+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 4, Issue 33, February 5, 2006. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 33 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: EVENTS. 05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 06: JAVASCRIPT. 07: NAVIGATION. 08: PHP. 09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 10: TOOLS. 11: TYPOGRAPHY. 12: USABILITY. 13: XML. SECTION TWO: 14: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Seven Accessibility Mistakes (Part 1) By Christian Heilmann. "Designers, clients and site visitors all have a role to play in achieving higher levels of accessibility across the Web. In a two-part series, contributing author Christian Heilmann discusses the seven habits that fail to deliver accessibility and what you can do to create change. This week Christian brings us habits one, two and three. Be sure to visit next week for habits four, five, six and seven." http://www.digital-web.com/articles/seven_accessibility_mistakes_part_1/ Captcha Usability Revisited: Google Inaccessible to Blind People By Jesper Ronn-Jensen. "An online petition is being circulated to all Internet users for the purpose of collecting signatures showing support for Google to make its word verification scheme accessible to the blind and visually impaired..." http://tinyurl.com/a26oh WCAG 2: The Difference Between a Level and a Priority By Gez Lemon. "The draft version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) uses success criteria that is organized into three levels of conformance. The method of grouping the success criteria differs in important ways from the approach taken in WCAG 1.0 where priorities are assigned to checkpoints, but I'm buggered if I understand the importance of the new approach. It seems to me that swapping the word 'priority' with the word 'level' is meant to imply that level 3 success criteria should be considered important, whereas priority 3 checkpoints shouldn't." http://tinyurl.com/a9s57 Accessites.org "Here at Accessites.org we will prove that accessible, usable websites built with universality and standards in mind need not be boring. We will show you stunning works of art crafted by some of today's most progressive accessible web developers and designers. Join us in honoring them and the sites they meticulously and lovingly build..." http://accessites.org/home/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. In Search of the Holy Grail By Matthew Levine. "Just in case you might want a three-column layout that doesn't require the usual sacrifices, we thought we'd share this technique. Not that you'd want that or anything." http://alistapart.com/articles/holygrail Explorer Exposed! By Holly Bergevin and John Gallant. "These CSS bugs are all found only in Internet Explorer, versions 5 and higher..." http://positioniseverything.net/explorer.html Cross-Browser Strategies For CSS By Emil Stenstrom. "This article will go through some useful techniques I use to get my sites to look the same in several modern browsers..." http://friendlybit.com/css/cross-browser-strategies-for-css/ Cross Browser Issues: CSS Hacks Explained, Tips, Tricks and Fixes By Jennifer Sullivan Cassidy. "Anyone who creates Cascading Style Sheets knows that Internet Explorer is a headache of a browser to build for because of the way it handles CSS. In this article, Jennifer goes into detail about how to deal with some of the most common bugs, and notes which ones may be fixed in IE 7..." http://tinyurl.com/7fo2b CSS Standards Compliance in Internet Explorer 7 By Jennifer Sullivan Cassidy. "There has been much anticipation and intense hype surrounding the release of Internet Explorer 7. Improvements range from better security issues to customization of user features; but the excitement in some web developers has been prompted by the compliancy standards of CSS that IE 7 embraces." http://tinyurl.com/dsj7o SkimCSS By John Wiseman. "SkimCSS is web service that provides visitors with a huge collection of content all related to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)." http://www.skimcss.com/skimlist +03: DREAMWEAVER. Dreamweaver 8 Reviewed By John Wilker. "When I got my review copy of Studio 8, immediately I saved it from that suffocating shrink wrap it came in. The box sure looked nice. The packaging was first rate, much cleaner and more impressive than the MX 2004 packaging. I tossed the box on the couch, grabbed my trusty laptop and set about checking this latest and greatest offering from Macromedia..." http://www.sitepoint.com/article/dreamweaver-8-review Using the Default Documents to Speed Up Your Work Flow By Adrian Senior. "Have you wished for ways to speed up your workflow? Do you want more ideas for removing repetitive coding tasks? In this article we will look at using the Edit