+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 4, Issue 36, February 26, 2006. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 36 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: EVALUATION & TESTING. 04: EVENTS. 05: FLASH. 06: JAVASCRIPT. 07: MISCELLANEOUS. 08: NAVIGATION. 09: PHP. 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. The DOM And Screen Readers By Gez Lemon. "This article investigates a method of providing client-side form validation through the DOM, and ensures that it works as expected with screen readers. Modern screen readers work relatively well with scripting, but it's the extra steps required to inform screen reader users that the content has changed that needs addressing." http://juicystudio.com/article/dom-screen-readers.php Non-Visual Access to the Digital Library (NoVA): The Use of the Digital Library Interfaces by Blind and Visually Impaired People By Jenny Craven and Peter Brophy. "NoVA's observations and other analyses of users searching for information on the web reveal that, unsurprisingly, people who are sighted find searching the web much easier than visually impaired people. Furthermore, people who are visually impaired, but possess enough sight to be able to see part of the screen (either up close or using magnification), find searching the web easier than those whose sight is severely impaired (i.e. those who are either totally blind or have very limited sight). These results confirm the findings of a parallel study conducted by Coyne and Nielsen, which estimated that 'the Web is about three times easier to use for sighted users than it is for users who are blind or who have low vision' (Coyne and Nielsen 2001 p 5), although we would not make such explicit claims. Again, as with NoVA, findings from this study also revealed that people using screen magnification appeared to have a higher success rate than those using a screen reader, although the difference was not statistically significant...." http://www.cerlim.ac.uk/projects/nova/index.php Web Accessibility and Learning Difficulties By Tim Fidgeon. "...Webcredible's analysis of usability testing sessions involving participants with learning difficulties has led to our suggesting these guidelines when designing for these users..." http://www.webdevtips.co.uk/webdevtips/article.php?item=101 Handheld for Blind and Low-vision Users By Matt Bailey. "VisuaAid releases a Mainstream handheld for blind and low-vision users. Called Maestro, the device is a compact, palm-like handheld that offers text-to-speech technology and tactile keyboard membrane over the touch screen, eliminating the use for a stylus. The handheld is build in the HP iPaq Pocket PC platform and VisuaAid claims..." http://tinyurl.com/h9gbb Increased Accessibility for Mobile Devices By Matt Bailey. "While browsing the latest press releases, this release caught my attention. 'Nuance introduces the Nuance Accessibility Suite; provides unprecedented User Accessibility to Mobile Devices.' Now, I'm usually skeptical of hype, especially when it is provided in the form of a press release, but this seemed very interesting, especially when most..." http://tinyurl.com/z2xsg +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Sample-05-b.1 By Mark Groen. "...This tutorial is not meant to be a bible for all things css, and indeed some of the notes I've made may even be wrong, your mileage may vary. What it does do, is to show some methods of taking an existing Photoshop or Illustrator mock-up or existing web page created with tables and slices, and one way to turn it into a light weight CSS and xhtml based document..." http://www.mgwebservices.ca/upgrade/samples/sample-05-b.1.htm Web Design: Learning Basic HTML and CSS By Wikibooks. "Get started creating your own HTML and stylesheets!" http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Web_Design:Learning_Basic_HTML_and_CSS Intermediate HTML and CSS By Wikibooks. "Building on your skills to create structured HTML content that can be styled and layed out with your stylesheets" http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Web_Design:Intermediate_HTML_and_CSS Managing Data Exchange/CSS By Wikibooks. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/XML:_Managing_Data_Exchange/CSS Programming: CSS By Wikibooks. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Programming:CSS +03: EVALUATION & TESTING. Virtual Focus Groups: Taking the Discussion Online By Chris Haas. "There are significant limitations to this technique: we were lucky we were seeking input from computer-savvy college students with disabilities, and that they were familiar with the IM process. Lucky that they had their own accounts, which made things easier. It raised protection of human subjects questions: how do they digitally sign a consent form? How do we verify their identities? And it cast doubt on our own procedures: While it takes a full minute to speak aloud our welcome and orientation in a lab-based session, it is a full page of lifeless text when parceled out line by line to participants online. The process illuminated technological limitations: