+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 4, Issue 18, October 27, 2005. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 18 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. Simply Accessible By Derek Featherstone. "The materials in this site formed the basis of a presentation at Web Essentials 05, in Sydney, Australia delivered by Derek Featherstone." http://simplyaccessible.org/ Creating Accessible Forms By WebAim. "...Forms can also pose accessibility problems. When we talk about the accessibility of forms, we are usually referring about their accessibility to screen readers and the visually impaired. People with other types of disabilities generally are less affected by faulty forms that are missing some of the HTML accessibility features. It should be noted, however, that everyone benefits from a well-organized form, especially those with cognitive disabilities. Visual layout can be important to those who have sight. The less explanation that a form needs, the better. Still, the focus of this exercise is mainly to make a form that can be read by a screen reader." http://www.webaim.org/techniques/forms/ Form Help Without Popups By Gez Lemon. "Thrusting new windows upon visitors of your site is frowned upon, as it goes against device independence by assuming a windowed environment. One situation where developers feel that a new window is appropriate is with web forms. If the visitor requires help on a form field, a new window saves the visitor the trouble of having to leave the form, and possibly losing the data they have entered. This article illustrates a scripting technique to get around the problem without having to open a new window." http://juicystudio.com/article/form-help-without-popups.html Lists and Screen Readers By Mel Pedley. "Use ordered lists by all means but please stay away from roman numerals. No matter how attractive they may appear within a graphical browser, they will almost certainly reduce your carefully marked up text to audio garbage within a screen reader." http://www.blackwidows.org.uk/wpress/?p=43 +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. A CSS Framework By Mike Stenhouse. "In my Modular CSS article I documented the possibility of breaking down stylesheets into components that could be reused across projects. All well and good. The next logical step is to extend this to become a CSS framework, allowing rapid development of sites with pre-written and tested components. All that's really required to produce this is a set of naming conventions and a flexible base template..." http://www.contentwithstyle.co.uk/Articles/17/a-css-framework/ Maintainability, a.k.a. The CSS Elephant Simon Willison. "Now that even Slashdot has made the move to CSS it's safe to say that the CSS advocacy battle is slowly being won. It's time to talk about the elephant in the corner of the room: stylesheet maintainability." http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2005/09/26/maintainability Maintainable CSS By Nathan Steiner. "Simon Willison put a call out for advice on creating maintainable CSS. Here are some collected thoughts on the matter, please keep in mind that quite a bit of this is just personal preference." http://web-graphics.com/mtarchive/001649.php My Top Ten CSS Tricks By Trenton Moss. "For years, designers have manipulated CSS to meet their needs. Now Trenton has compiled his favorite tips to help you get more out of your designs. From page-width, the text-transform command, and IE-specific tricks, to hints on creating CSS documents for hand-held devices, these powerful tips will save you time and hassle." http://www.sitepoint.com/article/top-ten-css-tricks +03: DREAMWEAVER. Introduction to Designing with CSS--Part 1: Understanding CSS Design Concepts By Adrian Senior. "Use CSS to style XHTML page elements and lay out pages, and learn about the importance of semantic markup...Note: This article has been updated for Dreamweaver 8." http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/css_concepts.html Introduction to Designing with CSS--Part 2: Defining Style Properties and Working with Floats By Adrian Senior. "Learn how to set up default properties for your HTML elements and override them with specificity...Note: This article has been updated for Dreamweaver 8." http://tinyurl.com/c3d37 Using Insert Div Tag in Dreamweaver MX 2004 By Virginia DeBolt. "One of the impediments to taking full advantage of CSS for users of Dreamweaver in the past has been the lack of an way to create a div with anything but the Draw Layer tool. In Dreamweaver MX 2004, Macromedia added a tool called Insert Div Tag for just that purpose. Unfortunately, most of the books I have seen that describe the use of Dreamweaver MX 2004 are not giving enough information about how Insert Div Tag can be used. This tutorial is meant to fill the gap." http://www.webteacher.ws/insertdiv.html +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Time Budgets for Usability Sessions By Jakob Nielsen. "Up to 40 percent of precious testing time is wasted while users engage in nonessential activities. Far better to focus on watching users perform tasks with the target interface design." http://useit.com/alertbox/usability_sessions.html +05: EVENTS. d.Construct November 11, 2005. Brighton, United Kingdom http://www.clearleft.com/services/training/dconstruct.php Web Essentials 05 Podcasts