+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 4, Issue 45, April 28, 2006. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 45 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: JAVASCRIPT. 06: MISCELLANEOUS. 07: NAVIGATION. 08: PHP. 09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 10: TOOLS. 11: TYPOGRAPHY. 12: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 13: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Manifesto By Web Standards Project's Accessibility Task Force. "The Web can be a truly democratic medium that enables people with disabilities in life-changing ways. Blind and visually impaired users can shop online. Those with cognitive difficulties can learn on-line at their own speed. Users with hearing impairments have access to rich media content. People can meet online, participate and socialize without prejudice and, potentially, with no barriers in their way. In many places this is already true. But not everywhere. We believe that everyone has a right to take advantage of the possibilities offered by the Web..." http://webstandards.org/action/atf/manifesto/ New Research Study Shows 57 Percent of Adult Computer Users Can Benefit From Accessible Technology By Microsoft. "Accessible computer technology, often associated only with people with disabilities, can benefit a much larger segment of the population, according to a new study conducted by Forrester Data and commissioned by Microsoft Corp. While accessibility options were originally designed for people with disabilities, the Forrester study shows that 57 percent of current working-age computer users may benefit from accessible technology because of mild to severe vision, hearing, dexterity, speech and cognitive difficulties and impairments. As the U.S. population continues to age, the number of people who experience these impairments will increase, and more people will likely turn to accessible technology to mitigate the effects of their changing physical abilities..." http://tinyurl.com/qumnd Transcribing Podcasts By Jeremy Keith. "But there is an inherent problem with publishing audio files on the Web. That problem is succinctly summarized in this comment accompanying an entry for an audio file over at Vitamin: Is there anyway to get a transcription of this? I am deaf so an audio mp3 is not going to help me a bit.'..." http://adactio.com/journal/1120/ What's Wrong With this Picture? By Ian Lloyd. "I had to flag this one up - a great example of a company that seems to 'get it' (on one hand) but then manages to foul it up at the same time. What's wrong with this picture? It's clear for all to see. Or rather it's not...So Earthlink provides an option for blind/vis impaired users to use if they can't use the captcha. How about making the whole phrase a link, not just the word 'here'." http://accessify.com/2006/04/whats-wrong-with-this-picture.php +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Print Stylesheets By Jeremy Keith. "CSS Naked Day was fun. It felt almost voyeuristic to peek under the CSS skirts of so many sites. It also made me realize that the browser default styles are what people are going to see if they decide to print out a page from many CSS-based sites..." http://www.adactio.com/journal/1121/ CSS Hacking By Anne Van Kesteren. "A CSS hack is basically about exploiting one browser bug to solve another. Now a new browser comes out that solves the exploited bugs, but not the other and people start advocating hacking to be stopped. It's not that simple. Hacks are wrong (forget what I said in Implement CSS 2.1. The reason they are is that using them might prevent further enhancements to a specification. Something that's invalid now might be a feature in the future." http://annevankesteren.nl/2006/04/css-hacking Stop Hacking, or be Stopped By Dave Shea. "With the imminent launch of IE7 your usual CSS hacking methods are going to fail. If you want to save web design, as we know it, it's time to take some drastic action." http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/css/stop-css-hacking Dealing With The Looming Internet Explorer 7 Release By Stephanie Sullivan. "Dave Shea makes some good points in his post at Vitamin about the upcoming IE7 release and browser hacks. I started to weigh in amongst his comments, but I got a little long-winded so I figured it was better written on my own blog instead of using Dave's bandwidth..." http://www.communitymx.com/blog/index.cfm?newsid=693 Build for the Future: Bend, Don't Break By Garrett Dimon. "Whatever the future holds, you can be certain about one thing: Your Web site's content will change. So what can you do now to minimize time spent monkeying with markup and CSS? Garrett Dimon gazes into his crystal ball." http://tinyurl.com/n249c CSS Love Child By Cameron Adams. "...My little bit of Perl scripting lets you take the HTML from one page, add the styles of another, and end up with a hideously mutated beast that can sometimes be amusing, sometimes be revealing, but most of the time looks like a fourth generation hillbilly..." http://www.themaninblue.com/writing/perspective/2006/04/24/ +03: EVALUATION & TESTING. Coming of Age in Ethnography By Dave Rogers. "With time, I came to my senses. I learned to distinguish design ethnography from its classic, anthropological forebears. I recognized that it could take many forms-from contextual inquiry to task analysis (something I had done many times as an instructional designer). I grew beyond the myth of the do-it-all IA. I chuckled at myself for failing to realize that I had initially reacted to design ethnography from an inadequate 'frame of reference.'" http://www.gotomedia.com/gotoreport/april2006/coming_of_age.html Are Heuristic Usability Evaluations Useful? By Kim Krause Berg. "A famous true story in Human Factors/Usability circles is the one where Rolf Molich ran a study called CUE-2, where nine teams did usability testing on Microsoft's Hotmail email system. All nine came back with different types of reports, noting different problems. Few agreed on what these "problems" were and they didn't all pick up on the same trouble spots. The Molich study raised all kinds of questions, including how accurate usability testing is. Now they