+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 5, Issue 02, July 7, 2006. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 02 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: FLASH. 05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 06: MISCELLANEOUS. 07: NAVIGATION. 08: PHP. 09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 10: TOOLS. 11: TYPOGRAPHY. 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. Text Equivalents Overview By Jon Gunderson. "Images and graphics are an important part of web sites and most web developers are concerned that their web resources are visually appealing to users. There is often a misconception that the use of graphics and accessibility are at odds with each other. For many types of disabilities, graphics actually enhances the accessibility of web resources. The accessibility of web resources really has nothing to do with the graphical effect the author envisions and has everything to do with the markup used generate that graphical effect or content..." http://html.cita.uiuc.edu/text/ The Moving Target of Accessibility By Matt Bailey. "I'm working on a large government accessibility project, and it is one of the most eye-opening and challenging projects I've been on. Not so much because of the work involved, but because of the attitudes and the attempt to totally comprehensive in meeting accessibility standards." http://tinyurl.com/zn89f Web Accessibility Soon Mandatory in Europe? By Jo Best. "The 25 European Commission member states and nine accession countries have all signed up for a plan that could make accessibility in e-procurement mandatory..." http://tinyurl.com/m7p83 Circus of CAPTCHA's By Matt Bailey. "Now that Google has changes its policies and added an accessible alternative, I thought that others would fall in line. Wow, was I wrong. In the past few weeks I have been overwhelmed with CAPTCHA's as I have opened accounts at many social media sites. One of the most egregious was at Yahoo..." http://www.accessibilityblog.com/2006/06/29/circus-of-captchas/ Text Only Sites By Leonie Watson. "...If an organization is serious about their reputation and quality of service, if they want to be cost and resource effective over a sustained period of time and if they want to be an example of social responsibility -- the single site approach is simply the only choice." http://www.nomensa.com/resources/articles/text-only-sites.html An Overview of WCAG 2.0 By Matt Heerema. "The WCAG WG is going to publish WCAG 2.0 as a formal recommendation later this year. I love the revisions and the new approach they are taking. It is a much more practical and accessible (pun intended) set of guidelines, more of a philosophy of how to make pages, than mechanical rules. This article is an attempt to digest and summarize the guidelines." http://tinyurl.com/f899w Why Design Accessible Web Sites? By Nicole Sullivan. "An accessible and non-accessible site can look exactly the same to a non-disabled user. It can be difficult then to understand what the fuss is all about. Why is it important to consider accessibility when designing and planning online assets?..." http://www.postdiluvian.org/~nicole/content/?p=19 +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Control Block Formatting Context By Zoe Gillenwater. "In order to become a skilled CSS developer, you need to understand the underlying concepts of CSS that make it work and not just how to produce certain visual effects. The 'block formatting context' is one of those concepts that drives how CSS affects your page without you even knowing it. Most of the time, you don't need to worry about it; it's just something that's going on behind the scenes that you don't need to get involved with. Sometimes, however, the lack of a new context can make elements interact in undesirable ways. The primary reason for setting a new context is to keep cleared elements inside a main content div from clearing floated sidebars. We'll use this problem as a case study for how to establish new block formatting contexts and to see what their effect is on the other elements around them." http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=6BC9D Can You Hear Me Now? By Joshua Briley. "One thing rarely mentioned in CSS discussions is the topic of aural style sheets. It can be assumed that limited user agent support is the culprit for limited discussion on the topic, but rest assured, support is on the way. Aural style sheets can add more of a human element to audibly presented sites. No longer should visitors have to listen to mechanical, lifeless presentations. Below is a discussion on current user agents, linking aural styles to your documents, and utilizing several properties and values." http://accessites.org/gbcms_xml/news_page.php?id=17 Style Me Challenge: Call for Entries By Virginia DeBolt. "The Style Me Challenge invites designers to create the CSS for an XHTML page. I had a similar Style Me exercise in my first book, and want to expand it for my new book, Mastering Integrated HTML and CSS. The new book is due out from Wiley Publishing in the Spring of 2007. There will be a full color insert in the book where I plan to showcase some of the designs created for a new Style Me Challenge. If your CSS design is chosen for the book, your name and a link to your website will be included, as well as a brief description of you or your design business. In addition to the free publicity, you'll get a copy of the book." http://www.webteacher.ws/styleme/ Tutorial: Coding a Layout By Erratic Wisdom. So, you've designed your next site but you're having a little trouble turning your lovely PSD into a coded layout. This tutorial should help you learn how to analyze either a new template, or even your current layout to find the best way to code it. http://erraticwisdom.com/2006/01/29/tutorial-coding-a-layout CSS Galleries By Nick Dunn. "...CSS Galleries makes your life easier by aggregating the major design showcases into one simple RSS feed..." http://css-galleries.com/ Inline Styles Won't Solve Your Problems...But Maybe It Can Save Your Sanity By Natalie Jost. "The issue of inline styles came up recently in regard to something in the stylesheet not working right. Instead of fixing the problems in the stylesheet, it appears there are people resorting to inline styles to 'fix' their troubles by overwriting the stylesheet. This bothers me for a lot of reasons, but I have a feeling it's pretty common." http://nataliejost.com/blog/inline-styles-wont-solve-your-problems +03: EVENTS. User Experience Week 2006 August 14-17, 2006. Washington, D.C. U.S.A. http://www.adaptivepath.com/events/2006/aug/ Information Architecture for Large Enterprises (Louis Rosenfeld) September 14, 2006: Chicago, Illinois U.S.A. September 28, 2006: Washington, D.C. U.S.A. October 19, 2006: Seattle, Washington U.S.A. http://louisrosenfeld.com/presentations/seminars/eia/ Web Usability Workshops (Steve Krug) September 15, 2006: Chicago, Illinois U.S.A. September 29, 2006: Washington, D.C. U.S.A. October 20, 2006: Seattle, Washington U.S.A. http://www.sensible.com/workshops.html +04: FLASH. Unobtrusive Flash Objects (UFO) v3.20 By Bobby van der Sluis. "Better standards compliancy by using W3C DOM methods and the object element instead of innerHTML and the embed element where possible, code optimization and bug fixes. Go get it!" http://www.bobbyvandersluis.com/ufo/ IE Security, JAWS, and Flash Issues By Andrew Kirkpatrick. "By now, almost everyone has heard about the IE Security Update and how it impacts ActiveX control interaction. With the release of JAWS 7.1, there are additional reasons to make sure that you add the HTML Object element in the way suggested at the Active Content Developer Resource site..." http://tinyurl.com/nt5c4 +05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Gliffy.com Moves Wireframing Online By Garrick Van Buren. "Gliffy is a browser-based, Flash-drive diagramming tool, with the feel of a desktop app (i.e. fast and has both 'File' and 'Edit' menus). I spent a little time with it today and am quite impressed. Far more enjoyable to use than Visio or ConceptDraw." http://mnteractive.com/archive/gliffycom-moves-wireframing-online/ Hand-Crafting Prototypes in Visio By Henrik Olsen. "If you are the happy owner of a tablet computer or a pen tablet you can hand-draw prototypes on your computer. In this article we'll look at what hand-sketching is good for and how to built hand-drawn prototypes in Visio. http://www.guuui.com/issues/03_06.php +06: MISCELLANEOUS. Ten Questions for Gian Sampson Wild By Russ Weakley. "Gian Sampson Wild talks about accessibility, WCAG 2.0, cognitive disability, Baseline, valid code, AAA and opening shopping malls." http://webstandardsgroup.org/features/gian-sampson-wild.cfm CSUN Accessibility Sessions Audio Now Available By Peter Korn. "After a disappointingly long delay, I'm happy to report that audio from our two Orca sessions at the CSUN (Conference on Technology and Persons with Disabilities) Conference on Technology and Persons with Disabilities, and the Open Document Format Accessibility panel discussion, are now available for your listening pleasure. They are encoded in Ogg Vorbis format, which is an open source audio compression and encoding system that to my ear sounds a lot better than MP3 when compressed to the same or even smaller bit-rate. Ogg Vorbis players are available for most every platform, and the latest players for Windows like WinAmp can play them automatically." http://tinyurl.com/q498q @media 2006 Presentations "Presentation audio and video from @media 2006, Europe's foremost web design conference...You can now download the first of the @media 2006 podcasts - 'A Decade of Style' by Eric Meyer. We will be releasing a new podcast every Monday." http://www.vivabit.com/atmedia2006/blog/ +07: NAVIGATION. Do Links Need Underlines? By Jared Spool. "When the designers switch back and forth, between having some links underlined but others not be underlined, that makes even more work for users. Work that doesn't add any real value. We think the visual design element of the underline is not required, but it is cruel to make users work extra hard because you can't decide." http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2006/07/05/do-links-need-underlines/ Creating Accessible Navigation Bars By Jon Gunderson. "Navigation bars and other groupings of links are important to represent in HTML markup so that users can easily identify the navigation bars and skip over or move to them. By providing a distinctive label with the title attribute for each grouping, users can also identify the purpose of each navigation bar." http://html.cita.uiuc.edu/nav/menus.php +08: PHP. An Introduction to OOP in PHP By phpdeveloper. "Okay, show of hands out there - who else is tired of the boring old car analogies when it comes to talking about object-oriented programming in PHP? I have to admit; even I got a little sick of reading them after a bit...So, here we go with something a little bit different - hopefully it'll turn out to be something useful for all of you developers out there trying to wade through the wide world of object-oriented programming with PHP..." http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/5719 Classes and Objects (PHP 4) By php.net. "A class is a collection of variables and functions working with these variables..." http://us2.php.net/oop Object-Oriented Features New To PHP5 By Peter Lavin. "This chapter is excerpted from 'Object-Oriented PHP: Concepts, Techniques, and Code'." http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/object_oriented_php20060620.php3 A Simple Sessions Tutorial By phpdeveloper. "Developers just starting out with PHP have a pretty easy time getting the basics down, but there are a few things that can take a little time to get ones head around. I just looking around the PHP community, I've noticed a bit of a barrier when it comes to getting aquatinted with sessions. So, to help overcome this bump in the road, here's a brief introduction to sessions - what they are and how they can help you..." http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/5704 Zend Framework By Zend. Zend's Framework is a PHP alternative to Ruby on Rails and Django (Python). http://framework.zend.com/ +09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Why Web Standards Matter (Case Study) By Jesper Ronn-Jensen. "Project managers often have a hard time understanding web standards and why they matter. In this case, my arguments made a perfect business case for the managers of a particular project. Recently I was called out to debug some javascript code that did not perform. There was really not a big problem in Firefox, but Internet Explorer hung using 20 seconds or more each time the script was activated by the user. It was one of those applications where you click on a little plus to expand a list of units in a subgroup. The list that caused the trouble contained 1,416 rows. The subgroup was invisible and already rendered. On click a display style property changed from display:none to display:block. Unfolding the list took 19 seconds in IE. WHAT?..." http://justaddwater.dk/2006/06/29/webstandards-case-study/ +10: TOOLS. Insta-Select By Ian Lloyd. "A web developer's time-saver - lets you paste in a list of words/phrases (separated by carriage returns) and converts to an XHTML-compliant