+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 4, Issue 20, November 9, 2005. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 20 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. SECTION TWO: 14: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Escape From CAPTCHA By Matt May. "CAPTCHA is a poor solution...Developers need to look at the real problem:...how much access control is needed?...how can we deliver it without breaking standards and accessibility?" http://www.w3.org/2004/Talks/0319-csun-m3m/Overview.html Breaking a Visual CAPTCHA By Greg Mori and Jitendra Malik. "This is the homepage of the Shape Contexts based approach to break Gimpy, the CAPTCHA test used at Yahoo! to screen out bots. Our method can successfully pass that test 92% of the time. See EZ-Gimpy in action at Yahoo! The approach we take uses general purpose algorithms that have been designed for generic object recognition. The same basic ideas have been applied to finding people in images, matching handwritten digits, and recognizing 3D objects." http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~mori/research/gimpy/ Shaw Trust User Testing By Dan Champion. "Accessibility was a prominent feature of ClacksWeb's development plan, reflecting its status as a local authority site and my increasing awareness of it accessibility as a critical issue. As work on the site progressed in early 2005 I undertook regular checks to make sure it was on track to deliver, both by checking against the WCAG and by using very simple tests like increasing the text size, browsing the site with Lynx, and navigating with the keyboard. Yesterday it became very clear to me just how inadequate that sort of testing was in truly determining whether or not the site was accessible." http://www.blether.com/archives/2005/10/shaw_trust_user.php +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Join Me, and Together We Can Rule the Galaxy as Father and Geeks! By Andy Clarke. "A few weeks back in Cupertino, I saw Molly and Aaron explain how the specificity of CSS selectors is calculated in a way which I hadn't seen before. Then today I came across a knotty problem while building XHTML and CSS templates for a new project where two selectors behaved differently to how I expected and I realized that I had not completed my training." http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/archives/css_specificity_wars.html CSS2 and CSS2.1 Specificity Clarified By Molly E. Holzschlag. Lest you get swept up into the stars with the imaginative Malarkey, who puts a cleverly galactic twist on describing CSS specificity, let me stop you with my own unique powers and clear up his errors before you follow his flawed math and find yourself flung back to earth most painfully. http://www.molly.com/2005/10/06/css2-and-css21-specificity-clarified/ Flexible Navigation Example By Christian Heilmann. "I was asked by a friend yesterday to review their company web site and was amazed to see table layouts with MM_ JavaScript rollover abominations still being paid good money for. One of the arguments for the old school design was that they wanted 'buttons' for navigation, and I promised to make a demo of a text/CSS navigation that does look like a nice graphical one and allow for font-resizing without breaking apart. It is nothing special, it has been done before but what the hey, have a look for yourself..." http://icant.co.uk/articles/flexible-css-menu/ Stop Using CSS Hacks Now By Roger Johansson. "Still using CSS hacks for Internet Explorer? Kick the habit now or you'll be sorry..." Be sure to check out the comments. http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200510/stop_using_css_hacks_now/ IE Blog: Replace Your Old Hacks With a New One! By Ben Buchanan. "No doubt you've seen this: IEBlog : Call to action: The demise of CSS hacks and broken pages. Microsoft is telling us to replace CSS hacks with a new, officially-sanctioned hack (yeah, the perfect solution). Instead of fixing the rendering engine in IE7, they're telling us to use conditional comments and write a separate stylesheet all for IE (because it's special). It would be far better to just make the rendering engine work properly, so it obeyed the standard rules and ignored the hack rules... you know, just like standards-compliant browsers do. Then we'd just remove the IE6 hacks when IE6 became irrelevant in the marketplace. But no, MS wants us to edit every single document we have..." http://tinyurl.com/cns2w +03: DREAMWEAVER. Tip: Dreamweaver 8 CSS Styles Panel Improvements By Virginia DeBolt. "Dreamweaver 8 is more CSS-friendly than previous versions. I'm going to describe a couple of welcome improvements in the CSS Styles panel..." http://www.webteacher.ws/2005/10/tip-dreamweaver-8-css-styles-panel.html Introduction to Designing with CSS--Part 5: Defining Columns and Vertical List Navigation By Adrian Senior. "Easily change your page's navigational design by making quick updates in your CSS file...Note: This article has