+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 4, Issue 44, April 21, 2006. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 44 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: COLOR 04: DREAMWEAVER. 05: EVALUATION & TESTING. 06: EVENTS. 07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 08: JAVASCRIPT. 09: MISCELLANEOUS. 10: NAVIGATION. 11: PHP. 12: SITES & BLOGS. 13: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 14: TOOLS. 15: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 16: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Web Accessibility Policies (and Pseudo Policies) in Post secondary Institutions By WebAIM. "This updated list represents a broad sampling of web accessibility policies across the United States and other regions around the world. Many of these policies can be more accurately described as suggestions, since many institutions do not have any binding formal policy. See how your web accessibility policy compares, or use these as a springboard to create your own." http://webaim.org/coordination/policies/postsec/ Involving Users in Web Accessibility Evaluation By Shawn Lawton Henry. "Web accessibility evaluation often focuses on evaluating conformance to accessibility standards, such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Broadening evaluation to involve people with disabilities helps better understand accessibility issues and implement more effective accessibility solutions." http://www.w3.org/WAI/eval/users A More Accessible Map By Seth Duffey. "Nifty web maps powered by Google and Yahoo! APIs are all the rage. And rage is what a visually impaired user may feel when trying to use them. Is there a way to make beautiful web maps accessible? In a word, yes." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/cssmaps Tate Online Wins Accessibility Award By Anna Lagerkvist. "i-Map, the arts resource for visually impaired people developed by Tate Online and BT, has won a web accessibility award. The judges awarded Tate Online the 2006 Jodi Award for Excellence in Museum, Library and Archive Web Accessibility, because the site was a "world leader in making online collections accessible to blind and partially sighted people...The site incorporates audio content so visitors can hear detailed descriptions of each work as well as watch full screen animations, which highlight and simplify key aspects of the included works..." http://tinyurl.com/k8ja9 Google Releases Audio CAPTCHA By Matt Bailey. "Google has now unveiled the Audio CAPTCHA for blind and low-vision users for many of the Google services. Gmail, Google Groups and the Google Account for the homepage. Users simply have to click the link and type the numbers they hear." http://tinyurl.com/mt7v3 Indicating Language Choice: Flags, Text, Both, Neither? By Roger Johansson. "At the office we recently had a bit of a discussion about how language choice should be indicated on the web. The specific case we were debating is when a site uses one primary language and contains sections of information in one or several other languages. Visitors who want to access the information in one of the secondary languages have to somehow be made aware that they can select another language. This is assuming the site does not use content negotiation to automatically display information in the visitor's preferred language (which is a bad idea anyway). Four options come to mind..." http://tinyurl.com/fdgly Accessible Business Online By Alexandra Graham. "It's about more than disabled users, it's an overall concept to apply to the web, web design as a whole and you need to build it into your development process as opposed to actually adding it on, because you just do it straight through the whole time and you make that a part of your web sites, then you're just going to be making better web sites anyway so clients are more likely to choose you. Make sure you're selling the features, don't talk in developer speak, like I said at the beginning, they don't care about how you made it accessible, just as long as people can use it. So make sure it's that usability that you're selling when you're talking to the clients. You just make the good web sites, don't make a big deal out of it to the clients, it's something that matters to developers because it's something that we do. But again, it's just a part of the end product, it's not anything that will really bother your client." http://kay.zombiecoder.com/wsg/wsg2006-03-30-Alex_Graham.html +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Getting Fieldset Backgrounds and Legends to Behave in IE By Matt Heerem. "I'm sure someone has posted on this issue before I just haven't found an answer I'm looking for. Jeff Croft has a close answer, but he is trying to solve a different problem. I built off of his exploration for this solution. The 'problem' occurs when you are building a form with a fieldset tag and a legend tag, and then style the fieldset with a background color like so..." http://tinyurl.com/qsmfy Projecting Your CSS By Jon Christopher. "I can remember setting up my first stylesheet and being truly impressed with the power of CSS. While I was still learning the language and implementation, I came across the concept of print stylesheets. The fact that you could present a completely different style for print was