If you missed Web Essentials 05 in Sydney, you can listen to many of the sessions. Download their podCasts and tune into a web development conference 'by developers for developers'. http://we05.com/podcast/ +06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Authority By Peter Morville. This article talks about the subjects of Wikipedia, folksonomy, tag clouds, and social facts. It raises issues of accuracy, objectivity, currency, and the judgment of authority. http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000057.php +07: JAVASCRIPT. The JavaScript STL (Standard Template Library). Part 1 By Guyon Roche. "One of the obstacles that programmers encounter when developing with different programming languages is that each language has its own "culture" and ways of getting things done. Sometimes different instances of the same language can suffer from this malady. This adds a complexity to software development that would be a waste of time if it weren't so necessary. In the C++ programming language (where I spend the other half of my programming life), a solution to this kind of problem has been developed, standardized and wholeheartedly adopted by developers worldwide. It's called the Standard Template Library or STL for short. I won't go into too much detail about the specification of the STL as a quick search on the Internet will bring up numerous sites about it. This article is intended to present a JavaScript implementation of the STL and that is what I will focus on." http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/gr/column13/ The JavaScript STL (Standard Template Library). Part 2 By Guyon Roche. "The list collection is organized as a linked list of nodes that hold references to the values stored in the list..." http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/gr/column14/ The JavaScript STL (Standard Template Library) Part 3 By Guyon Roche. "In the first two articles of this series I introduced three collections of the JavaScript Template Library, including list, vector and deque. This week, I explore the magic of iterators and introduce a new class of sorted collection that includes set, map, multiset and multimap." http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/gr/column15/ +08: MISCELLANEOUS. Ten Questions for Patrick Lauke By Russ Weakley. "Patrick Lauke talks about photography, CSS, the Zen Garden, accessibility, SMIL and the WASP accessibility Task Force." http://webstandardsgroup.org/features/patrick-lauke.cfm Interviews: Jeremy Keith By Aaron Gustafson. "A lot of Web developers who tried DHTML years ago got burned, and theyÕre wary of getting burned again. Applying the term DOM scripting to the new, standards-based way of writing JavaScript helps to distance it from the stigma of old-school DHTML." http://www.digital-web.com/articles/jeremy_keith/ Never Get Involved in a Land War in Asia (or Build a Website for No Reason) By Greg Storey. "If you don't know what the website you're working on is supposed to _do_, it's going to be really hard to succeed. Greg Storey offers a simple web strategy development process for everyone." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/landwarinasia +09: NAVIGATION. Ambient Findability: Findability Hacks By Peter Morville. "In this excerpt from his new book, Ambient Findability, Peter Morville explains why findability is a required element of good design and engineering--and what that means for you." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/ambientfindability The 7-11 Milk Experiment: How Does Site Design Affect Revenue? By Christine Perfetti. "In our latest study, users only purchased 30% of the time! So, what was happening here? We found that on most of the sites, users just couldn't find what they were looking for and that the siteÕs organization was to blame." http://tinyurl.com/dna8w Milk vs. Wood Screws By Eric A. Meyer. "Over at UIEÕs Brain Sparks, the brilliant and lovely Christine Perfetti talked recently about the 7-11 Milk test, and how web sites fail this test 70% of the time. I'm glad to see that they intend to do more research on the topic, because I think thereÕs a lot more to the story than just buying milk, and I hope thatÕs factored into the future research. Buying on web sites, to me, is not really a 7-11 milk purchase. ItÕs more like trying to buy a wood screw for a specific purpose at Home Depot when I'm used to buying them at a corner market..." http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2005/09/26/milk-vs-wood-screws/ +10: PHP. PHP 101 (part 11): Sinfully Simple An introduction to PHP's easiest method for dealing with XML. (PHP 5 ONLY) By Vikram Vaswani. "Unless you've been hiding in a cave for the last few years, you've heard about XML - it's the toolkit that more and more Web publishers are switching to for content markup. You may even have seen an XML document in action, complete with user-defined tags and markup, and you might have wondered how on earth one converts that tangled mess of code into human-readable content. The answer is, not easily. While PHP has included support for the two standard methods of parsing (read: making sense of) XML - SAX and DOM - since version 4.0, the complexity and inherent geekiness of these methods often turned off all but the most dedicated XML developers. All that has changed, however, with PHP 5.0, which introduces a brand-spanking-new