been updated for Dreamweaver 8." http://tinyurl.com/cf88r Introduction to Designing with CSS--Part 6: Deciding Whether to Float or Position Columns By Adrian Senior. "Use alternative methods for creating two-column layouts and learn the strengths and weaknesses of each...Note: This article has been updated for Dreamweaver 8." http://tinyurl.com/buxfe +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Usability Test Planning By DeeDee DeMulling. "Usability Testing has work activities that come together before going out to do the study..." http://tinyurl.com/bd9s4 +05: EVENTS. SITE 2006 Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education International Conference March 20-24, 2006. Orlando, Florida U.S.A. http://site.aace.org/conf/ +06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Information Architecture in an European Dimension: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats By Peter J. Bogaards. "Presentation from Europe's first information architecture summit - 'This talk will take an analytical but subjective approach to the current state-of-affairs of (continental) European IA. The local IA communities of practice, knowledge and interest seem still premature, fragmented and not well-connected. Even if there is such a thing as an European IA community, it lacks a solid identity and definitely a strategy.'" http://www.bogieland.com/euroia_2005.htm +07: JAVASCRIPT. Using Ajax By Phil Ballard. "Page update without refresh using Javascript, PHP and XML's XMLHTTPRequest object (also known as 'remote scripting')" http://www.mousewhisperer.co.uk/ajax_page.html AJAX: Getting Started By Mozilla Developer Center (Also known "Devmo", short for "DEVeloper.Mozilla.Org"). "This article guides you through the AJAX basics and gives you two simple hands-on examples to get you started." http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/AJAX:Getting_Started Is AJAX Here to Stay? By Jordan Frank. "Jordan Frank takes a high-level look at the way AJAX is changing the Web and whether it's a technology that's going to stick around." http://tinyurl.com/9lom2 Take Command With AJAX By Stoyan Stefanov. "Want to get a bang out of your AJAX artillery? In this hands-on tutorial, Stoyan puts AJAX on the front line as he develops a Web app with which you can execute shell commands on your Web server. The downloadable code provides a real tactical advantage as Stoyan marshals JavaScript and XML to create the app." http://www.sitepoint.com/article/take-command-ajax +08: MISCELLANEOUS. Audio Interview with Jakob Nielsen By Larry Magid. "To design a usable website, designers need to think how the user is going to use their website rather than present him with what they want him to see." http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail670.html Web 2.0: Is It Just Hype? By Meryl Evans. "The term is hype. That is all it is. Hype. Cry and scream, if you want, but the Web can't have a label like this. It's not a project with a start and finish timeline. It evolves. When the first phone came to be, it didn't get names like Phone 1.0 or Phone BC (before cell). The phone industry involved and now the lines are blurring between phones and Internet connections, even cable television. But, the thoughts and ideas behind it are important..." http://www.meryl.net/articles/archives/003870.php +09: NAVIGATION. Basics of Search Engine Optimization By Roger Johansson. At my day job, we're contacted every now and then by clients asking about search engine positioning and optimization. Most of the time the client has been approached by an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) consultant trying to talk them into paying lots of money for search engine optimization. The SEO firms promise 'guaranteed top results' and 'submission to 500 000 search engines and directories'. http://tinyurl.com/449me The Role of Alignment in Web design By Joe Clark. "I have here a curious paper by Parush et al., 'Impact of Visual Layout Factors in Performance in Web Pages: A Cross-Language Study.' The researchers attempt to generalize from user-interface research on application software and what little research there is on Web sites...It seems that the more links you've got on a page, the harder it is to find the one you want. I suppose that is true if all the links are blue underlined, as all were in the study, but real-world Web pages don't look like that, so the entire experiment is pretty much irrelevant, from what I can see. If I have to find a link on a page, I use type-ahead find." http://blog.fawny.org/2005/10/10/parush/ +10: PHP. PHP 101 (part 14): Going to the Polls Putting the pieces together - a first Web application. By Vikram Vaswani. "Over the final two chapters of this tutorial, I'm going to guide you through the process of creating two real-world PHP applications. Not only will this introduce you to practical application development with PHP, but it will also give you an opportunity to try out all the theory you've imbibed over the past