+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 4, Issue 43, April 13, 2006. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 43 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: EVENTS. 04: JAVASCRIPT. 05: NAVIGATION. 06: PHP. 06: TOOLS. 08: TYPOGRAPHY. 09: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 10: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Accessibility Tips for Website Construction By Patrick Kennedy. "We all know accessibility is important, but precisely how does one make a website or intranet more accessible? Often what is needed is a pragmatic view, based on real experience, to reveal what is really important and what should be tackled first." http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_accessibilitytips/index.html Alt Text is an Alternative, Not a Tooltip By Roger Johansson. "It seems like there is a bit of confusion among many web developers and browser vendors surrounding the use of the alt attribute (yes, It's alt attribute, not alt tag) to provide alternative text for images and other non-textual elements..." http://tinyurl.com/s7cxd Active Discrimination Policy By Gez Lemon. "Attitudes..." http://juicystudio.com/article/active-discrimination-policy.php Paul Boag Podcast on Accessibility Guidelines By Patrick H. Lauke. "In this weeks show we get 'down and dirty' with web accessibility, including a step-by-step tutorial into the WAI guidelines." http://accessify.com/2006/04/paul-boag-podcast-on-accessibility.php +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Using Firefox to Wage a Class War By Virginia DeBolt. "It turns out that family relationships between ancestors and descendants are as important in CSS as they are in real life. Understanding the power to select descendant elements to minimize both your CSS and your HTML pays off in lighter document weight, less bandwidth required to serve up pages, faster downloading, and improved accessibility. Using the Firefox add-on Web Developer Toolbar to examine pages can help show you the way to achieve these goals." http://www.webteacher.ws/classwar.html CSS - Auto-height and margin-collapsing By Minz Meyer. "...If you are working with CSS on a regular basis, you might have come across this behaviour. As did I. And if you are like me, you might have found a solution that works around it. But I have to admit that I never really understood what was happening..." http://tinyurl.com/8u8jr Filtering CSS By Minz Meyer. "...I really do not like using CSS hacks, but sometimes you just can't avoid them, at least not if you code for IE. But the above mentioned method is sufficient to me, allows handling of the different hacks in different files, doesn't litter your main stylesheets and is completely valid." http://www.researchkitchen.de/blog/archives/filtering-css.php Accessibility Navbar By Blair Millen. ...It's a must-have item for any self-respecting accessible website... um; well... really, it's a just bunch of links; but what a BRILLIANT bunch of links they are! The Accessibility Navbar sits at the top of the document (immediately after the tag) thus giving prominent access to the important options a first time visitor may need. This article shows how to create and implement the Accessibility Navbar into your website, including how to: 1) Create the HTML for your Accessibility Navbar, 2) Implement a style sheet switcher, 3) Detect a mobile device and send an appropriate style sheet, 4) Create a low vision style sheet, 5) Consider other options you have in making your site accessible." http://theletter.co.uk/index?id=1918 Handheld Stylesheets By Russell Beattie. "...the coolest part is every single page has an associated handheld media-type stylesheet associated with it to make browsing via mobiles that support it (i.e. Opera mobile) faster, easier, more pleasing and generally more efficient...I used Opera's web browser to take the screen shots because you can hit shift-f11 and get into "small screen rendering" mode, and browse around like you were using a mobile, which is good to test things out. But I normally use FireFox as my main browser which doesn't have this functionality built in. But the cool thing is that my favorite FireFox plugin, the Web Developer Extension, has included a small screen view in its menu, so you can check out how your site would look in a mobile browser, and if you have a handheld style sheet, it'll pick it up as well. It's not as good as Opera's because it does stick between pages, but it makes tweaking the design using the CSS editor sidebar really easy." http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1008914.html +03: EVENTS. IceWeb 2006 April 27-28, 2006. Reykjavik, Iceland http://www.svef.is/page/iceweb2006_english Building Beautiful Websites with CSS (with Dave Shea) May 11, 2006. Chicago, Illinois U.S.A. http://www.carsonworkshops.com/design-dev/shea/11MAY2006.html Professional CSS XHTML Techniques (with Eric Meyer) May 12, 2006. London, United Kingdom http://www.carsonworkshops.com/design-dev/meyer/12MAY2006.html Getting Started with Rails (with Geoffrey Grosenbach) May 25, 2006. New York, New York U.S.A. http://www.carsonworkshops.com/dev/rubyonrails/25MAY2006.html +04: JAVASCRIPT. Introducing DOM Builder By Dan Webb. "It's always seemed a bit wrong and dirty to use innerHTML to manipulate or add content to a page..." http://www.vivabit.com/bollocks/2006/04/06/introducing-dom-builder Usability by Hand, AJAX and Efficiency By Thoman Baekal. "Take drag and drop shopping carts, where you drag product in or out of the space reserved for your cart. This sure looks fancy. But, it is more than 1000% slower to drag and drop, than to simply click an 'Add to Shopping Cart' button. Specifically it takes 0.2 seconds to click on any target, and 2.4 seconds to drag and drop." http://www.baekdal.com/articles/Usability/usability-ajax-efficiency/ Mastering Ajax, Part 1: Introduction to Ajax By Brett McLaughlin. "Ajax, which consists of HTML, JavaScriptť technology, DHTML, and DOM, is an outstanding approach that helps you transform clunky Web interfaces into interactive