+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 4, Issue 52, June 16, 2006. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 52 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: JAVASCRIPT. 08: MISCELLANEOUS. 09: PHP. 10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 11: TOOLS. 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. WCAG 2.0 Quick Reference By W3C. "A (draft) summary of all WCAG 2.0 requirements (success criteria) and techniques sufficient to meet them." http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref/ WCAG 2 - What a Whopper! By Jack Pickard. "...They (WAI) have the basis of something that could be a very good document, but it's not there yet. Don't feel you can't have further public revisions if necessary. The document can and should be saved, but it shouldn't be used as it currently stands, otherwise I for one will be using the unofficial WCAG 1.0 guidelines as produced by Joe Clark and his secret Samurai." http://accessites.org/gbcms_xml/news_page.php?id=16 WCAG 2.0 Revisited By Lachlan Hunt. "Joe Clark has kindly responded to some the many questions I raised in my last article. Specifically, he responded to the issues of validation, the baseline, multimedia; abbreviations, jargon and pronunciation, and the WCAG Samurai. I still don't fully agree with him regarding validity, though I fully understand and accept his point of view. He has satisfactorily responded to the issues regarding multimedia and full-text alternatives, but I still have some questions about the baseline. Before I discuss these issues further, there's just one thing I'd like to clear up..." http://lachy.id.au/log/2006/06/wcag2-revisited This Just In: I Run a 'Movement' By Joe Clark. "One's esteemed colleague Lachlan Hunt inaccurately accuses me of engaging in a 'movement against the WCAG Working Group'..." http://blog.fawny.org/2006/06/08/lachy/ Even Academics Can't Understand It By Joe Clark. "Further on a topic that my non-technical readers assuredly don't care about, WCAG 2: Even academic researchers with Ph.D.s cannot follow the damned thing..." http://blog.fawny.org/2006/06/10/commtheory/ Accessibility Testing By John S. Britsios. "Accessibility testing for web sites is a service that can provide much more than the standard point-by-point testing techniques of most automated services..." http://www.webnauts.net/accessibility-testing.html Accessibility Lifecycle By Alastair Campbell. "This article outlines which aspects of accessibility can be checked at each stage of development, with a focus on where automated tools should fit in. Some knowledge of web accessibility is assumed. If this subject is new to you, please read an introductory article on web accessibility. The target audience is people who manage medium to large web site projects." http://www.nomensa.com/resources/articles/accessibility-lifecycle.html Five Assistive Technologies for the Web By Leonie Watson. "Leonie Watson of Nomensa introduces some popular assistive technologies for the Web: head and mouth wands, speech enabled websites, screen magnifiers, voice recognition software and the browser; and gives a brief summary of the design issues each brings with it." http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article3163.asp Letter to the MS Society on Accessibility By Bruce Lawson. "Web Accessibility is a human rights issue rather than a technological problem. And history shows us that human rights issues are never resolved until the people who are losing out become vocal in demanding their rights. In the USA, disability lobbying groups have pursued AOL, Southwest Airlines and most recently, Target. But in the UK, nothing much has happened. It could be that most websites here are perfectly acceptable. Ahem. More likely, it could be the case that going to the law is stressful, complicated and expensive. It could also be that people with disabilities may not know their rights to the Web. So when there was an article in the magazine for the MS Society about using a computer accessibly, I wrote the following letter which was published in the May/June edition..." http://tinyurl.com/p54jc +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. CSS-Based Tabbed Menu By Michal Wojciechowski. Recipe for a CSS-based tabbed menu. http://odyniec.net/articles/css-based-tabbed-menu/ CSS Tables Verses Layout Tables By Alastair Campbell. "It's been something that designers have wanted better control of ever since CSS started to be considered the best way to layout HTML pages: table style grids." http://alastairc.ac/2006/06/css-tables-verses-layout-tables/ An Easy Way to Remember CSS Comments Debbie Thuillier. "The syntax for a css comment is somewhat difficult to remember. I know I always had trouble until I thought of an easy way to remember..." http://tinyurl.com/kykj5 +03: COLOR. Accessibility Tripwire - Beware Defaults By Mark Sheppard. "One of the most common and annoying accessibility barriers