are evaluating data from a similar study called CUE-4. I'm interested in these studies and the opinions by Jakob Nielsen, Jared Spool, and many others. It is Nielsen who coined the phrase, "discount usability", in which the practice of heuristic evaluations became popular because they are affordable and simple to execute." http://tinyurl.com/enhxc Honda Website Gets Impromptu Test and Comes Out Poorly By Ann Light. "William Hudson of Syntagm asked members of the London Usability mailing list to try the following task, after his own experiences with a website..." http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article3074.asp +04: EVENTS. E-Learn 2006 October 13-17, 2006. Honolulu, Hawaii U.S.A. http://www.aace.org/conf/elearn/ +05: JAVASCRIPT. innerHTML vs. DOM = Pot Noodles vs. Real Cooking By Christian Heilmann. Chris summarizes the ongoing discussion about innerHTML versus DOM methods, and reaches several conclusions. http://www.wait-till-i.com/index.php?p=270 Get the Rendered Style of an Element By Robert Nyman. "I guess most of you, one time or another, has had the need to find out what style was actually rendered on an element. The easiest way to do this is through the style property followed by the specific value you're looking for: var intPosLeft = document.getElementById("left").style.left; However, this only works if the..." http://tinyurl.com/zwe2g An Important Lesson Learned About AJAX and Accessibility By Robert Nyman. "...if you want to develop AJAX apps, make sure that it works without JavaScript as well..." http://tinyurl.com/ney39 +06: MISCELLANEOUS. Dave Shea - CSS3, IE7 and Web Professionals By Ryan Carson. "In this interview, Ryan Carson from Carson Workshops talks to Dave Shea, the creator of CSS Zen Garden about the changes in IE7 and CSS3." http://www.thinkvitamin.com/interviews/css/dave-shea/ Eric Meyer - CSS, Life and Print Stylesheets By Ryan Carson. "The world-renowned CSS expert Eric Meyer talks about how he got into CSS and the benefits of print stylesheets." http://www.thinkvitamin.com/interviews/css/eric-meyer The Key to Simplicity - Questions for Donald Norman By Eddie Lopez. "Don Norman lives two lives: theory and applications. As a cognitive scientist, he studies, teaches, and writes about the relationship between technology and people. In his applied life, he helps companies make products that appeal to the emotions as well as to reason...He was kind enough to answer a couple of questions for User Centered..." http://my.opera.com/usability/blog/show.dml/232714 +07: NAVIGATION. Navigation: Left is Best By Bob Bailey. "...Kingsburg and Andre's research demonstrated that navigational selection limited to either the left or right panels resulted in the best human performance and strongest user preference. However, there appears to be a performance advantage when the first selection is made from the left navigation panel as compared to the right navigation panel. This difference may be explained by the reading pattern of the participants (i.e., English reading requires reading from left to right and top to bottom)..." http://www.usability.gov/pubs/040106news.html Which Should Come First - Navigation or Content? WebAim Thread. http://www.webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread.php?thread=2877 The Challenges of Moving to Horizontal Navigation By Joshua Porter. "The designers of CNN.com recently redesigned their home page, changing from a left-hand, vertical navigation scheme to a top-of-the-page, horizontal one..." http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2006/04/26/horizontal-navigation/ Click Here to Read this Article By Jonathan Christopher. "Hyperlinks are what make the Internet its own. The concept of being able to connect documents with the click of a mouse was a major selling point of the Web and it is that basic functionality which makes the Internet so great. I'd like to take a quick minute to talk about the..." http://www.mondaybynoon.com/2006/04/24/click-here-to-read-this-article/ Defining 'Taxonomy' By Patrick Lambe. "There are three basic characteristics of a taxonomy for knowledge management, and to be any good at its job, it needs to fulfil all three functions: 1. A taxonomy is a form of classification scheme. 2. Taxonomies are semantic. 3. A taxonomy is a kind of knowledge map." http://www.greenchameleon.com/gc/blog_detail/defining_taxonomy/ +08: PHP. PHP Gotchas By John Herren. "Call them obscure, call them pointless, call them 'newbie mistakes.' Whatever you call them, you've more than likely been tripped up at some point in your PHP coding journey by seemingly odd or illogical behaviors of the language. With PHP being a loosely-typed language, funny things are bound to happen. PHP is an easy language to pick up for the casual coder--things should "just work." But not everyone comes into PHP development with a strong programming background, so here are some charming examples of ways PHP can trip you up if you aren't careful. Put on your thinking caps--here comes the science! " http://devzone.zend.com/node/view/id/168 Use PHP to Strip the Last Character in a String By Christopher Jason. "Whether you're working with a string created from a database query or array, here's a cool trick to strip the last character (comma) of a comma separated list of values using PHP." http://www.christopherjason.com/articles/php-strip-characters/ +09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. The Great Microsoft Blunder By John C. Dvorak. "Internet Explorer is a dead albatross...So what can Microsoft do about its dilemma? First, it needs to face the fact that this entire preoccupation with the browser business is bad for the company and bad for the user. Microsoft should pull the browser out of the OS and discontinue all IE development immediately. It should then bless the Mozilla.org folks with a cash endowment and take an investment stake in Opera, to influence the future direction of browser technology from the outside in. Then, Microsoft can worry about security issues that are OS-only in nature, rather than problems compounded by Internet Explorer..." http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1952999,00.asp Benefits of CSS By Cameron Olthuis. "Well