and progressive." http://liquid.rdpdesign.com Free Usability Advice By Expero. "The 'Free Usability Advice' weblog is a service provided by the design and usability experts at Expero Inc., creators of user experience solutions for software products and websites." http://www.freeusabilityadvice.com/ +17: XML. The More Things Change By Micah Dubinko. "In the final XML-Deviant column, Micah Dubinko offers a retrospective of XML and discusses some of the enduring topics of debate in the XML-developer community." http://tinyurl.com/8fkxr [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.]