+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 5, Issue 05, July 28, 2006. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 05 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: BOOKS. 03: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. 04: EVALUATION & TESTING. 05: EVENTS. 06: JAVASCRIPT. 07: MISCELLANEOUS. 08: NAVIGATION. 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. Understanding Web Accessibility By Shawn Lawton Henry. "'Understanding Web Accessibility' is Chapter 1 of the recently-published book Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance." http://www.uiaccess.com/understanding.html Can You Get the Music? A Review of Music Download Sites By Janet Ingber. "...Unfortunately, no single web site is totally accessible, has old and new music from major record labels, and uses a format that is compatible with all portable players and CD burners..." http://www.afb.org/afbpress/pub.asp?DocID=aw070407 Disabilities and Barriers By Georgia Southern University. "This section will illustrate various disabilities and how a disability prevents users from accessing information on the Internet. A barrier is defined as those parts of a Web page that are inaccessible to people with disabilities. In the majority of sites, barriers can be removed from Web pages without compromising the integrity, presentation or the author's "creative license" of their site..." http://tinyurl.com/rqqfn PDF Standards From ISO By Leonard Rosenthol. "...I thought I'd write a bit about some of the standards related to PDF from ISO (International Standards Organization)." http://tinyurl.com/j8c86 PDF Needs You for PDF/UA! By Duff Johnson. "AIIM's PDF/UA Committee needs your help!. PDF/UA (Universal Accessibility) is tasked with developing a Standard for accessible PDF with a goal of eventual adoption by the ISO." http://tinyurl.com/kj4zo LIFT Text Transcoder WebAIM Thread. Ann Jenkins: "I am wondering if anyone on this list has any experience with or an opinion about the LIFT Text Transcoder..." Patrick H. Lauke:"...quick fix, band-aid solution. If you build your pages properly, using standards, providing alternative content etc, then you've already got a text-only version...your markup itself..." http://www.webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread.php?thread=2985 +02: BOOKS. Kaiser, Shirley. Deliver First Class Websites, SitePoint, 2006. +03: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Transcendent CSS: Creating the Aesthetic Web By Molly E. Holzschlag. "For those folks working with Web standards, particularly CSS, the road's been a bit of a difficult one. We've faced a lot of challenges and continue to face them. But there's hope on the horizon, lots of hope. This hope has emerged from the hard work of many people who are attempting to transcend the technical problems and create great Web sites. Our joint goal is to create sites that are structurally sound, accessible, usable, and designed with aesthetic appeal for multiple platform use including screen, print, and wherever possible, mobile devices..." http://www.molly.com/2006/07/25/informme-please/ Dvoraked By Eric A. Meyer. "...none of his individual points are on target. What his outburst does is remind us of the problem to which so many have grown numb, and which we still-for all the progress that has been made-face on a daily basis. Consequently, it reminds us to keep advocating for greater consistency between browsers, to praise the efforts of browser makers in that direction, and to help them correct their course when they move in the wrong direction-and to do so constructively, not destructively. For while we may gain insights from the rantings of trolls, we should never be so foolish as to adopt their tactics." http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/07/26/dvoraked/ Dvorak Reloaded By John Allsopp. "You know, having got stuck into John Dvorak the other day, I kinda feel a little bad now. See, underneath it all, I sense his frustration with CSS. And I do agree both the issues of browser compatibility and the learning curve with a new technology can be frustrating...So here is a challenge for all you CSS designers: Develop a CSS redesign of John Dvorak's blog...The first 10 redesigns we receive, will receive..." http://westciv.typepad.com/dog_or_higher/2006/07/dvorak_reloaded.html Correcting the 20 Pro Tips (.NET magazine) By Emil Stenstrom. ".NET magazine is a fairly big web development magazine. I've recently been referenced to its articles from many separate places, and often found the articles to be of good quality. The last one, called 20 pro tips, was not too good though, so I'm going to go through and correct it. I'm not trying to attack the