mind blowing for me. It made so much sense all at once and was a great thing to learn. What's also great is the ability to style for other media, such as handheld devices and projectors. Did you know that there are 7 total media types you can style for?" http://www.mondaybynoon.com/2006/04/17/projecting-your-css/ +03: COLOR. Accessible Colors By Menghini Calderon Fabrizio Antonio. "W3C assert that the formula (they have developed for testing for accessible color) has been tested using a sample of 149 volunteers where 80% of them reported some visual impairment (acuity problems, myopia, hypermetropia, presbyopia). However there are some problems that invalidate the results obtained." http://www.internotredici.com/article/accessiblecolors +04: DREAMWEAVER. Precisely Positioning div Tags in Your Page From Design View By Adrian Senior. "In this article we will look at how you can insert div tags into your code, precisely. We will do this from Dreamweaver's design view by making good use of the insert div tag function that can be found on the insert bar." http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=07BC6 Styling Forms with CSS - Part 1: Accessibility and Form Element Styles By Adrian Senior. "Learn to create accessible forms using the latest CSS techniques instead of tables." http://tinyurl.com/rbxxm Styling Forms with CSS - Part 2: CSS-Structured Forms By Adrian Senior. "In Part 2 of this series, you will build on this knowledge and explore more advanced methods of positioning your form elements using CSS. You can use the HTML and CSS documents you created in Part 1 or else download the files from the sample download link and continue with Part 2." http://tinyurl.com/prrc7 +05: EVALUATION & TESTING. F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content By Jakob Nielsen. "Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe. F for fast. That's how users read your precious content. In a few seconds, their eyes move at amazing speeds across your website's words in a pattern that's very different from what you learned in school." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html Usability Testing Best Practices: An Interview with Rolf Molich By Christine Perfetti. "You may have never heard of Rolf Molich. Yet, if you've done any usability testing, design evaluations, or heuristic inspections, then you've been affected by his pioneering work. Since entering the field in 1983, Rolf has produced some of the most impressive and forward-thinking research on effective discount usability techniques. Two of Rolf's more renowned contributions include the co-invention of the Heuristic Inspection process with Jakob Nielsen and the more recent CUE (Comparative Usability Evaluation) studies..." http://www.uie.com/events/uiconf/2006/articles/molich_interview/ +06: EVENTS. Internet Research 7.0: Internet Convergences International and Interdisciplinary Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers September 28-30, 2006. Brisbane, Australia http://conferences.aoir.org/index.php?cf=5 WWW/Internet 2006 October 5-8, 2006. Murcia, Spain http://www.iadis.org/icwi2006/ +07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Information Architecture and Findability By Russell Wilson. "Peter Morville, co-author of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web with Lou Rosenfeld and author of Ambient Findability, presented a very informative day-long lecture on the subject of information architecture (IA). He discussed many basic concepts as well as best practices, so his presentation would appeal to both beginner and intermediate IAs." http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000086.php Information Architecture Success Story: the Development of www.plainlanguage.gov By Thom Haller. "In Fall 2002 I was working with IA students at Johns Hopkins University who were seeking strategies to "engineer" information to improve human performance. We were studying research-based heuristics from the field and needed a real-life client. The government's plain language site seemed ripe for reshaping." http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Apr-06/haller.html +08: JAVASCRIPT. JavaScript 101 - Part 1: The Basics By Rob Williams. "The purpose of this series of articles is to introduce newcomers to the concepts and fundamentals of JavaScript, so that you can begin to leverage the power of this technology in your own web projects." http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=74116 Mastering Ajax, Part 3: Advanced Requests and Responses in Ajax By Brett McLaughlin. "For many Web developers, making simple requests and receiving simple responses is all they'll ever need, but for developers who want to master Ajax, a complete understanding of HTTP status codes, ready states, and the XMLHttpRequest object is required. In this article, Brett McLaughlin will show you the different status codes and demonstrate how browsers handle each and he will showcase the lesser-used HTTP requests that you can make with Ajax." http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-ajaxintro3/ Mastering Ajax, Part 4: Exploiting DOM for Web Response By Brett McLaughlin. "The great divide between programmers (who work with back-end applications) and Web programmers (who spend their time writing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) is