+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 4, Issue 24, December 2, 2005. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 24 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: FLASH. 07: JAVASCRIPT. 08: MISCELLANEOUS. 09: PHP. 10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 11: TOOLS. 12: TYPOGRAPHY. 13: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 14: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 By W3C. The new public draft of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 has been published. http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/ Understanding WCAG 2.0 By W3C. "This document, 'Understanding WCAG 2.0,' is an essential guide to understanding and using 'Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0' [WCAG20]. It is part of a series of documents which support WCAG 2.0. WCAG 2.0 establishes a set of "success criteria" to define conformance to the WCAG 2.0 Guidelines. A success criterion is a testable statement that will be either true or false when applied to specific Web content. 'Understanding WCAG 2.0' provides detailed information about each success criterion including its intent; the key terms that are used in the success criterion; examples of Web content that meets the success criteria using various Web technologies (for instance, across HTML, CSS, XML) and common examples of Web content that does not meet the success criterion. Finally, this document also explains how the success criteria in WCAG 2.0 help people with different types of disabilities." http://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/ HTML Techniques for WCAG 2.0 By W3C. "This document provides information to Web content developers who wish to satisfy the success criteria of 'Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0' [WCAG20] (currently a W3C Working Draft). The techniques in this document are specific to Hypertext Markup Language content [HTML4], [XHTML1] although some techniques contain Cascading Style Sheet [CSS1] and ECMAScript solutions. Use of the illustrative techniques provided in this document may make it more likely for Web content to demonstrate conformance to WCAG 2.0 success criteria (by passing the relevant tests in the WCAG 2.0 test suite - to be developed) than if these illustrative techniques are not used." http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-HTML-TECHS/ Involving Users in Web Accessibility Evaluation By The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). "The document introduces: benefits of including people with disabilities; ('users') in Web accessibility evaluation throughout development; involving users effectively in different types of evaluations; including diverse users; analyzing accessibility problems; drawing conclusions and reporting; resources for more information." http://www.w3.org/WAI/eval/users.html Testing with Screen Readers: A Hypothetical Conversation By Paul Bohman. "Paul Bohman takes a conversational approach in this article answering common questions he receives about using screen readers for testing the accessibility of web content." http://www.webaim.org/techniques/articles/screenreader_testing/ Four Different Ways To Test Web Accessibility By Joe Clark. Joe Clark summarizes a comparative study in accessibility testing: Expert web developers with screen readers caught the highest number of accessibility errors. http://blog.fawny.org/2005/10/10/jen/ Accessibility is Optimization By Matt Bailey. "More than just accessibility and search engine optimization, the accessibility checkpoints also provide a comprehensive outline for marketing a website. A consistent, easy to read layout of the content and navigation can help a site in building conversions, not just rankings. Ultimately the measure of any website is the number of conversions, be it sales, leads, ad clicks, etc. When site owners and managers start to realize this, the emphasis will be where it counts - on the bottom line and how to improve it." http://tinyurl.com/8nmhv Inaccessibility of CAPTCHA By W3C. "A common method of limiting access to services made available over the Web is visual verification of a bitmapped image. This presents a major problem to users who are blind, have low vision, or have a learning disability such as dyslexia. This document examines a number of potential solutions that allow systems to test for human users while preserving access by users with disabilities." http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/NOTE-turingtest-20051123/ CAPTCHA Paper Updated By Matt May. "At long last, the update to the paper I wrote (with the help and support of the WAI Protocols and Formats Working Group has been published as a W3C Working Group Note...Weighing in at a hefty 3,000 words, it's pretty long, even for me. It's more than most people ever need to know about visual verification schemes. But hidden in there is a call to think about the problem you're solving before relying on CAPTCHAs as a panacea. In some cases, outside of accessibility factors, its use is overkill. And in others, it may provide a dangerous false sense of security. The new paper also gets into details the older version didn't, and offers actual guidance at the end for solving the problem. The short version is as follows..." http://www.bestkungfu.com/archive/date/2005/11/captcha-paper-updated/ CAPTCHA is Dead By Matt May. "As if you needed more evidence from me that CAPTCHA is a bad idea, here's some more: Amazon has just made automated Turing tests obsolete..." http://www.bestkungfu.com/archive/date/2005/11/captcha-is-dead/ W3C Formally Dislikes the CAPTCHA By Matt Bailey. "The W3c has created a formal document on the inaccessibility of CAPTCHA (Turing Test) as a security device on sites as a means of keeping automated bots from registering as users. The main criticism of CAPTCHA has been the inability of blind, dyslexic or other vision-impaired users to use pass the test of identifying characters in a low-contrast or difficult-to-read bitmap..." http://tinyurl.com/8ayhh Visual Verification: Potential New Audio CAPTCHA Solution By Darrell Shandrow, Blind Access Journal. "Some in the technology industry justify the ongoing inaccessibility of their visual verification schemes due to the claimed 'expense' of implementing solutions such as audio CAPTCHA. Let's evaluate a potential solution that could be built entirely on open source or otherwise easily available technologies at a sufficiently low cost to insist upon its implementation..." http://nu7i.blogspot.com/2005/11/visual-verification-potential-new.html +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Printing a Book with CSS: Boom! By Bert Bos and Hakon Wium Lie. "You like microformats? We'll give you some freakin' microformats. CSS luminaries Bert Bos and Hakon Wium Lie introduce the boom! microformat and show you how to make book the easy way." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/boom A Print CSS Primer By Kenji Ross. "Kenji Ross, web developer...has kindly written a very concise yet informative tutorial on how to use CSS to generate printer-friendly pages. Note, however, that this feature of CSS only works in standards compliant browsers (i.e., it won't work in Netscape 4.7x, the undisputed king of non-compliance)." http://www.tufts.edu/webcentral/tutorials/printcss/ What are CSS Tables? By Stefan Mischook. "...This article is theoretical - CSS tables are not supported by the browsers yet, and cannot be used. I wrote this article to make a few points and to expose people to lessons learned in software development: that grids are an excellent way to layout user interfaces..." http://www.killersites.com/blog/2005/what-are-css-tables/ Changingman Layout By Andy Clarke and James Edwards. "Changingman, a liquid three column CSS layout with a fixed positioned and width centre column, released under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license." http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/archives/changingman_layout.html +03: DREAMWEAVER. Show and Hide Content Based on User Access Levels By Danilo Celic. "Dreamweaver's native Log In User server behavior combined with the Restrict Access to Page server behavior can help you protect your pages from prying eyes. However, when it comes to more fine grained control of content on pages viewable by users from multiple access levels, Dreamweaver doesn't have anything built in to offer any assistance to you. Read on to learn how to show and hide content on a page based upon the access level (user group) of a logged in visitor..." http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=CEE05 +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Cognitive Walkthrough By Zhijun (William) Zhang. "Cognitive walkthrough involves one or a group of evaluators inspecting a user interface by going through a set of tasks and evaluate its understandability and ease of learning. The user interface is often presented in the form of a paper mock-up or a working prototype, but it can also be a fully developed interface. The input to the walkthrough also include the user profile, especially the users' knowledge of the task domain and of the interface, and the task cases. The evaluators may include human factors engineers, software developers, or people from marketing, documentation, etc. This technique is best used in the design stage of development. But it can also be applied during the code, test, and deployment stages." http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~zwz22/CognWalk.htm +05: EVENTS. TechEd International Conference and Exposition March 27-29, 2006. Pasadena, California U.S.A. http://www.techedevents.org +06: FLASH. Adding Flash Video to Dreamweaver 8 By Tom Green. "Sometimes you just have to wonder how the guys at Macromedia do it. For example, web video is suddenly all the rage thanks to Flash Professional 8, those wonderful people at On2 and Sorenson and the folks at Adobe who provide the video editing software. It is enough to make a web developer's head spin. Suddenly we are confronted with putting web video in our web pages because clients see the neat stuff the 'Cool Kids' over on the Flash side of the street are doing and we get caught with a '"Me too!' The guys at Macromedia must have anticipated this because they did something with Flash Video in Dreamweaver 8 that is rather amazing; they made it even easier to use. Best off all, it is free." http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=A98BB +07: JAVASCRIPT. The JavaScript Diaries: Part 10 By Lee Underwood. " There are four objects that provide information about the environment of the user's system. They belong to the window object: navigator, screen, history and location. These objects are used to obtain information such as screen size and resolution, color depth of the monitor, limited information on the browser history, and the URL. In addition, information such as the user's operating system, including the browser type, version and language can also be obtained." http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/diaries/10/ The JavaScript Diaries: Part 11 By Lee Underwood. "In this installment we take a look at JavaScript arrays. This is a process of study that will span several installments because arrays can be very useful in creating different types of scripts. At first they can be somewhat confusing but in time they become easier to understand." http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/diaries/11/ On Web 2.0 By Bruce Lawson. "There's a lot of talk about the so-called Web 2.0 at the moment, and I'm in two minds about what I think. On the one hand...It could genuinely be the Web is metamorphosing from rather dull dumb-terminals sending and receiving screenfulls of data - just like the IBM MVS terminals I used to use in 1988 - to a rich, asynchronous, application-like environment...On the other hand, I have two worries. The first is my natural scepticism (some might say 'cynicism') about the hype....I also worry about accessibility. It strikes me that people are so busy adding extra Ajax loveliness that the separate stripped-down 