Document Templates extension (by Danilo Celic) to customize the New Document Templates. Talk about a Dreamweaver time-saver!" http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=6B38F +04: EVENTS. Higher Ed BlogCon 2006: Transforming Academic Communities with New Tools of the Social Web April 3-28, 2006. An all-online event http://higheredblogcon.editme.com/ Adaptive Hypermedia 2006 (AH06) June 21-23, 2006. Dublin Ireland http://www.ah2006.org/index.html +05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Taking a Content Inventory By Donna Maurer. "You take a content inventory because, before redesigning a website or intranet, you need to know what you have." http://www.maadmob.net/donna/blog/archives/000669.html +06: JAVASCRIPT. Getting Funky With Scopes and Closures By Mark Wubben. "The most powerful thing about the JavaScript programming language are it's scoping rules. In programming languages, scope is what makes the world go round. It defines the context in which the code executes. The context contains objects which are available to the code. To draw a real-world analogy: Say you're in your living room, and you want to watch some television. You can, because the television is in your living room. But what if you're in the kitchen?" http://novemberborn.net/javascript/scopes-and-closures-funk CSS Bubble Tooltips By Alessandro Fulciniti. Bubble Tooltips is some more CSS magic from Alessandro Fulciniti that creates some very nice Javascript and CSS based tooltips. As with other scripts from Alessandro, this one uses unobtrusive Javascript and degrades perfectly! http://web-graphics.com/mtarchive/001717.php +07: NAVIGATION. Best 2005: Navigation By Martin Hardee. "Don't tell your neighborhood librarian, but sometimes there just isn't a single perfect way to organize things..." http://tinyurl.com/c2pln Site Maps for Web Applications By Drew McLellan. "Site maps generally fall into two different categories:- those that document the navigational structure of the site, and those that describe interaction flow. As the days of enormous, static sites vignette to make way for sites driven by logic not links, we naturally see a shift in emphasis from navigational maps to those which document interaction. The question worth exploring, however, is can this form of documentation continue to prove both useful and a valuable investment of resources?" http://allinthehead.com/retro/279/site-maps-for-web-applications The Lazy IA's Guide to Making Sitemaps By Stephen Turbek. "Sitemaps can be useful tools and are a whole lot easier when you separate the data from the visualization. After you have done these steps a few times, you will be able to update a sitemap in under a minute." http://tinyurl.com/75mqv Why Good Website Navigation Is Important? By Warren Baker. "Web surfers are basically an impatient bunch and if a website is hard to figure out because the links are not obvious, they will click away never to return. Website navigation is one of the most crucial elements in determining the effectiveness of a website. This article discuses the basic principle of designing website navigation." http://tinyurl.com/attwn +08: PHP. PHP for the Novice Programmer By Albert Dieter Ritzhaupt. "This e-book was developed to serve as an instructional resource for students in my Introduction to the Internet course that I teach for the University of North Florida and to serve the aspiring Information Technology (IT) student as a resource to learn about and how to use PHP. My hope is that this resource will be invaluable to the IT community, and help learning what I consider to be one of the best server-side scripting languages." http://www.unf.edu/~rita0001/eresources/php_tutorials/ Improve Your Build Process with Ant By Michael Kimsal. "Web applications today are much more complex beasts than they were even just a few years ago. The largest sites may constitute thousands of files with complex directory structures, and migrating those between development, staging, and production environments can be difficult to say the least. My own experience with web applications dates back to 1996. While I've seen a lot of changes over the years, keeping a large project in check never seems to get much easier, despite advances in CPU speed, RAM prices, broadband, and communication tools..." http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/php/2005/12/20/php_ant.html Simplify PHP Development with WASP by Brian Fioca. "WASP (Web Application Structure for PHP) is a three-tier framework built on PHP 5. Lately, more software engineers are moving from cumbersome 'enterprise' languages such as Java and C# to languages such as Python and Ruby and PHP. With version 5, PHP has finally reached the point where these developers can feel at home in what used to be considered a hacker's