weeks." http://www.zend.com/php/beginners/php101-14.php +11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. The State of the Art in Australian Web Development By John Allsopp. "In a way, I found the results somewhat depressing. I had expected quite a bit better, to be frank. In terms of validation, structural and semantic HTML and accessibility, there is little evidence that the significant majority of sites are doing things any differently than half a decade ago. But on reflection, if we had done this survey or five years ago, we would have found little if any CSS, few if any doctype declarations, even fewer alt attributes, even more use of images for text. At least we are moving in the right direction. Let's hope when we do this survey in the future, we'll find more to be upbeat about." http://westciv.com/style_master/house/good_oil/best_practices/ Criticisms of Internet Explorer By Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticisms_of_Internet_Explorer +12: TOOLS. The Typetester By Marko Dugonjic. "The Typetester is an online application for comparison of the fonts for the screen. It's primary role is to make web designer's or web developer's life easier. As the new fonts are bundled into operating systems, the list of the common fonts will be updated." http://typetester.maratz.com/ +13: USABILITY. 9 Lessons From 9 Years of Interface Design By Luke Wroblewski. "Over the next few articles on Functioning Form, I'll dive into each of these lessons with concrete examples and explanations..." http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?209 Insights Come in All Shapes and Sizes By Luke Wroblewski. "In 2000, I flew out to San Jose to work on a product for a company called Currenex. They had a successful terminal-based client application that enabled banks and their customers to trade currencies and were looking to bring the experience online as a Web application. What greeted me there in addition to representatives from business, marketing, and engineering teams was a fifty-page report of existing user 'interviews'. In truth, however, the report was more of an activity log than a set of interviews. Each user's daily activities were chronicled minute by minute in vivid detail. Reading through the report, I was instantly..." http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?210 Writing it Down Forces You to Think it Through By Luke Wroblewski. "Within my proposals for Web application design projects, I always include the following clause when outlining project deliverables: 'Accompanying text will be included with each set of screen designs to provide a high-level overview of the design decisions made.' This portion of the project deliverables not only gives my clients an understanding of the research and rationale that went into my designs, it also forces me to rationalize the decisions I've made and explain them in a clear and concise manner. Writing down my design decisions enables me to:Solidify my design approach: Within application design, there..." http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?211 Less is More... By Luke Wroblewski. "Gradually moving away from a 'more is more' approach to 'less is more' is not unique to Web design. As most professional musicians mature, they no longer try to play as many notes as possible and instead focus on playing the right notes...For Web designers, the right 'notes' amount to the minimum amount of visual and interaction elements required to effectively communicate content and actions to end-users. Of course, the principle of 'less is more' applies to all aspects of an interface: visual design, interaction design, organizational structure, and content." http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?212 ...Except When More is More By Luke Wroblewski. "Previously I made the case that, in interface design, less is more. But as with all design principles, the real answer is 'it depends'. It depends on the context and type of information you are presenting to users as well as their goals and actions." http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?213 Patterns Occur at All Levels By Luke Wroblewski. "In order to maximize the value of patterns, designers need to be aware of common design opportunities and limitations at both macro and micro levels..." http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?217 Documentation Takes Time. Make It Worth the Effort. By Luke Wroblewski. "Documentation, after all, takes time. Internal design organizations within large companies are often moving too fast to keep records of their work. Consulting firms and studios, on the other hand, are always crunched by scope and rarely have extra 'paid' cycles to devote to documentation. Given these constraints, it's important that any effort allocated to documentation pays off..." http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?219 [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +14: 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.]