I come across in my daily browsing is the failure of web designers to specify font or background colors on their websites..." http://www.insimplicity.com/2006/06/accessibility_tripwire_beware.html +04: DREAMWEAVER. Dreamweaver 8 Does Not Launch By Adobe. "Issue: Some users are reporting that Dreamweaver 8 does not launch. The common characteristic is that the splash screen appears momentarily, then the application closes. Some users report being able to launch Dreamweaver 8 two or three times before experiencing the problem, while some users were never able to launch Dreamweaver 8. Solution..." http://tinyurl.com/jmqk7 +05: EVALUATION & TESTING. Eyetracking: Worth The Expense? By Jared Spool. "...Eyetracking is fun to watch and produces cool output. It can serve as a good demonstration that users approach designs differently than we imagine. But can we find a useful place in our research process that is worth all the hassle and expense? I'm still not convinced." http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2006/06/13/eyetracking-worth-the-expense/ +06: EVENTS. An Event Apart Seattle September 18, 2006. Seattle, Washington U.S.A. http://www.aneventapart.com/events/2006/seattle/ 2006 Euro IA Summit European Information Architecture Summit September 30 - October 1, 2006. Berlin, Germany http://www.euroia.org/ User Interface 11 Conference: Enriching the Experience October 9-12, 2006. Cambridge, Massachusetts U.S.A. http://www.uie.com/events/uiconf/2006/ Hands on CSS - Sandy Clark October 10, 2006. New York, New York U.S.A. http://tinyurl.com/fsv3v 2006 DC PHP Conference October 18-20, 2006. Washington, DC U.S.A. http://dcphpconference.com/ MAX October 23-26, 2006. Las Vegas, Nevada U.S.A. http://www.adobe.com/events/max/ Web 2.0 Conference November 7-9, 2006. San Francisco. California U.S.A. http://www.web2con.com/web2006/ +07: JAVASCRIPT. Dynamic Accessible Web Content Roadmap By W3C. "The Dynamic Accessible Web Content Roadmap addresses the accessibility of dynamic web content for people with disabilities. The roadmap outlines the technologies to map controls and events to accessibility APIs, including custom controls. The roadmap also outlines new navigation techniques to mark common web structures as menus, primary content, secondary content, banner information and other types of web structures. These new technologies can be used to improve the accessibility and usability of web resources by people with disabilities, without extensive modification to existing libraries of web resources." http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/roadmap/DHTMLRoadmap040506.html The JavaScript Diaries: Part 14 - The Math Object By Lee Underwood. "This week we look at the Math object, a JavaScript object used to perform mathematical operations such as obtaining the values of predefined mathematical constants. It can also be used to generate random numbers." http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/diaries/14/ LoJAX (Low-technology AJAX) By James Edwards. "LoJAX is a re-creation of the window.XMLHttpRequest object, designed for low-specification and legacy browsers..." http://www.brothercake.com/site/resources/scripts/lojax/ Ajax Use Patterns By Peter-Paul Koch. "Well, my previous entry Is asynchronous communication really being used? has certainly elicited some interesting comments. The answer was a resounding "Yes"; and the replies allow me to take a first stab at defining a few Ajax use patterns. We'll encounter four Ajax use patterns..." http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2006/06/ajax_use_patter.html The JavaScript Library World Cup By Dan Webb. "Love them or loathe them, JavaScript libraries are making a huge impact in the area of DOM Scripting. As AJAX matures, and the complexity of the scripts required to support its expanding use increases, it becomes much less feasible to produce custom code from scratch for every project." http://www.sitepoint.com/article/javascript-library +08: MISCELLANEOUS. Webstock Conference Recordings By Webstock Team. "There's a wealth of wonderful stuff there, including Doug Bowman on a common structure for webpages, Ben Goodger on Firefox and Tony Chor on IE7. The Darren Fittler presentation - using the web as a blind person - is pretty much all you need to convince people of the importance of accessibility. And see Russ Weakley blather on about tagging." http://www.webstock.org.nz/recordings.php Web Design Podcasts from Boagworld.com Host Paul Boag. These podcasts "cover all things relating to web design and web development. Whether you are a web site owner, designer or developer hopefully this show has something for everybody. Each episode includes news, review and hints and tips, all presented in the light hearted style of podcasts like diggnation." Offerings include an interview with Andy Budd, developing a site structure, accessibility, SEO, http://www.podcast.net/show/44454 Accessibility Interview (Andy Budd) By Net magazine. "I was recently interviewed for an article on accessibility in this month's .Net magazine. Here is what I had to say..." http://tinyurl.com/qsgss The Importance of a Customer-Centric Design Approach: An Interview with Gerry McGovern By Christine Perfetti. "Gerry McGovern is a world-renowned content-management expert and author of the books, 'Content Critical' and 'The Web Content Style Guide.' User Interface Engineering's Christine Perfetti recently talked with Gerry about the importance of a customer-centric approach to design. Here is what Gerry had to say about his experiences..." http://www.uie.com/events/uiconf/2006/articles/importance_of_customer/ +09: PHP. PHP Tutorial: Introduction By Vince Barnes. "Welcome to the HTML Goodies PHP Tutorials! This series is a new series that is in development right now. This tutorial series is a little more advanced than our HTML tutorials. The assumption is made that you already have an understanding of HTML and basic web design. For this reason this is not a good starting point for the new designer, but is instead a place for one with a little experience to spread their wings and expand their design horizons. Check back here often to see the progress of the series. We'll have you writing PHP code very soon! The following sections are available now..." http://www.htmlgoodies.com/beyond/php/article.php/3472391 The Basics of Serializing Objects in PHP By Alejandro Gervasio. "Object serialization in PHP is very easy, and can be used for a variety of different purposes. It can be used to perform some fairly complex operations, in fact. This article, the first of a three-part series, introduces you to object serialization and a number of the tasks for which you can put this approach to use....What should you expect from this series? By the end of it, you should be equipped with a decent knowledge of how to serialize/unserialize objects without losing their methods and properties during the transition, as well as constructing persisting and session objects, and much more..." http://www.devshed.com/c/a/PHP/The-Basics-of-Serializing-Objects-in-PHP/ An Introduction to Test Driven Development with PHP By Dennis Pallett. "This article will introduce you to the concept of Test Driven Development, and demonstrate it with a simple example project." http://www.phpit.net/article/introduction-tdd-php/ The Problem with PHP Joshua Barrett. "...Rails is a framework, PHP is a bunch of bricks. You figure it out." http://www.relativesanity.com/archive/95 In Praise Of PHP By Andreas Roell. "PHP has been able to stand its ground as a consistently implemented server-side scripting language. PHP is a general-purpose scripting language that is ideally suited for web developers, and can be easily embedded into HTML." http://tinyurl.com/jyvdy +10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Real Hackers Don't Use CSS By Emil Stenstrom. "When you, as a standardist, talk to hackers about standards, keep in mind that they are good at what they do. There's a reason they are doing it a certain way and it works. Just throwing out a 'Tables are so 96' won't bite; you need to be smarter than that. Don't forget that you where once in the same seat, and use the same arguments that made you switch..." http://friendlybit.com/css/real-hackers-dont-use-css/ Standards in a Nutshell By Natalie Jost. "I was thinking the other day about how to best explain web standards to someone unfamiliar. I've heard the podcasts, read the discussion, I've read Zeldman's book a couple of times now, and when I think about it all my head hurts a little for those people who are just finding web standards for themselves. People take way too long explaining what web standards means. It's about accessibility, usability, semantic markup, blah blah blah... yep, it's all those things, but in a nutshell, what is it? What's the starting point, the springboard for beginners? It's simply separating your content, your design, and your behavioral aspects of your site. So I drew this out..." http://nataliejost.com/articles/standards-in-a-nutshell What is Semantic Markup and Why Should You Care? By Virginia DeBolt. "The word semantic gets tossed around a lot in connection with web design. A comment from someone made me realize I had overlooked discussing what that means here on Web Teacher. I use the word logical quite often instead, although I am not in a majority by talking about the logic of HTML tags as relating to semantics..." http://tinyurl.com/nmy6d Web Patterns: Q and A with John Allsopp By Luke Wroblewski. "Following up on part one of the Design Patterns conversation, I recently had the pleasure of speaking with John Allsopp about Web patterns. John is the lead developer of the Style Master CSS Editor and founder of Webpatterns.org, a site focused on the intersection of design patterns and Web development. In John's own words: 'The purpose of identifying patterns is to use them in