language. By demonstrating that it is possible to create and use complicated, "enterprise-class" frameworks effectively in PHP 5, WASP will help more developers make the switch..." http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/php/2006/01/19/wasp_intro.html Not All Bugs Are Worth Fixing By Jeff Atwood. To me, triage is about one thing: making life better for your users. And the best way to do that is to base your triage decisions on data from actual usage -- via exception reporting, user feedback, and beta testing. Otherwise, triage is just a bunch of developers and testers in a room, trying to guess what users might do." http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000498.html +09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Web Authoring Statistics By Google. "...In December 2005 we did an analysis of a sample of slightly over a billion documents, extracting information about popular class names, elements, attributes, and related metadata. The results we found are available below..." http://code.google.com/webstats/index.html Inaccessible Google Web Authoring Statistics By Peter-Paul Koch. "There's just one slight problem: the actual data is totally inaccessible. The reason is that Google uses that muppet of Web formats, SVG, for presenting its data, and that it doesn't give a text-only alternative." http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2006/01/inaccessible_go.html The State of the Web Standards By Bruce Lawson. "...if the web standards brigade shake our heads in sorrow, the Semantic Web gang must be sobbing into their beer and phoning the Samaritans." http://tinyurl.com/7w578 Formulas and Confusion By Michael Andrews. "Let's arbitrarily divide user centered designs into two types: formulaic designs, and non-formulaic ones. Formulaic designs are the stock and trade of web agencies designing for the public -- things like news sites and online catalogs. They are ubiquitous, and generally all look and work the same, regardless of whose site it is. Generally people involved in such projects have a good idea about user needs even prior to starting: they are folks just like us, after all, and we have already talked to countless people like them for other similar projects. When we design for formulaic projects, we already have a good grasp of the solutions available to us. Designing an online shopping cart is not rocket science, it has been done countless times, users have expectations how they operate, and the work is mostly a matter of polishing the details." http://michaelandrews.blogspot.com/2006/01/formulas-and-confusion.html Please Test Your Sites With IE7 By Chris Wilson. "I'm very excited we've released a public preview of beta 2 that everyone can download. I'm also very happy that we've opened up a couple of different avenues to take your feedback." http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/01/31/520883.aspx Frequently Asked Questions for the IE7 Beta 2 Preview By Al Billings. "Hi, I'm Al Billings. I'm a project manager on the Internet Explorer team. I haven't posted before but you have probably seen comments from me from time to time on the blog. I'm involved in the regular work with it. Today, we have been getting a lot of questions in comments on our blog posts in response to the release of the IE7 Beta 2 Preview. I wanted to try to wrap most of these up in one post so people don't have to hunt for answers to common questions." http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/01/31/521344.aspx Installing and Uninstalling IE 7 Beta 2 By Peter-Paul Koch. "The release of Explorer 7 beta 2 has raised some questions, especially about maintaining the various IE versions you may have on your computer....but you can uninstall the beta quite easily and IE 6 is restored to you. I suppose I do a few people a favour when I write down clear installation and uninstallation descriptions and instructions." http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2006/02/installing_and.html IE 7 Beta 2 - A First Test Drive By Robert Nyman. "Microsoft has now publicly released IE 7 Beta 2 Preview, which you can download in their IE page. It is only available for Windows XP SP 2 as of now. Naturally, your favorite blogger (yeah, you know it's true, just admit it) has taken it out for a short test drive..." http://www.robertnyman.com/2006/02/01/ie-7-beta-2-a-first-test-drive/ HOWTO Spot a Wannabe Web Standards Advocate By Henri Sivonen. "If there is a match, you have spotted a wannabe..." http://hsivonen.iki.fi/wannabe/ +10: TOOLS. FireBug - Firefox Extension By Joe Hewitt. "FireBug is a new tool that aids with debugging Javascript, DHTML, and Ajax. It is like a combination of the Javascript Console, DOM Inspector, and a command line Javascript interpreter." http://tinyurl.com/db6rz Colour Check