magazine here (remember 'friendly' in the URL), I just want people to know these things. The article consists of 20 points that a pro should know. Here are the points I found errors in..." http://friendlybit.com/css/correcting-the-20-pro-tips/ Styling Abbreviations and Acronyms By Russ Weakley. "I wrote an article on abbreviations about three years ago that discussed the basics of abbreviations. Aspects of the article were slightly misleading and I have been meaning to update the information for a long time. A modified version of Styling abbreviations and acronyms is now online..." http://www.maxdesign.com.au/presentation/abbreviations/ Open Web Design By openwebdesign.org. "Open Web Design is a community of designers and site owners sharing free web design templates as well as web design information. Helping to make the internet a prettier place!" http://openwebdesign.org/ CSSElite Another CSS design gallery. http://www.csselite.com/ +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Meet the Unicorn By Olivier Thereaux. "Why should we have to use ten different tools to check the quality of a single web page? We think there should be a tool to gather observations made on a single document by various validators and quality checkers, and summarize all of that neatly for the user..." http://www.w3.org/QA/2006/07/meet_the_unicorn.html Codename UniCORN By Jean-Guilhem Rouel and Damien Leroy. "...The aim of our internship is to create a 'universal validator' that will be able to validate and check multiple things in a document through a single Web interface. But this is not only a merge of all the validators interfaces, there should be a strong link between all these tools to avoid inconsistency and useless job..." http://www.w3.org/QA/2006/obs_framework/ Expert Usability Participants By Alastair Campbell. "...Usability testing, including participants with disabilities is almost always a good thing. However, you have to be aware of what you are getting if you use a panel of regular testers. Obviously I'm somewhat biased by being from a psychology/usability background, and working for a company that does full usability testing. There are some inherent difficulties with repeat users that should be known to interpret the results..." http://alastairc.ac/2006/07/expert-usability-participants/ The Ultimate Testing Checklist By Shirley Kaiser. "Testing plays a critical role in the development of your web site and its long-term maintenance. While smaller web sites-especially those with more limited budgets-may not need to follow the formal testing procedures that are required for large-scale, commercial web sites, every site needs to be thoroughly tested to ensure that it's error-free, user-friendly, accessible, and standards compliant..." http://www.sitepoint.com/article/ultimate-testing-checklist +05: EVENTS. Introduction to Dreamweaver 8 August 22, 2006. 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM US/Eastern Live Online Seminar http://tinyurl.com/qt2xs Best Practices: A Closer Look at CSS and XML in Dreamweaver 8 August 22, 2006. 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM US/Eastern Live Online Seminar http://tinyurl.com/qt2xs Professional PHP Development August 24-25 2006. London, United Kingdom http://www.carsonworkshops.com/dev/php/24-25AUG2006.html SHiFT Social and Human Ideas for Technology September 28-29, 2006. Lisbon, Portugal http://wiki.shift.pt/doku.php CISSE 2006 Second International Joint Conferences on Computer, Information, and Systems Sciences, and Engineering December 4-14, 2006. Virtual forum for presentation and discussion of the state-of the-art research, conducted online in real-time via the internet. http://www.cisse2006online.org/ IEEE First International Conference on Digital Information Management December 6-8, 2006. Bangalore, India http://www.icdim.org/ +06: JAVASCRIPT. JavaScript Event Tests Part 1: onmouseover By Gez Lemon. "This is the first part of a series of articles investigating support for JavaScript events in popular screen readers. This article investigates the onmouseover event." http://juicystudio.com/article/screen-reader-onmouseover.php Highlighting Form Fields with Unobtrusive JavaScript By Adam Kalsey. "I wanted to alter the appearance of a form field when someone places their cursor in i, an effect that you see here and there..." http://tinyurl.com/qsckf Dynamic Content with DOM-2 By Apple. The relatively recent emergence of peer-to-peer distributed computing and the renewed interest in real-time data exchange have stoked the embers of a hot topic: displaying dynamic content over the Web. Unfortunately, the statelessness of HTTP and the limitations of the rendering components of different browsers present