both Yahoo! IM and AOL IM proved unequal to the task of reliably holding two hours of transcript information in memory without crashing. Not everyone may have access to scan converters for screen recording. But conducting virtual focus groups had clear benefits: with electronic communication the limitations of space, geography, sign-language interpreter costs, and even scheduling fell by the wayside. Our researchers could conduct groups at nearly any time of day or night, all at the participants' convenience. And the software, unreliable as it was, was free." http://www.accessiblecontent.com/online/v1n2/index.php?view=usability +04: EVENTS. ED-MEDIA 2006 World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia & Telecommunications June 26-30, 2006. Orlando, Florida U.S.A. http://www.aace.org/conf/edmedia/ SIGGRAPH 2006 July 30 - August 3 2006. Boston, Massachusetts U.S.A. http://www.siggraph.org/s2006/ +05: FLASH. Flash is dead! Long live Flash! By Phil Renaud. "...Know what else is a primary reason standardists have come together? The banishment of flash User Interface sites. The emerging web at the turn of the century was something pretty scary if you're a fan of accessibility, and verily, web usability as a whole. But, we're over that now, right? Lengthy flash intros by the wayside, user interfaces no longer with the same techno song pounding in the background and a series of beeps that'd make you swear Hal 9000 was living in your PC? Weren't those the old days? Hasn't web 2.0 saved us from the damnation that was unusable and one-shot websites? Maybe not. Because it seems every time I turn around, there's a new variety of the old problem. Right now, I think that the next big usability and accessibility problem on the web could be the rampant use of AJAX..." http://www.aspiramedia.com/fadtastic/?p=69 +06: JAVASCRIPT. Quick Explanation of the Object Literal By Christian Heilmann. "Answering some emails, I realized lately that the object literal notation used in modern scripts does confuse JavaScript novices. So if the following is gobbledegook for you..." http://domscripting.webstandards.org/?p=42 Show Love to the Object Literal By Christian Heilmann. "If you are just getting your teeth into JavaScript, or if you used it in the past and re-discovered it in the wake of the AJAX craze you might have been baffled by scripts that come in a new syntax." http://www.wait-till-i.com/index.php?p=239 The Document Object Model By David Flanagan. Chapter 17 of the book 'JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 4th Edition". http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/jscript4/chapter/ch17.html Ajax, Hijax and Accessibility By Bruce Lawson. "...If screenreaders didn't support any JavaScript, then they'd get the working, traditional page that gets hijaxed by JavaScript, and all would be well. We could ask all screenreader users to turn off JavaScript, as Derek Featherstone suggests, but it ain't gonna happen. (Have you ever tried to turn off JavaScript in IE? It's buried way down in the menus, and it's unreasonable to ask people to do that for just your site, when the reason that the screenreaders have some scripting capability is because 90% of the Web would be useless without it.) So a functioning Ajax page would be very, very difficult to make accessible..." http://tinyurl.com/bodxf Object Oriented Javascript - Part 1 By Guyon Roche. "To many object orientation purists, a programming language doesn't cut the mustard unless it supports some form of class inheritance, where one class can 'inherit' the behavior of another class. This week, you'll learn how JavaScript can support class inheritance for user defined classes." http://tinyurl.com/bl47k Developing a Simple Validation Library in JavaScript By Jagadish Chaterjee. "This series of articles mainly lists some of the most commonly used JavaScript functions for client side validation of HTML forms. You can reuse these scripts to inject into server side controls easily..." http://tinyurl.com/crsk8 +07: MISCELLANEOUS. Gary Schar Interview: Microsoft Exec Talks IE7, RSS By Nate Mook and Ed Oswald. "Following a decision to release a stand alone version of IE7, browser development at Microsoft has come fast and furious. BetaNews this week sat down with Gary Schare, Director of IE Product Management, to discuss the changes coming in IE7, Firefox's growth, and how Microsoft will bring RSS to the mainstream." http://tinyurl.com/fdy5u Gary Share on IE7 By Daniel Glazman. "Gary Share says only security and feature requests coming from users drove the expansion of IE7 to WinXP. Gary Share certainly omits one particularly important detail: Microsoft killed Netscape and it killed it well. But a small group of completely crazy people, incredibly poor and unorganized compared to the giant Microsoft, stood up and made a new browser that has kicked the giant's but. Microsoft can certainly answer strongly, they have the power, the money and the brains for that. Not only they can do it, but they need to do it. They need to do it because otherwise, the whole world will see it is possible to challenge Microsoft products even when zillions of people use them, even when they come bundled with Windows!" http://tinyurl.com/jrrmy Paul Dell vs Dell Computers By Stephanie Sullivan. "This is another one of those David and Goliath stories that always aggravate me. Another case of the big giant shoving around the little guy who has a smaller sword and shield in the hopes he'll just give up..." http://www.communitymx.com/blog/index.cfm?newsid=664 +08: NAVIGATION. Avoid Within-Page Links By Jakob Nielsen. "On the Web, users have a clear mental model for a hypertext link: it should bring up a new page. Within-page links violate this model and thus cause confusion." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/within_page_links.html Jakob Nielsen and Ajax By Tom Dell'Aringa. "What do the usability guru and the emerging (stampeding) force that is Ajax have to do with each other? Today, Mr. Nielsen wrote in his Alertbox article this: 'On the Web, users have a clear mental model for a hypertext link: it should bring up a new page. Within-page links violate this model and thus cause confusion.' Ah, but what do we have in Ajax applications? 'Web pages' that act like applications, which are loaded with hyperlinks that absolutely do not navigate away from/reload the page! Mr. Nielsen says such links break the users mental model..." http://www.pixelmech.com/notebook/2006/02/jakob-nielson-and-ajax/ Jakob Nielsen Strikes Again on a Usability Practice and He's Right By Kim Krause Berg. "...end users don't like the unexpected. They hate feeling dumb. User instructions would have been helpful, such as 'These links will take you to sections within the page.' Then, I would have known what the links were for, and how to use them. Jakob Nielsen writes, 'To avoid confusing users, you must communicate exceptions to their expectations in advance.' Exactly..." http://www.cre8pc.com/blog/2006/02/jakob-nielsen-strikes-again-on.html +09: PHP. On PHP - My Thoughts By Mike Papageorge. "...Herein lies the main problem: people with little or no education in the realm of programming are programming! And these are oftentimes people who don't understand what POST is, or GET, or even a header for that matter. The fact is, PHP makes it easy to make a dynamic website, just as Dreamweaver makes it easy to write HTML, and we're all familiar with the mess that program spits out. So of course people are going to write spaghetti code, they are going to repeat themselves, and the result is going to be a pain the in ass to maintain and improve. I should know, I have no formal programming education, and when I look back on the first few scripts I wrote I cringe - well, now I laugh - at how green I was (I also wonder how I had the knackers to charge for the work!)..." http://tinyurl.com/8cnnt +10: TOOLS. CSS Editors By css-discuss Wiki. Huge listing of CSS editors. http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=CssEditors +11: TYPOGRAPHY. Em Vs Percent Widths By css-discuss Wiki. "Both em and % are relative measures. The difference is what each is relative to. Em is always relative to font size. % is relative to the containing block, usually the body, a div, or a table, unless applied to font-size, in which case it applies to the parent font-size..." http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=EmVsPercentWidths +12: USABILITY. Usability for Rich Internet Applications By by Donna Maurer. "After struggling for years to design Internet applications around the limitations of HTML, I have been very excited by the recent release of a range of Internet applications with increased richness and interactivity. Rich Internet applications (RIAs) can provide opportunities to design much better user experiences. They can be faster, more engaging and much more usable. However, this improvement is not without its downside?RIAs are much more difficult to design than the previous generation of page-based applications. The richer interaction requires a better understanding of users and of human-computer interaction (HCI). Although there is a lot of HCI material and research available, it can be difficult to determine how it applies to this new environment. In this article, I provide some practical tips for designing usable RIAs, based on fundamental principles of HCI." http://tinyurl.com/r3mwc Trust and Blame By Whitney Quesenbery. The more we rely on our electronic devices, the more we are trusting them to be there when we need them and to safeguard our information and our privacy." http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000075.php Designing Websites for Older Users By Tim Fidgeon "...Although more research into the internet behaviors and preferences of elderly users is obviously required, we would like to suggest the following..." http://www.webdevtips.co.uk/webdevtips/article.php?item=102 +13: XML. XML in the Real World By Scott Fegette. "Learn what XML is, what purpose it serves, and how you can put it to use in your projects..." http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/xml_realworld.html [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.]