long standing. However, the Document Object Model (DOM) bridges the chasm and makes working with both XML on the back end and HTML on the front end possible and an effective tool. In this article, Brett McLaughlin introduces the Document Object Model, explains its use in Web pages, and starts to explore its usage from JavaScript." http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-ajaxintro4/ Mastering Ajax, Part 5: Manipulate the DOM By Brett McLaughlin. "Learn how to create, remove, and change the parts of a DOM tree, and take the next step toward updating your Web pages on the fly!" http://tinyurl.com/paz7x Comet: Low Latency Data for the Browser By Alex Russell. Comet is different from Ajax in the way messages are passed between the server and client. Instead of occasionally polling the server, Comet applications keep a open line of communication with the server, whereby the server pushes data to the client. http://alex.dojotoolkit.org/?p=545 +09: MISCELLANEOUS. Steve Smith Interview By WaSP Education Task. "Steve Smith, lead Web developer with the University of Notre Dame Web Group, believes in 'finding joy in small steps' when it comes advocating standards. After all, it's no small feat to introduce change within the greater machine of an educational institution. How does Steve and his team face up to the challenge? Steve finds some time amidst his flurry of evangelist and educational activities to tell us a little more about their strategies..." http://www.webstandards.org/action/edutf/interviews/smith/ +10: NAVIGATION. Of Cereal and Search: Improving Customer Experience with Selective Search Engine Optimization By Eric G. Myers. "If your site is like most, there are probably places that are better for users to enter than others. Of course, it all depends on the user's goal. This is exactly why you need to customize your optimization efforts for each individual page of your web site. Some pages are going to require (and deserve) a lot more effort. These are the pages you really want to put front and center for your users to find." http://tinyurl.com/gp3sq How Important is ALT Text In Search Engine Optimization? By Robin Nobles. "...I've been recommending to my online and offline SEO students for a long time that they needed to use ALT text in the manner in which it was designed to be used by the W3C..." http://www.link101.com/2006/04/how-important-is-alt-text-in-search.html Don't Forget to Add the Tax(onomy) By Cathy McKnight. "So what is taxonomy? How does it differ from information architecture? And how do you create an effective taxonomy for a successful intranet?" http://tinyurl.com/kngof +11: PHP. PHP vs perl By Justin Silverton. "PHP and perl are both powerful languages used successfully in a server environment. Here are some brief differences between the two languages." http://blinduser.blogspot.com/2006/04/php-vs-perl.html +12: SITES & BLOGS. Bite Size Standards By John Oxton et al. "Bite Size Standards aims to offer concise web development tutorials, tips and tricks. Written by designers and developers who are passionate about web standards." http://bitesizestandards.com/ +13: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Minnesota Standards Bill Could Affect Microsoft Word, Adobe By W. David Gardner. "In conducting a theoretical search of the Minnesota state Web site, Nesbitt observed that most of the results 'come back as either HTML, PDF, or MS Word. The problem is that the latter two formats are owned by entities that could go out of business, charge significantly, make unannounced changes, sue others for creating similar technologies, act as a monopoly, or abort a product offering altogether. In those instances, there is very little the State could do about it.'" http://www.techweb.com/wire/software/186100201 +13: TOOLS. X-Ray By Stuart Robertson. This Firefox extension lets you to see the markup of a page without viewing source, which can be useful when debugging. It's also both fun and educational to use X-Ray to explore the markup used on other people's sites. http://www.designmeme.com/2006/01/06/new-firefox-extension-x-ray/ Colour Contrast Analyser 1.1 By Steve Faulkner. "...a primarily a tool for checking foreground and background colour combinations to determine if they provide good colour visibility. It also contains functionality to create simulations of certain visual conditions such as colour blindness...System Requirements: Microsoft Windows..." http://www.wat-c.org/tools/CCA/1.1/index.html +14: USABILITY. Usability Book of Knowledge By Usability Professionals Association. "The Usability Body of Knowledge (BoK) project is dedicated to creating a living reference that represents the collective knowledge of the usability profession. Preliminary work has started, but there is more to do. This website introduces the subject areas that will eventually be included in the Usability Body of Knowledge and a preview of what is to come." http://www.usabilitybok.org/ Making Popular Layout Decisions By Eric Meyer. "Every time you make a layout decision - fluid vs fixed, scaled vs percentage, a few more people hate you. How do you make the right decisions and when?" http://tinyurl.com/znqm9 [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +15: 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.]