significant challenges to web developers wishing to get fresh information to the client without sending additional requests to a server. http://developer.apple.com/internet/webcontent/dom2i.html Javascript, the DOM and application/xhtml+xml By Simon Willson. Simon describes the differences when developing a javascript for a page served as application/xhtml+xml. http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2003/06/15/javascriptWithXML The Right Way to do Ajax is Declaratively By Duncan Cragg. "Don't write your interactive Web application in custom Javascript! The Web's Declarative nature needn't be broken just because you want two-way dynamic data instead of one-way documents on your site. Instead, write Declaratively to generic Javascripts, plugins and browser features such as Hijax, hInclude, XForms, SVG, XBL, etc..." http://duncan-cragg.org/blog/post/right-way-to-do-ajax-is-declaratively/ +07: MISCELLANEOUS. Microsoft Finds That More Screens are Better By Ann Light. "Mary Czerwinski...has looked into the relationship between the monitors that people use and their productivity at office tasks. The upshot of her research: bigger monitors are better, and while two monitors are good, three are ideal..." http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article3277.asp Interview with Jakob Nielsen By Matt Mickiewicz. "Matt Mickiewicz interviews Jakob Nielsen, author of the brand new book 'Prioritizing Web Usability,' about AJAX, usability's close link to keyword advertising, and some of the advertising formats we're seeing around the Web today. What do you think of the current implementations of AJAX (Google Maps, Writely, Google Suggest, Zimbra, etc.) on the Web today?" http://www.sitepoint.com/article/interview-jakob-nielsen Ten Questions for David Storey By Russ Weakley. "David Storey is the Chief Web Opener at Opera Software, based in Oslo, Norway. He leads a small global team, responsible for improving the compatibility of the web, so that it can be accessed by all. David talks about Web Openers, web standards, Opera9, Operas relevance in today's marketplace, document.stylesheets and User Agent String spoofing." http://webstandardsgroup.org/features/david-storey.cfm Veerle Pieters Interview By Carolyn Wood. "Most of us learned to make Web sites mired in 'view source' code, through careful self study, and from those generous souls who share their tips and techniques through tutorials. If you're one of the lucky ones, you already know of the inimitable Veerle Pieters. A Web uber-talent, she's been helping others with her in-depth Web design tutorials for years. If you haven't been introduced, join our own managing editor Carolyn Wood as she and Veerle talk about process, working with clients, and of course, how to pronounce Veerle correctly." http://www.digital-web.com/articles/veerle_pieters/ Getting Emotional With Donald Norman (Interview) By Marco van Hou. "I believe that we now do understand how to design so that the result truly fits people. By 'we', I mean the design community, the design theorists (which is where I fit), and the university community of design." http://tinyurl.com/jmyd2 UPA 2006 Podcast By Giles Colborne. "Giles Colborne of the UK chapter of the Usability Professionals' Association just announced that a podcast containing interviews of people at the UPA 2006 conference is now available here. Interviewed in the podcast is Steve Krug, Shawn Henry, Jacob Nielsen and Larry Constantine." http://www.ukupa.org.uk/resources/archives/cat_podcast.html UXPod - User Experience Podcasts By Gerry Gaffney. User experience discussions by Gerry Gaffney. http://uxpod.libsyn.com/ +08: NAVIGATION. The Ultimate SEO Checklist By Shirley Kaiser. "Optimizing your web site for search engines should be an integral part of your web site project, from the very beginning to the very end. Search engine optimization (SEO) should be considered, and if possible, implemented, throughout the planning, design, development, and maintenance stages of your web site." http://www.sitepoint.com/article/ultimate-seo-checklist net-guide.co.uk "Whilst some search engines are easy to use for the visually impaired, this is not necessarily true of the sites returned in the results of any searches carried out. This search engine gives an accessibility rating for the websites returned for any query entered...The accessibility rating is determined mainly by how user-friendly a website is for visitors with visual disabilities. Other factors include how fast loading a website is, how easy it is to navigate and clarity of language." http://www.net-guide.co.uk/ Google Accessible Search Isn't By Ben Buchanan. "The latest product of Google labs shows Google managing to do