our work as designers, information architects, and developers.' We chatted about doing just that..." http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?361 +11: TOOLS. Clean CSS By Jeff Finley. "CleanCSS is a powerful CSS optimizer and formatter. Basically, it takes your CSS code and makes it cleaner and more concise." http://www.cleancss.com/ Sizer By brianapps. "Sizer is a freeware utility that allows you to resize any window to an exact, predefined size. This is extremely useful when designing web pages, as it allows you to see how the page will look when viewed at a smaller size. The utility is also handy when compiling screen-shots for documentation, using Sizer allows you to easily maintain the same window size across screen grabs." http://www.brianapps.net/sizer.html The Color Wizard By Colors on the Web. "The Colour Wizard lets you type in the value of your colour and get an automatic return of that colour's complementary colour, split complementary colours, analogous colours, chromatic variations, shade and tint variation and saturation variation." http://www.colorsontheweb.com/colorwizard.asp rendr 2 By greg taff. "I've been tinkering with a rapid html prototyping tool for sometime and have finally fixed a critical bug that was making it a pain to use for large bits of markup. I now feel its good enough to share." http://gregtaff.com/rendar2.html Photosensitive Epilepsy Analysis Tool (PEAT) By Trace. "The Trace Center's Photosensitive Epilepsy Analysis Tool was developed to provide a way for web developers to identify potentially seizure inducing material. Download the beta version free and try it out." http://trace.wisc.edu/peat/ +12: USABILITY. Oh, That Kind of Better...On the Trade-Off Between Feature-Laden and Usable By Kath Straub. Kath Straub "looks at the disparity between what consumers think they need and what they can actually use." http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/jun06.asp#kath No Instruction Necessary, Part 1 By Andy Rutledge. "...at every step in the design process we have to be in the habit of asking ourselves if there is a reasonable possibility that instructions for basic use are necessary. Ideally, instructions for use are superfluous and indicate poor design. This isn't always so, but it is generally so, especially when we're talking about fundamental interface function issues. Website design presents us with all sorts of opportunities for crafting good and bad affordance. These opportunities run the gamut, from simple universal elements, like site navigation, to more context-specific, esoteric and playful elements, like those found in game sites or viral ads..." http://www.andyrutledge.com/no-instruction-necessary-part1.php Intuitive By Adam Kalsey. "Your intuition is based on your experiences. Just because your new UI is intuitive to you, that doesn't mean it's intuitive to your users. They have different experiences and therefore different intuitions." http://kalsey.com/blog/2006/06/intuitive/ Eight Problems That Haven't Changed By Jakob Nielsen and Hoa Loranger. "... 1) Links that don't change color when visited; 2) Breaking the back button; 3) Opening new browser windows; 4) Pop-up windows; 5) Design elements that look like advertisements; 6) Violating Web-wide conventions; 7) Vaporous content and empty hype; 8) Dense content and unscannable text". http://www.webmonkey.com/webmonkey/06/24/index4a.html Email Newsletters: Surviving Inbox Congestion By Jakob Nielsen. "Newsletter usability has increased since our last study, but the competition for users' attention has also grown with the ever-increasing glut of information...Feeds are a cold medium in comparison with email newsletters. Feeds do not form the same relationship between company and customers that a good newsletter can build. We don't have data to calculate the relative business value of a newsletter subscriber compared to a feeds subscriber, but I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that companies make ten times as much money from each newsletter subscriber. Given that newsletters are a much more powerful and warm medium, it is probably best for most companies to encourage newsletter subscriptions and promote them over website feeds." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/newsletters.html Making the Customer CEO By Gerry McGovern. "...The websites that succeed are customer-focused. The websites that fail use organization-speak and are technology-centric. It's as simple as that..." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2006/nt-2006-06-12-customer-ceo.htm +13: XML. The 7 (f)laws of the Semantic Web By Dan Zambonini. "When it comes to the Semantic Web, you might call me a disillusioned advocate. I've been dipping in and out of the technologies for the last 5 years or so, but am increasingly frustrated by the lack of any visible progress..." http://tinyurl.com/g29ob [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.]