+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 5, Issue 01, July 1, 2006. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 01 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: DREAMWEAVER. 04: EVALUATION & TESTING. 05: EVENTS. 06: FLASH. 07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 08: JAVASCRIPT. 09: MISCELLANEOUS. 10: NAVIGATION. 11: PHP. 12: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 13: TOOLS. 14: TYPOGRAPHY. 15: USABILITY. 16: XML. SECTION TWO: 17: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Whither WAI and WCAG? By Joe Clark. "WCAG 1 was OK and could use a new coat of paint, but the entire modus operandi of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group has been rejected by people who know, and actually love, the Web. As such, any credibility the Working Group has is hanging by a thread in the best case and is a figment of the Working Group's imagination in the worst. You had a good run for a while there, but is it time to close up shop?" http://blog.fawny.org/2006/06/23/whither/ Formal Objection to WCAG 2.0 By Lisa Seeman et al. "WCAG 2.0 claims to define and address the requirements for making Web content accessible to those with learning difficulties, cognitive limitations and others. We object to that claim. Specifically, the success criteria requirements for making content understandable largely ignores the needs of people with learning difficulties and cognitive limitations..." http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/2006AprJun/0368.html What's Next for Web Accessibility? By Faruk Ates. "Accessibility, in the end, is not about the web designer or developer, or the people developing browsers or authoring tools; it's about the people with disabilities, and these people will suffer from WCAG 2.0 the most. Being the normative technical report issued by the W3C, we run the risk of WCAG 2.0 being adopted unquestioned by many governments and large corporations. We shouldn't blame them for doing so, because it's not their duty to conduct a research into the quality, effectiveness and usability of the technical reports that the W3C produces. It is their duty, however, to make use of these reports in a conscious, sensible manner. In other words, it is reasonable to expect them to use their heads when working with these reports. The NFB vs. Target lawsuit shows that this isn't a given. What may happen is that many government and corporation websites will try to 'pass' WCAG 2.0, but through doing so become no more accessible than they were before (or even worse, less accessible). People with disabilities will continue to experience a frustrating rendition of the internet, but they will have little hope for the situation to improve any time soon." http://tinyurl.com/jrzwh David Berlind on Web Accessibility By Joseph Dolson. "Unless society changes significantly, there will always be technologies available which are not 'accessible' - does this mean we should therefore never require accessibility? Does not being ready therefore exonerate our responsibilities? I can't accept that - instead, we should require accessibility and expect that technologies will not be accepted for mainstream use until an accessible use paradigm has been developed." http://tinyurl.com/ej7x9 Crying Foul on Accessibility Claims By Ian Lloyd. "It's an accessibility moan double-bill, folks. First up, there's the story of the UK Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), a governmental department that recently had a Website redesign that should, according to their own specifications (let alone any Disability Discrimination Act requirements) be accessible. But you know how governments are for saying one thing and then doing another..." http://tinyurl.com/q8ez7 Prettier Accessible Forms By Nick Rigby. "Forms are a pain. You can make them pretty, make them accessible, or go a little crazy trying to achieve both. Nick Rigby offers a happy solution." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/prettyaccessibleforms PAS 78 Download Developed by The British Standards Institution sponsored by the Disability Rights Commission. "...available in Word and PDF formats. One electronic copy of the guidance is available free per individual or business." http://www.drc-gb.org/default.aspx?page=3364 A Critique of P.A.S. 78 By Joe Clark. "...The specification has a lot of typos and is inconsistent in several places, to be discussed below. However, I believe the authors have succeeded about 85 percent in achieving a document that teaches untrained people how to manage developers and user testing to arrive at an accessible Web site..." http://blog.fawny.org/2006/03/21/pas78/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. All About CSS Drop Shadows By John Gallant, Holly Bergevin. "Do you like drop shadows on your page elements, but haven't a clue how to get them on your pages? Maybe you do know a bit about creating drop shadows, but a refresher on the modern methods would be welcome? Do you want to learn the very latest cutting edge tricks? If you are any of these, don't go away because we now begin a series on drop shadows for HTML elements. At the start we'll keep it simple, and as we progress in the series the methods will become more advanced and effective. At the end you will be treated to a brand new method so advanced that it must wait for IE7 to arrive before you can use it properly." http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=0536D