Ajax applications. The author, an Ajax expert, demonstrates how these technologies work together -- from an overview to a detailed look -- to make extremely efficient Web development an easy reality. He also unveils the central concepts of Ajax, including the XMLHttpRequest object." http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-ajaxintro1.html Mastering Ajax, Part 2: Make asynchronous requests with JavaScript and Ajax By Brett McLaughlin. "In this article, you'll begin with the most fundamental and basic of all Ajax-related objects and programming approaches: The XMLHttpRequest object. This object is really the only common thread across all Ajax applications and -- as you might expect -- you will want to understand it thoroughly to take your programming to the limits of what's possible. In fact, you'll find out that sometimes, to use XMLHttpRequest properly, you explicitly won't use XMLHttpRequest. What in the world is that all about?" http://tinyurl.com/bao7n XAJAX By xajax Wiki. Xajax is an open source PHP Library for building ajax based applications. http://wiki.xajaxproject.org/Main_Page Round-up of 30 AJAX Tutorials By Max Kiesler. This is a very comprehensive list of Ajax tutorials and resources that ranges from beginner to advanced. http://tinyurl.com/l2s6v Making AJAX Navigation Optional By Christian Heilmann. "I just put up a proof of concept for the AJAX chapter of my book. For years I have ranted about DHTML multi level menus simply assuming that every user wants to have every page in the sitemap as an item in the navigation. My idea was to make the..." http://www.wait-till-i.com/index.php?p=266 +05: NAVIGATION. Don't Neglect the title Attribute By Jon Christopher. "If it is one thing that I find myself forgetting when initially marking up a document, it is to make effective use of the title attribute in anchors. I think the title attribute is one of those things that gets pushed aside due to the fact that it is seen as tedious by some. I also feel that a good number of developers may not realize the impact it may have on a variety of things relating to your document. Not only will it help with the usability and accessibility of your document, but also give your search engine optimization a good boost..." http://www.mondaybynoon.com/2006/04/10/dont-neglect-the-title-attribute/ +06: PHP. Using AJAX with PHP and mySQL By Bill Bercik. " The purpose of this article is to demonstrate through a series of baby steps just how easy it is to use the XMLHttpRequest object. In order to complete this tutorial you should have some basic PHP, MySQL and JavaScript experience. That said, the PHP programming in these examples is so basic that if you do not have PHP experience, it may still be possible for you to look at the PHP code and apply the functionality to your weapon of choice, be it PERL, ASP, or JSP." http://www.webpasties.com/xmlHttpRequest/ Handling Dates and Times in PHP and MySQL By Dennis Pallett. Handling dates and times in PHP and MySQL can be a tricky task at times, and that's why in this article Dennis Pallett discusses the date/time problem, and gives a solid solution. http://www.phpit.net/article/handling-date-time-php-mysql/ Digg PHP's Scalability and Performance By Brian Fioca. "Several weeks ago there was a notable bit of controversy over some comments made by James Gosling, father of the Java programming language. He has since addressed the flame war that erupted, but the whole ordeal got me thinking seriously about PHP and its scalability and performance abilities compared to Java. I knew that several hugely popular Web 2.0 applications were written in scripting languages like PHP, so I contacted Owen Byrne - Senior Software Engineer at digg.com to learn how he addressed any problems they encountered during their meteoric growth. This article addresses the all-to-common false assumptions about the cost of scalability and performance in PHP applications." http://tinyurl.com/h3ykj +07: TOOLS. Inline Javascript Console By Oliver Steele. A lightweight Javascript debugging tool with a clean and simple UI. If you just need to pop in an expression here and there before adding it to your project, it's a handy tool. http://osteele.com/archives/2006/03/inline-console +08: TYPOGRAPHY. Time to Change Your Fonts By Rachel McAlpine. "...commonsense dictates that there are only three fonts worth considering for routine business documents. Why? Because the big three are easy to read on a screen." http://www.webpagecontent.com/arc_archive/182/5/ +09: USABILITY. The Paper Of Record Goes Long By Jared Spool. "The New York Times has redesigned their home page...Apparently, the designers at NYTimes.com, WSJ.com, and CNN.com have discovered what we've known for years: Users are quite willing to scroll!" http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2006/04/12/the-paper-of-record-goes-long/ This Boring Headline Is Written for Google By Steve Lohr. "JOURNALISTS over the years have assumed they were writing their headlines and articles for two audiences - fickle readers and nitpicking editors. Today, there is a third important arbiter of their work: the software programs that scour the Web, analyzing and ranking online news articles on behalf of Internet search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN." http://tinyurl.com/fx3bv Your Website is for Your Most Important Customers By Gerry McGovern. "Most websites suffer from over-ambition. They try to do too much with few resources. They think they can answer every question." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2006/nt-2006-04-09-customers.htm Thumbnail: Jakob Nielsen By Clifford Anderson. "A final concern is that 'websites still don't write for the web. Very few people worry about the actual information they put up. When we run studies, we find that's what users really care about. More than ten years of finding the same in every study, and you still have that brochure thinking." http://tinyurl.com/mqjxp [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +10: 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.]