XML extension named SimpleXML that takes all (and I do mean all) the pain out of processing XML documents. Keep reading, and find out how. " http://www.zend.com/php/beginners/php101-11.php PHP 101 (part 12): Bugging Out Basic error handling in PHP 4 and PHP 5. By Vikram Vaswani. "Even the best developers make mistakes sometimes. That's why most programming languages - including PHP - come with built-in capabilities to catch errors and take remedial action. This action can be as simple as displaying an error message, or as complex as sending the site administrator an email with a complete stack trace. To make it easier to do this, PHP comes with a full-featured error handling API that can be used to trap and resolve errors. In addition to deciding which types of errors a user sees, you can also replace the built-in error handling mechanism with your own custom (and usually more creative) functions. If you're using PHP 5, you get a bonus: a spanking-new exception model, which lets you wrap your code in Java-like try-catch() blocks for more efficient error handling. In this edition of PHP 101, I'm going to discuss all these things, giving you a crash course in how to add error-handling to your PHP application. Keep reading - this is pretty cool stuff!" http://www.zend.com/php/beginners/php101-12.php Core Web Application Development with PHP and MySQL, Part 1 By Marc Wandschneider. This content is excerpted from Chapter 13 of the new book, "Core Web Application Development with PHP and MySQL." http://www.webreference.com/programming/php_mysql/ +11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. W3C Compliance and SEO By Dave Davies. "With more and more competition for top search engine positioning every advantage helps. This article outlines how W3C compliance can help your SEO efforts (and visitor experience) and provides resources to help you bring your site into compliance." http://evolt.org/w3c-compliance-and-seo SlashdotÕs Validity By Eric A. Meyer. "Slashdot, the venerable geek portal so infamous for its ability to kill web servers with a single link that the siteÕs name is a verb meaning 'to bring a server grinding to a halt'." http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2005/09/25/slashdots-validity/ +12: TOOLS. Back Links Analyzer By Aaron Wall. "A free link popularity / link analysis tool. It shows what anchor text is linking into a page or site...System Requirements: Backlink Analyzer currently is a Windows only application. Going forward I am hoping to make it system independent. " http://tools.seobook.com/backlink-analyzer/ +13: USABILITY. Is Home Page Design Relevant Anymore? By Jared Spool. "...In studying users visiting sites, we learned a long time ago that there are only two important functions for a home page: 1.) The home page delivers the content to the user that they are seeking, such as the top story on CNN, OR 2.) The home page provides strong scent to those pages that contain the content the user seeks. Those are the only two things users care about on a home page..." http://tinyurl.com/cmnz3 University Websites Come of Age By Gerry McGovern. "University websites have matured significantly over the last 2-3 years. There are fewer pictures of buildings and smiling faces, and greater focus on helping students decide why they should enroll." http://tinyurl.com/cu8ee R.I.P. WYSIWYG By Jakob Nielsen. "Macintosh-style interaction design has reached its limits. A new paradigm, called results-oriented UI, might well be the way to empower users in the future." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/wysiwyg.html Beware of False Prophets... By Peter Merholz. "Causing a buzz among folks who design websites and software is Jakob's latest Alertbox 'R.I.P. WYSIWYG'...What not mentioned until the very end (after the content) is that a Design Research Lead is speaking at the User Experience event on the Results-Oriented UI. By not mentioning it at the outset, it feels like Jakob is marketing Microsoft in his Alertbox to promote his workshop. And I strongly question this part..." http://www.peterme.com/archives/000623.html Scary Download Times at Halloween Sites By Andy King. "We test five top Halloween shopping sites for speed and accessibility. Ghouls, goblins, and usability gotchas await visitors brave enough to browse these haunted home pages. Pull up a crypt, we'll leave the fright on for you." http://www.optimizationweek.com/reviews/halloween/ +14: XML. HOWTO Avoid Being Called a Bozo When Producing XML By Henri Sivonen. "There seem to be developers who think that well-formedness is awfully hardÑif not impossibleÑto get right when producing XML programmatically and developers who can get it right and wonder why the others are so incompetent. I assume no one wants to appear incompetent or to be called names. Therefore, I hope the following list of dos and don'ts helps developers to move from the first group to the latter...This document focuses on the Unicode layer, the XML 1.0 layer and the Namespaces in XML layer. Getting higher layers like XHTML and Atom right are outside the scope of this document. Also, anything served as text/html is outside the scope of this document, although the methods described here can be applied to producing HTML. In fact, doing so is even a good idea." http://hsivonen.iki.fi/producing-xml/ [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.]