By etre. "Our online Colour Check determines the colour difference and contrast between any two colours to maximize readability." http://www.etre.com/tools/colourcheck/ +11: TYPOGRAPHY. Define the Word Space to Suit the Size and Natural Letterfit of the Font By Richard Rutter. "If text is set ragged right, the word space (the space between words) can be fixed and unchanging. If the text is justified (set flush left and right), the word space must be elastic. In either case the size of the ideal word space varies from one circumstance to another, depending on factors such as letterfit, type color, and size. A loosely fitted or bold face will need a larger interval between the words. At larger sizes, when letterfit is tightened, the spacing of words can be tightened as well."s http://webtypography.net/Rhythm_and_Proportion/Horizontal_Motion/2.1.1/ Choose a Comfortable Measure By Richard Rutter. "...The measure is the number of characters in single line of a column of text. HTML doesn't have a concept of columns per se, instead text is held within boxes. In CSS the width of a box is set using the width property with any unit of length, for example..." http://webtypography.net/Rhythm_and_Proportion/Horizontal_Motion/2.1.2/ Kern Consistently and Modestly Or Not All By Richard Rutter. "Kerning - altering the space between selected pairs of letters - can increase consistency of spacing in a word like Washington or Toronto, where the combinations Wa and To are kerned..." http://webtypography.net/Rhythm_and_Proportion/Horizontal_Motion/2.1.8/ +12: USABILITY. Home Page Goals By Derek Powazek. "Home pages may get plenty of design attention, but that doesn't mean they don't need improvement." http://alistapart.com/articles/homepagegoals Website Design Considerations for Older People By Ann Light. "Older users are an audience group that will grow in size and importance over the next few years. Our studies indicate that there are lots of simple things we can do to support their use of the internet." http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article2911.asp Usability for Older Web Users By Tim Fidgeon. "Elderly users are an audience group that will grow in size and importance over the next few years. Our studies indicate that there are lots of simple things we can do to support their use of the internet. We believe that these recommendations should be taken into account by all sites, and efforts should be made to further expand our knowledge of how to design for these users." http://tinyurl.com/7b3jj Rules for Labeling Buttons By Caroline Jarrett. 1. Label the button with what it does. 2. If the user doesn't want to do it, don't have a button for it. http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article2949.asp Are Websites Judged in the Blink of an Eye? By Gerry McGovern. "People can get a strong impression of your website within one twentieth of a second, according to a new study. But it may not be a lasting impression." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2006/nt-2006-01-30-blink.htm To Know Your Customer, Know Their Carewords By Gerry McGovern. "If you use the words your customers care most about, your website will deliver more value. Best practice web management is about knowing your customers better than they know themselves." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/mcgovern-carewords.htm What Matters Most? By Gerd Waloszek. "Recently, I had to use an application that reminded me of a very basic usability question: What matters most? Based on my experiences, I found the answer quite revealing, especially with respect to the role of usability efforts in the development process. For this article, let me put the initial question slightly differently: Which usability problems annoy me most?" http://www.sapdesignguild.org/community/editorials/editorial_02_2005.asp +13: XML. SVG in Firefox 1.5 By Mozilla Developer Center. "Firefox 1.5 marks the first official release of a browser from Mozilla that includes Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) functionality. The road this project has taken to release has been long, and we're excited to get it in the hands of content developers to see what they produce." http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/SVG_in_Firefox_1.5 SVG In HTML Introduction By Mozilla Developer Center. "This article and its associated example shows how to use inline SVG to provide a background picture for a form. It shows how JavaScript and CSS can be used to manipulate the picture in the same way you would script regular XHTML. Note that the example will only work in browsers that support XHTML (not HTML) and SVG integration." http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/SVG_In_HTML_Introduction [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.]