Selectors in Action By Russ Weakley. This is a sample chapter from Russ Weakley's book 'Teach yourself CSS in 10 minutes'. http://www.samspublishing.com/articles/article.asp?p=425175 Bulletproof Web Design: Expandable Rows By Dan Cederholm. "This chapter takes a look at a common approach to designing a login/promotional area that occupies the top portion of a typical Web page. We deconstruct the design and then rebuild it to accommodate any text size or amount of content." http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=482332 CSS 2.1 Properties By Lee Underwood. "Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are used for Web page layouts and aid in separating the document's style from its structure. Used correctly, CSS can be a powerful Web design tool. This extensive reference covers all the properties of the current version." http://www.webreference.com/authoring/style/sheets/properties/ Ten Common CSS Mistakes By Design Detector. "I've recently been tweaking the code on a website designed by someone else, where I spotted several common mistakes in the stylesheet. I thought it would be helpful to point out a list of these and other mistakes in CSS that I've seen before..." http://www.designdetector.com/link/to/ten-common-css-mistakes/ Inline CSS Should Not be Allowed in Strict Doctypes By Emil Stenstrom. "Strict doctypes are for documents where the webmaster has taken the time to clearly separate the content from the design, not other hybrids." http://tinyurl.com/hga3g Future-Proof Your CSS with Conditional Comments By Bruce Lawson. The IE development team are calling on people to clean up their CSS hacks that might fail when IE7 is released, so I thought I'd tell you about how I did this for an emergency design I did for a punter a couple of months ago. http://tinyurl.com/elk5l +03: DREAMWEAVER. Creating a Simple Three-Column Design with CSS and Dreamweaver 8 By Stephanie Sullivan. "Take your CSS skills to the next level by creating a website with three vertical columns." http://tinyurl.com/kfllk +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Quantitative Studies - How Many Users to Test? By Jakob Nielsen. "When collecting usability metrics, testing 20 users typically offers a reasonably tight confidence interval." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/quantitative_testing.html When 100% Really Isn't 100%: Improving the Accuracy of Small-Sample Estimates of Completion Rates By James R. Lewis and Jeff Sauro. "Small sample sizes are a fact of life for most usability practitioners. This can lead to serious measurement problems, especially when making binary measurements such as successful task completion rates (p). The computation of confidence intervals helps by establishing the likely boundaries of measurement, but there is still a question of how to compute the best point estimate, especially for extreme outcomes. In this paper, we report the results of investigations of the accuracy of different estimation methods for two hypothetical distributions and one empirical distribution of p. If a practitioner has no expectation about the value of p, then the Laplace method ((x+1)/(n+2)) is the best estimator. If practitioners are reasonably sure that p will range between .5 and 1.0, then they should use the Wilson method if the observed value of p is less than .5, Laplace when p is greater than .9, and maximum likelihood (x/n) otherwise." http://tinyurl.com/lfq7c The Return on Investment (ROI) for Personas Submitted by Ann Light. "Extract from 'The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind throughout Product Design' by John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin..." http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article3242.asp +05: EVENTS. WebCT Users Conference July 10-14, 2006. Chicago, Illinois U.S.A. http://www.webct.com/2006 CSS: From the Ground Up with Molly Holzschlag, Andy Clarke July 15, 2006. Honolulu, Hawaii U.S.A. http://www.outreach.hawaii.edu/pnm/programs/2006/EVENT-L08360.asp CSS: Applied Design Techniques with Molly Holzschlag, Andy Clarke July 16, 2006. Honolulu, Hawaii U.S.A. http://www.outreach.hawaii.edu/pnm/programs/2006/EVENT-L08361.asp Distance Teaching and Learning Conference August 2-4, 2006. Madison, Wisconsin U.S.A. http://www.uwex.edu/disted/conference/ CSS Workshops with Russ Weakley August 14-15 or 17-18, 2006. Sydney, Australia http://maxdesign.com.au/workshop-css2006/#workshops +06: FLASH. Testing Keyboard Access in Flash and Flex By Andrew Kirkpatrick. "Testing for keyboard access is probably the first test that should be performed when evaluating the accessibility of Flash and Flex content and applications." http://tinyurl.com/ocru4 +07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. The Confluence of Research and Practice in Information Architecture By Karl Fast. "If you have tried your hand at information architecture (IA) - designing navigation schemes, creating wireframes, planning usability studies - then you will know how challenging the work is. If you have attended the Information Architecture Summit - the seventh edition of this annual conference was recently held in Vancouver - then you will know that information architects are a smart, creative and enthusiastic lot. And if you have worked with information architects then you will have respect for how, and how well, they grapple with tortuous information problems