the right thing and the wrong thing at the same time: Google Accessible Search. It's kind of spectacular that Google can produce a search specifically for accessible resources and still not make a best-practice search form or results page..." http://weblog.200ok.com.au/2006/07/google-accessible-search-isnt.html Google Accessibility Search WebAIM Thread. "(Christian Heilmann) I like the idea, but it is - possibly involuntarily - advertising the idea that there needs to be a 'special' version of any web app for blind people, which is a myth we tried to get rid of for years now..." http://www.webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread.php?thread=2983 They Think It's Accessible. It is not! By Marjolein Katsma. "First of all, it would be more accessible if they just made the actual page accessible - people don't like to be treated differently - certainly not being presented with less functionality." http://tinyurl.com/gnj3o Ranking Accessible By T.V. Raman. "I'm penning this as a response to all who have wondered about what you could do make your particular Web sites rank well with respect to Accessible Search..." http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/2006JulSep/0046.html +09: PHP. Using XML - Part 6: Validation By Adam Delves. "This series has so far focused on XML technologies and how they can be utilized using PHP 5. A subject we have not touched upon yet, is XML validation. This article will explore the application independent XML validation standards of DTD's, the XML Schema Language and the XSLT-based Schematron language. I will demonstrate how to validate XML in PHP and demonstrate how PHP 5's XSL extension can be used to validate XML using the Schematron language..." http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/adam_delves20060719.php3 +10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Misplaced Anger: A Rebuttal to Zeldman's Criticism of the W3C By Molly E. Holzschlag. "...Jeffrey is wrong in his current assessment of the W3C. Clearly, there are a lot of reasons to dislike the organization, and surely we shouldn't put all our standards attention to an organization that is known to be filled with difficulties. But the reasons Jeffrey cites aren't the ones I'd choose as being up for criticism, knowing what I do at this point. The W3C has been more open to a new breed of interested people than ever before. Slowly, yes, and perhaps only in certain sectors. But it is only perceived as a closed system. It isn't one, but you have to have the initiative..." http://tinyurl.com/ktwlf Professionalism and Best Practice in Web Design and Development By John Allsopp. "...A professional web designer and developer understands best practices in their field, among them the use of valid HTML and CSS, the appropriate use of CSS and HTML (separating presentation from structured content, using the appropriate semantic HTML elements where available), and the development of accessible web content. A professional designer and developer uses these techniques knowledgeably and intelligently to develop solutions which meet their client's, employer's or own needs, and which meet the needs of the users of the sites they develop..." http://westciv.typepad.com/dog_or_higher/2006/07/professionalism.html Web Professional's Code of Ethics By Molly E. Holzschlag. "Many professional organizations publish policy and ethics documents relating to how they as individuals treat their clients, each other, how they manage fees, and the kind of treatment their professionalism deserves in kind. In an effort to mobilize the Web community as professionals, and what it means to be a Web professional, I firmly believe that a code of ethics for our profession should arise out of a common group. I believe we owe it to ourselves, each other, our clients, and the profession's integrity and sustainability at large to begin a time of new professionalism for ourselves..." http://www.molly.com/2006/06/27/web-professionals-code-of-ethics/ Web Professionals Code of Ethics Wiki Launched by Meri Williams. http://www.meriwilliams.com/ethics/ Best Practices By Webcontent.gov. "The Web Managers Advisory Council, of the Interagency Committee on Government Information (ICGI), recommended these best practices in its June 2004 report to OMB: 'Recommended Policies and Guidelines for Federal Public Websites.' They are practices that many federal agencies have adopted to make their websites more citizen-centered." http://tinyurl.com/jzqwm +11: TOOLS. WebbIE By Alasdair King. "WebbIE is a web browser for blind and visually-impaired people, especially those using screen readers. The Accessible programs let you access news and audio on the Internet in a simple and accessible