'html-only' versions they offer are unthinkingly accepted as a legitimate sop to people with disabilities. We reject separate 'text-only sites' in Web 1.0 ; why should we accept them in 'Web 2.0?? Don't misunderstand me here. I love Google's maps, gmail etc, and have never believed that accessibility means bringing everything down to the lowest common denominator. Truly creative and thoughtful coding will ensure graceful degradation of the 'rich user experience', not banish those without JavaScript to the basement. But in the rush to 'Ajaxify' everything (whether it actually serves a useful purpose other than saying 'ooh look at me I'm web 2.0 too!'), the majority of developers are not properly thinking through the accessibility ramifications." http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/index.php/2005/on-web-20/ JavaScript and 'Serious' Programmers By Peter-Paul Koch. "For at least a year I've been worried about the total lack of relation between JavaScript and 'serious' programmers. Unfortunately it seems as if JavaScript is still beneath their notice. That starts to annoy me. The advent of Ajax makes a solution to this problem mandatory. Who will create the Ajax applications? Those who don't know how to write an application, or those who don't know the language the application will be written in?" http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2005/11/javascript_and_1.html +08: MISCELLANEOUS. Interview: Mark Trammell By D. Keith Robinson. "I normally teach students with a mix of business, computer science and artistic backgrounds. A designer that wants to please a client in the long term must be able to draw on a broad set of skills that pull on concepts from all three of these areas. I'm not suggesting that a successful designer has to be an expert or hold degrees in all of these areas" http://www.digital-web.com/articles/mark_trammell/ +09: PHP. PHP 5.1 Released "The PHP development team is proud to announce the release of PHP 5.1.0..." http://www.php.net/downloads.php#v5 PHP Problems By Noel Davis. "Welcome to Security Alerts, an overview of recent Unix and open source security advisories. In this column, we look at problems in PHP, Emacs, ftpd-ssl, Lynx, Roaring Penguin pppoe, OpenVPN, RAR, Fedora Core X-Chat, HP-UX xterm, libungif4, and GpsDrive." http://tinyurl.com/8knoq +10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Beyond New Professionalism By Holly Marie Koltz. "...At the EduTF we realize there are no excuses and we also see many reasons why standards and accessible techniques are not being taught...Many schools are not teaching standards, guidelines, accessibility, and best practices. They are teaching the opposite. Just a few weeks ago a frustrated student in a web program contacted our EduTF and told us that he had to use table markup for layout on his final project even though he was aware of and knows how to use standards and CSS. If he did not use the table for layout, his grade would have been marked down. The student in the program is enrolled to get a degree so his work and skills are more recognized. There is something seriously wrong with this situation. What will that degree mean? Does it represent a quality education where needed skills are taught? No. The same student is keeping in touch with us and sent us information on his current course, a web scripting course which offers up the advice of not to use CSS. It's not important to single this institution and program out, because there are many more out there. Many of us feel that this situation and others like it represent the majority of educational institutions. We need to address this issue...Standards, guidelines, accessibility, and separation skills need to be taught to developers and designers. We need better applications, software, and content management solutions. We need better e-commerce applications, better educational software, and coursewares. So developers in computer science departments need to know and learn these standards, too." http://www.webstandards.org/buzz/archive/2005_11.html#a000591 Educating the Educators By Vicki Berry. "An emerging discussion on the Web Standards Group (WSG) email list has brought up some interesting points on the quality of web design and development instruction in tertiary institutions. I don't have any statistics to back this up (and would be surprised if any formal study has been conducted) but there is strong anecdotal evidence that the majority of institutes of higher learning don't teach web standards - and when they do, it's with a wishy-washy attitude..." http://www.unheardword.com/archives/2005/09/08/educating-the-educators/ Learning and Teaching Web Standards By Julian Rickards. "If I am going to continue to teach the use of Dreamweaver and adhere to Web standards, I must make the effort to learn and understand the XHTML DTD and specifications as well as the CSS specifications. Not unlike researching during my M.Sc., I should go to the original sources and learn from them." http://pen-and-ink.ca/?p=48 Encouraging Web Standards By Vicki Berry. "I'm a bit concerned, after some recent comments on some of the email lists (which shall remain nameless!) to which I subscribe, about the attitude of some web standards advocates towards others...Many of us don't even hear the term 'web standards' until we've already learned a different way. And then we need to somehow hear about the resources where information about web standards can be found. It take time and effort (and therefore money, because time is money) to re-train. And it's a process. It's not instant. I know a lot more than I did, but I'm still learning. Who is not still learning?" http://tinyurl.com/d58gr Knowing Our Craft By Mike Davies. "The web standards community has spoken. If you are still building websites with table layout, you are just an amateur. Professionals use CSS for layout, and the benefits of doing so seem to be well established. The web is one of the few areas where standing still means you are really moving backwards. Web development is on ongoing learning process. Any