in all their real-world complexity..." http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Jun-06/fast.html The Rolling Content Inventory By Louis Rosenfeld. "...I'm increasingly recommending pursuing a rolling content inventory. Instead of a snapshot, as all those silly IA books suggest, inventory your content on an ongoing basis. Put another way, a content inventory is an process, not a deliverable..." http://louisrosenfeld.com/home/bloug_archive/000448.html Why You Shouldn't Start IA with a Content Inventory By Donna Maurer. "Leisa Reichelt has a blog post on Why you shouldn't start IA with a Content Inventory. I totally disagree with this. But I work on really big, content rich sites, and they are usually in a very poor state, so that may differ from her experience. I could not start a project without an inventory. I cannot imagine how I would reorganize a site if I didn't know what's there to be organized..." http://www.maadmob.net/donna/blog/archives/000696.html +08: JAVASCRIPT. Behavioral Separation By Jeremy Keith. "Breaking up is hard to do. But in web design, separation can be a good thing. As Jeremy Keith explains, content, style, and behavior all deserve their own space." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/behavioralseparation Graceful Error Handling in JavaScript By Tony Patton. "JavaScript provides rudimentary support for error handling to properly handle and avoid errors. Learn about the various techniques available to help you address any development problems you might encounter." http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-6087917.html +09: MISCELLANEOUS. Net Neutrality: This is Serious By Tim Berners-Lee. "When I invented the Web, I didn't have to ask anyone's permission. Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely. I am worried that is going end in the USA..." http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/144 You Can't Keep Ignoring the Web By Gerry McGovern. "The Web deserves professional management because the Web is central to the future of the organization. Most websites are not managed. They are, at best, administered. These administrators 'put up' stuff on the website that they are told to put up. This approach quickly turns your website into a dumping ground. Many administrators know this but they have no real power or authority-it's often their bosses who tell them to put up this unnecessary content." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2006/nt-2006-06-26-senior-managers.htm How to Plan Manpower on a Web Team By Shane Diffily. "Just how many people does it take to properly manage a website? It depends on the website. Shane Diffily explains how to figure it out." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/manpoweronawebteam Hakon Responds to Questions About CSS and... By slashdot.org. "You submitted questions for Hakon Wium Lie on June 20. Today we have his answers, not only to the (+5 moderated) questions we sent him, but to a bunch of others he thought would also be interesting to answer." http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/23/1443203 Where Visual Design Meets Usability - An Interview with Luke Wroblewski, Part 1 By Joshua Porter. "Joshua Porter catches up with Luke Wroblewski about the intersection between visual design and web site usability. Here is what Luke had to say." http://www.uie.com/events/uiconf/2006/articles/wroblewski_interview/ Where Visual Design Meets Usability - An Interview with Luke Wroblewski, Part 2 By Joshua Porter. http://tinyurl.com/qw5qo +10: NAVIGATION. Lifestyles of the Link-Rich Home Pages By Jared M. Spool. "Jared talks about the emerging trend of home pages featuring more and more links and why this is probably a good thing." http://www.uie.com/articles/linkrich_home_pages/ Designing Accessible Navigation By Joseph Dolson. "Building an accessible website is a holistic endeavor. In order to provide easy access to the information on each page, myriad factors must be considered. One of the chief amongst these is the creation of accessible navigation. Whether considering business logic or a principled perspective on web design, enabling the site user to move within your pages is of key importance. This article will describe the principles of accessible navigation and demonstrate ways to create it using CSS and XHTML." http://www.joedolson.com/accessible-navigation.php +11: PHP. How to Manage Memory in PHP By Sara Golemon. WebReference.com has a sample chapter from Sara Goleman's book 'Extending and Embedding PHP' (Chapter 3) taking a look at memory management in PHP. http://www.webreference.com/programming/php_mem/index.html Time Sensitive CSS By Nathan Smith. "Recently, there's been some discussion on the Godbit forum about how to serve dynamic, time sensitive CSS with PHP. I got to thinking, and the steps necessary to make this work are actually pretty easy. First off, let me say that most hardcore programmers will probably scoff at the simplicity of these examples. However, a hardcore programmer I am not, so basic tutorials are what I enjoy. Also, please know that this is not an exercise in JavaScript / Ajax. It is simply a way to provide unique CSS based on date and time." http://sonspring.com/journal/time-sensitive-css Using Globals in PHP By Dennis Pallett. "Dennis Pallett shows you how to use globals in this article, where you will learn everything about the global keyword, the Singleton pattern, the