the fact is there is a lot of benefits of using CSS. I'd even go as far as saying I can't really see any negatives to layouts based on Cascading Style Sheets. The only thing that could possibly be a negative in my opinion is so called browser issues, but once your skills improve it shouldn't really be a problem. Anyway, here's some of the benefits that I could come up with, if you have anything I miss please contribute." http://www.cameronolthuis.com/2006/04/benefits-of-css/ +10: TOOLS. Browsershots A free online service called Browsershots (still beta) has launched. You provide it with a URI and it will take real screenshots in different browsers of that page. http://browsershots.org/ +11: TYPOGRAPHY. The (In)accessible Web aka Discriminating Against Individuality & Handicap By Felix Miata. "Setting primary content text size to other than medium puts the author in the unenviable position of disagreeing with his readers about what type sizes they find best. Trying to substitute author judgment for readers' is presumptuous, at best...The reason personal computer settings are adjustable is so that users can enjoy having their personal computers meet their own personal needs. Many users do precisely this; however large or small is their number matters not, only that any do, and all are entitled to. Among those that do are apparently not very many web authors. Most presume most users don't exercise their entitlement, and so don't exercise their own, so as to see as they presume most users see. If they did adjust their browsers to their personal preferences before creating their page styles, not only they would enjoy the results they prefer, but so would presumably all sighted visitors. This major strength of the web is, unfortunately, much too infrequently enjoyed." http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/auth/accessibility.html Browser Defaults Are Not Too Big By Felix Miata. "...If the author thinks the text is too big on his page, then he needs to change his own browser default, and not mess with dad's. He's probably where the author will be in 20-30 years, and he won't like that tyranny any more than dad does. A user's actual default size shouldn't matter to anyone except the user. So, a designer arbitrarily setting a size for normal paragraph content at 76% of whatever it happens to be serves no purposes other than barring some users, impeding other users, inhibiting people who have sampled the web and found it too difficult from trying again, and pleasing designers too daft to understand they can have their preferred size just as easily by suitably setting their own defaults, thus giving everyone a win." http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/auth/bigdefaults.html +12: USABILITY. Dimensions of Usability: Defining the Conversation, Driving the Process By Whitney Quesenbery. "Have you ever wondered if your colleagues or clients really understand usability? Too often, standards or guidelines substitute for really engaging our business, technical and design colleagues in a discussion of what usability means. By looking at usability from five dimensions, we can create a consensus around usability goals and use that definition to provide the basis for planning user centered design activities." http://tinyurl.com/qqf4b Dividing User Time Between Goal And Tool By Jared Spool. "...Working to minimize the time our user spends on these elements will only improve her overall experience, making her more likely to come back to the site and recommend it to her friends. Do you know what parts of your design are tool time elements? Could you reduce or eliminate these elements without reducing the quality of the user's results? Do you know where goal time comes in? Could you find ways to increase the user's exposure to this part of the experience?" http://tinyurl.com/poqe9 Making Your Web Site Senior Friendly By National Institute on Aging/National Library of Medicine. "People age 60 and older now constitute the fastest growing group of computer users and information seekers on the World Wide Web.1 They go on line principally to find health information, to plan personal travel and for e-mail.2. While advanced age is not a hindrance to computer or Internet use, there are normal, gradual age-associated declines in vision and certain cognitive abilities that may limit the use of electronic technology. In the last two decades, the National Institute on Aging has funded a number of basic and applied cognitive aging studies, focus groups and usability tests, and survey research on how age-associated changes affect computer use..." http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/staffpubs/od/ocpl/agingchecklist.html Corporate Usability Maturity, Stages 1-4 By Jakob Nielsen. "As their usability approach matures, organizations typically progress through the same sequence of stages, from initial hostility to widespread reliance on user research." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/maturity.html How Much Effort Does It Take to Create a Great User Experience? By John Rhodes. "The purpose of this article is to provide you with a way to measure the level of effort required to successfully complete a project in respect to user experience. This is a powerful merging of project management, user experience, requirements and best practices. And, it is simple enough for a little monkey to use. More accurately, it is simple enough for me to use...My main point is that it is possible to figure out how hard you have to work to create a great user experience. This topic has only been loosely explored by others. The key is that you have to understand what your users face while also knowing how well your organization can meet users needs. The formula shows how to get your arms around all of this at once. " http://tinyurl.com/fpu75 Podcasting Fails to Impress, Claims Forrester By Ann Light. "Podcasting is not attracting users, despite consumer awareness of the new form of content delivery, finds a new study by Forrester Research..." http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article3076.asp [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +13: 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.]