way, allowing you to use podcasts, listen to the radio and read RSS and news with your screen reader or other access solution. Together they provide a way to access websites and other great things online..." http://www.webbie.org.uk/ Thunder By screenreader.net. "At ScreenReader.net we have freeware for blindness and visual impairment special needs throughout the world. It is free only to individual blind people for their personal use at home: it is not free to organisations...Download the Thunder ScreenReader talking software and your modern XP or Vista computer will be immediately usable by someone who can't see to read the screen." http://www.screenreader.net/ W3C Mobile Web Best Practices Checker (ALPHA) By Dominique Hazael-Massieux. "...this tool is an alpha release of a Mobile Web Best Practices checker..." http://www.w3.org/2006/05/mwbp-check/ SafariTest By snugtech.com. "How does your website look on Apple Safari? Enter your URL in the box above and click View. SafariTest will return a screenshot of your page as viewed with Safari." http://www.snugtech.com/safaritest/ +12: USABILITY. Evaluating Low Spatial Frequency Compositions By Matt Queen. "Icons that are difficult to tell apart can lead to disastrous consequences. Matt Queen shows us how studying the way the human visual system encodes information can lead to more effective icon design." http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/icon_analysis The Elements of Style for Designers By Christina Wodtke. "What if E.B. White had written 'Hanging Commas 99% Bad' instead of a gentle list of reminders for young writers? Wodtke outlines how White's list of 22 reminders for writing can be just what young designers need." http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/the_elements_of Site Evolution By Paul Boag. "...There are obvious benefits to evolving a site over time rather than undertaking sporadic redesigns. However, it is important to remember that the foundations need to be in place before you can successfully follow this approach. It will be hard to evolve a site that has not been built with this approach in mind. Ensuring content, design, and functionality are all maintained separately is key to the success of a constantly evolving website. Without those the overheads of evolving your site will be too high." http://www.boagworld.com/archives/2005/11/site_evolution.html +13: XML. What are Microformats? By Tantek Celik. Tantek's presentation slides form his 'An Event Apart' New York City, presentation. http://tantek.com/presentations/2006/07/what-are-microformats/ What Is RDF By Joshua Tauberer. "Joshua Tauberer updates the classic XML.com article 'What Is RDF' by rewriting it from scratch. Tauberer claims that RDF is more relevant than ever in the world of Web 2.0." http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/01/24/rdf.html Google Exec Challenges Berners-Lee By Candace Lombardi. "A Google executive challenged Internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee on his ideas for a Semantic Web during a conference in Boston on artificial intelligence...Google Director of Search and AAAI Fellow Peter Norvig was the first to the microphone during the Q&A session, and he took the opportunity to raise a few points...'from Google's point of view, there are a few things you need to overcome, incompetence being the first...We deal with millions of Web masters who can't configure a server, can't write HTML. It's hard for them to go to the next step. The second problem is competition. Some commercial providers say, 'I'm the leader. Why should I standardize?' The third problem is one of deception. We deal every day with people who try to rank higher in the results and then try to sell someone Viagra when that's not what they are looking for. With less human oversight with the Semantic Web, we are worried about it being easier to be deceptive'..." http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-6095705.html Incompetents Revolt! By Danny Ayers. "I guess what I'm trying to say here is that Google appears to see data being distributed on the Web and under the control of individual users as being a threat to their own aims. They see problems unless Web data is in their silos. But this doesn't have to be the case, they can still be leaders in the interfaces to the data. i.e. don't build big DBs, make good mashups. In one sense at least there is potentially a big problem for them: the more directly addressable, first-class data there is on the public Web, the less people will be dependent on free-text search engines. No doubt they're aware of that already." http://dannyayers.com/2006/07/19/incompetents-revolt [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.]