Registry pattern and a Request Wrapper." http://www.phpit.net/article/using-globals-php/ Using Register Globals By php.net. "Perhaps the most controversial change in PHP is when the default value for the PHP directive register_globals went from ON to OFF in PHP 4.2.0. Reliance on this directive was quite common and many people didn't even know it existed and assumed it's just how PHP works. This page will explain how one can write insecure code with this directive but keep in mind that the directive itself isn't insecure but rather it's the misuse of it..." http://il.php.net/register_globals +12: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 9 Ways to Misunderstand Web Standards By Philipp Lenssen. "Misunderstanding 1: 'We Need Separate Print Pages'..." http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-06-23-n15.html Failed Redesigns III By Joe Clark. "Time for another edition of Failed Redesigns, in which incompetent, underschooled Web developers produce new or revamped Web sites with outdated and inaccessible code - and then act all surprised and indignant when I call them on it..." http://blog.fawny.org/2006/06/24/failed3/ CSS Reboot as Web Standards Validation Indicator By Sean Fraser. "Sean Fraser provides standards compliance details of CSS Reboot. 71.8% of CSS Reboot participants use invalid HTML, CSS, or both." http://tinyurl.com/ffks3 A Comparative Investigation of the Accessibility Levels of Irish Websites By Vivienne Trulock. This is Vivienne's dissertation which follows on from Barry McMullin's WARP study of 2002. http://www.ilikecake.net/accessibility/accessibilityinvestigation_3.htm A Love Song About Web Standards By Paul Boag. "It's not often that I receive an email that really makes me laugh. However, this morning I received one containing a love song about web design and boagworld that had me in hysterics..." http://www.boagworld.com/archives/2006/04/a_love_song_to_boagworld.html +12: TOOLS. Docvert By Matthew Cruickshank. "This web service takes multiple word processor files (typically .doc) and converts them to HTML or any XML." Recently support for S5 Slideshow was added, meaning "that you can make slides based on word processing documents. New slides will be created for each 'Heading 1' within the document." http://holloway.co.nz/docvert/index.html Demo (OpenDocument only): http://docvert.com/demo/2.2 HTML Tidy (Online) By Flumpcakes. "HTML Tidy Online is a web front end to the command line program Tidy. It helps remove redundant and sloppy code. It has various options to improve code and fix errors in HTML documents." http://flumpcakes.co.uk/css/html-tidy/ +13: TYPOGRAPHY. Fine Typography for the Web By Dave Shea. Dave Shea's at Media conference presentation materials. http://mezzoblue.com/presentations/2006/@media/ Font-Size - The Right Way... By Gunlaug Srtun. "If you want to know what the correct size for an accessible font should be, then you won't find an absolute answer. The reason is that that's for each visitor to decide, and we as designers should accommodate such decisions as well as we possibly can." http://www.gunlaug.no/contents/wd_1_03_04.html +15: USABILITY. The Battle Between Usability and User-Experience By Thomas Baekdal. "The main reasons why it is so hard to create usable products is that there is a conflict between a high-usability level and great user-experience. You might think this as strange, but there is a important difference between the two." http://tinyurl.com/rcg5l Text Columns: How Long is Too Long? By Jeff Atwood. "...So what's the best way to structure columns of text on a computer screen? How long is too long?..." http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000618.html The Power of Positive Whining By Jeffrey Zeldman. "I recently had a bad experience on a good website and wrote about it here. Writing about experiences is not the same as writing about facts. A company might spend $40,000 to ensure that its navigation labels can be clearly understood by all users. That they spent the money and conducted the tests is the fact. Yet some users might not understand the labels anyway. That would be the experience of those users. Fact versus experience: not the same thing..." http://www.zeldman.com/2006/06/29/the-power-of-positive-whining/ +16: XML. Microformats in Education Wiki Initiated by Jesse Rodgers. "This Wiki is to discuss Microformats in Education. To figure out a need for any specific types this wiki attempts to collect the information required to make a sound proposal to the Microformats discussion list for either new formats or modifications required to current formats. An example might be..." http://web.uwaterloo.ca/wiki/index.php/Main_Page Why XHTML? Or, Why not HTML? By Sean Fraser. "In this article Sean Fraser looks at fifty standards compliant websites to find out which doctype they use. He presents the results which show that the vast majority of the examined sites use XHTML." http://tinyurl.com/lcgwg Understanding XForms: Components By Kurt Cagle. "...Big complex data models look really imposing and impressive, but at the end of the day, XForms got their start largely because the existing HTML forms just weren't expressive enough. Consider some of the more vexing problems associated with typical web forms. Suppose that you wished to..." http://tinyurl.com/mfo7d [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +17: 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.]