developer who stops learning is effectively falling further and further behind on the web. What was great in 1996 is perhaps a very bad idea in 2006..." http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/standards/KnowingOurCraft Go Out, Be Loud, Be Positive. Build a Profession. By Cameron Adams. "From what I can see of most higher education Web courses they barely know what to teach as the essentials, let alone give their students a decent understanding of each and every competing standard or practice that pops up on a regular five minute cycle. Part of our job is still convincing clients that what we do has value. As much as I'd like to think it, even the Standards set out by the W3C are not well developed enough -- or even well known enough by the majority of people in our industry -- to form a codified body of knowledge which could be the basis of a profession. And as far I see it, this isn't a bad thing, just a challenge. The Internet is so immature we don't even know whether we'll be coding HTML and CSS in five years, so don't beat on the people who haven't yet decided to join the party. I don't know about you, but I'm in this because I have an opportunity to shape something, to contribute to something completely new." http://www.themaninblue.com/writing/perspective/2005/11/25/ The New Amateurs By Peter-Paul Koch. "Basically the idea is that any web developer who refuses to learn CSS and modern, unobtrusive JavaScript, either from ignorance or from a refusal to break old habits, is no longer worthy of the name 'professional'..." http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2005/11/the_new_amateur.html The New Amateurs - part 2 By Peter-Paul Koch. "To my astonishment it turns out that some New Amateurs read my site, and that some of them even agree with me. It seems they aren't even too much annoyed by the label 'amateurs'. Great! Let's review a few of their arguments." http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2005/11/the_new_amateur_1.html +11: TOOLS. TAW (Web Accessibility Test) By CTIC Foundation (Centre for the Development of Information and Communication Technologies in Asturias). "TAW (Web Accessibility Test) is a tool for the automatic analysis of Web sites, based on the W3C - Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG 1.0)". http://www.tawdis.net/taw3/cms/en +12: TYPOGRAPHY. Web Browser Vendors are Also Responsible for Accessibility By Robert Nyman. "First, we developed layouts based on pixels. Along came accessibility and scalability, and we started to specify our fonts with ems instead. Then, those of us who wanted to be really out there created whole layouts using ems, so the whole layout would scale accordingly to the user's current text size setting, giving a more consistent design impression. Hand in hand with this, we also created layouts that were elastic, expanding but with a fixed maximum and/or minimum width." http://tinyurl.com/7pys8 +13: USABILITY. What's Different About Writing for the Web By Trenton Moss. "Writing for the web is totally different to writing for printed matter. We tend to scan content on the web hunting for the information we're after, as opposed to reading word-for-word. As a result of this, there are certain guidelines you should be sure to follow when writing copy for your website..." http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article2484.asp Resurrect Your Writing, Redeem Your Soul By Jennie Robinson. "Bad writing that has been 'Webified' can look great on screen and to search engines, but to human beings, it's still just bad writing. Applying the new rules of Web writing to muddled thoughts is a bit like hiding dirty hands in clean gloves." http://digital-web.com/articles/resurrect_your_writing_redeem_your_soul/ Why People Don't Read Online and What to do About It By Michelle Cameron. It's been proven that two things people will look at on the screen are bullet points and numbered lists. Knowing that, use them. It's called content chunking, and, as you can see from many of our own pieces, it's an effective way to pull the eye." http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v6i40_cameron.html Power to the People By D. Keith Robinson. "Relentlessly simple solutions to complex design problems can be the difference between an average experience and a great one. D. Keith Robinson reminds web designers and developers that ease of use is more important than technological sophistication." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/powertothepeople Is Your Homepage Immature? By Indi Young. "Every large corporation has a marketing strategy that outlines what it wants to say to customers, but many of them still aren't using their homepages effectively to highlight that message." http://adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/ Nino Doll: Great Web Design and a Great Cause By Gerry McGovern. "You can't administer a website; you have to manage it. If Google administered its website, then every time it released a new tool or service, it would add it to its homepage. If you don't have genuine management authority for your website today, you must carefully build the business case for why you should be given that authority. If you let your website grow wild, you destroy rather than create value. That's not good for your organization, and it is certainly not good for your career. What's the hard core of what your organization can offer on your website? Relentlessly strip away the clutter. The Web rewards those who do a little well-and become known for what they do well-rather than a lot poorly." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2005/nt-2005-11-28-nino-doll.htm Workers Waste 10 Percent of Their Time Fighting with Technology By Lyle Kantrovich. "From Scotsman.com: We have the technology, now tell us how to use it. 'Office workers waste up to a month a year trying to figure out how to use their computers properly because modern technology is so complicated, a new study warns'..." http://tinyurl.com/cw4od [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.]