+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 5, Issue 06, August 4, 2006. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 06 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: FLASH. 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. Expert Declaration of Dr. James W. Thatcher in NFB V. Target By James W. Thatcher. "...There are many thousands of images on Target.com that lack text equivalents to make them available to people using screen readers. It is impossible before April 6, 2006 to complete a transaction relying on keyboard interaction. Though this one problem appears to have been fixed, many critical barriers remain. None of the form controls on Target.com have proper labeling and there is no accommodation to facilitate keyboard navigation throughout Target.com pages. I have described four types of barriers that are easiest to explain and that are especially important for screen readers. There are other components of Web Accessibility for people with visual disabilities. As of April 12, 2006 the website of the Target Corporation is virtually unusable by a visitor who is blind." http://jimthatcher.com/target/jwtdeclaration.htm This Week in WCAG By Joe Clark. "...WCAG is really quite chuffed that it's been named to the Section 508 review panel, about which I'll have more to say later. Their stated interest is 'harmonization' of Web-accessibility standards, which is another way of saying 'rewrite 508 so it's functionally or actually identical to WCAG 2.' If WAI has its way, '508' will simply become another numbered guideline. WCAG is to 508 as Iraq was to Kuwait..." http://blog.fawny.org/2006/07/28/twiw1/ Disabled Technologies Pave the Way for Next Generation Mobile Web By EurekAlert. "Scientists at The University of Manchester have a launched a new project which seeks to combine web accessibility with cutting-edge mobile phone technologies." http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-08/uom-dtp080306.php The Trouble With the Title Attribute By Steve Faulkner. Steve Faulkner's OZeWAI presentation slides. http://www.sf.id.au/ozewai/ Tangling with Accessible Web Content By Karl Sabino. "New technologies have turned the Web into an accessibility challenge, but preparing the latest guidance on design seems no less fraught. Here Karl Sabino of Flow Interactive gives a picture of the tensions in developing WCAG 2.0." http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article3294.asp +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Understanding Inheritance By Adrian Senior. "Certain properties in a cascading style sheet (CSS) inherit (read assume) the values of their parent. For example, if you have an h1 element that is colored black and that h1 element has a nested span within it, then by default the span will also be black-it inherits the color value from its h1 parent. In this article you will discover how you can use inheritance to optimize your CSS file." http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/css_inheritance.html +03: EVALUATION & TESTING. Is Usability Testing as We Know it About to Radically Change? By Susan Weinschenk. "Usability testing is a tried and true methodology in our industry. Periodically it comes under fire from within and outside the usability community, but has always stood the test of time. Although there is some variation in usability testing protocols from tester to tester, or firm to firm, the basic concepts - think-aloud techniques during the test, usability engineer observing, logging data, interpreting user actions - remain the same. Is this all about to change?..." http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/jul06.asp#kath +04: EVENTS. 2006 Participatory Design Conference August 1-5, 2006. Trento, Italy http://www.pdc2006.org/ Information Architecture - Theory and Practice (Donna Maurer) August 31, 2006. Wellington, New Zealand http://www.optimalusability.com/services.training.donnamaurer.php Hot Topics in Interaction Design September 6, 2006. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania U.S.A. http://www.syntagm.co.uk/design/phichi.shtml Accessibility, Beyond the Basics September 28, 2006; October 26, 2006; November 30, 2006; January 25, 2007; February 22, 2007; or March 29, 2007. London, United Kingdom http://tinyurl.com/k65n3 Demystifying Accessibility October 19, 2006 or January 18, 2007. London, United Kingdom http://tinyurl.com/jqdeh +05: FLASH. Best Practices for Accessible Flash Design: Part 1 By Bob Regan. "In this section you'll learn about accessibility challenges in Flash. Included is a sampling of use cases to help designers create effective strategies for people with disabilities." http://www.webreference.com/authoring/flash/ Flash 8 Accessibility Design Guidelines By Adobe. http://www.adobe.com/resources/accessibility/flash8/components.html +06: JAVASCRIPT. Enumerating JavaScript Objects By Dean Edwards. Dean Edwards discusses Mozilla's new forEach function, which simplifies enumerating Arrays and document nodes. http://dean.edwards.name/weblog/2006/07/enum/ IE7 XMLHttpRequest - Native or Not? By Michael Mahemoff. Michael Mahemoff discusses the issue of native XMLHttpRequest support in IE 7. http://ajaxian.com/archives/ie7-xmlhttprequest-native-or-not DOM Events By Wikipedia. Events from typical mouse and form events, through to DOM mutation events, Microsoft-specific events, and XUL events. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOM_Events +07: MISCELLANEOUS. Ten Questions for Steve Faulkner By Russ Weakley. "Steve talks about accessibility, the Web Accessibility toolbar, the Web Accessibility Tools Consortium, title attributes, AJAX and WCAG2." http://webstandardsgroup.org/features/steve-faulkner.cfm Ten Questions for Donna Maurer By Russ Weakley. "Ten questions for Donna Maurer explores information architecture and interaction designer, the term "usability", teaching people to think, teams, AJAX interactions and more. http://webstandardsgroup.org/features/donna-maurer.cfm A Shortcut to 456 Berea Street (Roger Johansson Interview) By Johan Van Den Rym. "I interviewed (just a little) Roger Johansson, a web developer living and working in Goteborg, Sweden. He is the driving force behind 456 Berea Street, a weblog where you will find a whole bunch of articles related to webstandards, accessibility and usability..." http://fadtastic.net/2006/07/31/a-shortcut-to-456-berea-street/ Designing Powerful Web Applications: An Interview with David Malouf By Joshua Porter. "UIE's Joshua recently interviewed David (Heller) Malouf, a premier Interaction Designer, to discuss the issues involved when development teams are thinking about designing web applications using AJAX and RIA." http://www.uie.com/events/uiconf/2006/articles/malouf_interview/ Interview With Laura Thomson By Cal Evans. "While at OSCON, I had the privilege of talking with Laura Thomson. Laura is the Director of Web Development at OmniTI. Together with husband Luke, she has written 2 books for SAMS publishing on PHP; 'PHP and MySQL Web Development' (currently 3/e) and 'MySQL Tutorial'. She joined the OmniTI team in August of 2005 and moved to the United States in January of 2006. She was kind enough to sit down with me and talk about PHP, OmniTI and other interesting topics. Here's what she had to say." http://devzone.zend.com/node/view/id/755 An Interview With Molly E. Holzschlag By Christopher Hester. "Molly E. Holzschlag is a well-known name in the world of web standards. She publishes a regular blog and has written many books on web design. So when I saw she'd joined forces with .net magazine as well, I thought it would be good to do an interview with her, to find out more about the wide range of activities she is involved in." http://tinyurl.com/fvch2 The Fine Art of Web Design Molly E. Holzschlag. Molly's 'Web Design World - Seattle' Presentation. http://tinyurl.com/rxqtr Accessibility in a Web 2.0 World By Shawn Lawton Henry. Shawn Lawton Henry's 'Web Design World - Seattle' Presentation. http://www.ftponline.com/channels/web/reports/wdwseattle/2006/henry/ +08: NAVIGATION. Using 'Guides' as a Supplemental Navigation Technique By Maish Nichani. "...It is the nature of websites to grow. You can't stop it, but you can manage it. The focus should be in providing a sustained positive user experience. Guides can help in this regard - when you design it with a purpose and with care." http://tinyurl.com/p6fyu Google Accessibility Search By Joe Dolson. "...I applaud Google for the concept and the principles behind the Accessible Web Search, and wish them the best in making it a real, practical, and valuable resource for impaired populations. I also implore them to take their ideals to the next step and embrace web standards and accessibility in their own development and interfaces." http://www.joedolson.com/articles/2006/08/google-accessibility-search/ +09: PHP. PHP Functions By Jacques Noah. "If you're looking for a way to save time when you program, look no further. Creating functions lets you reuse code that you've used before without having to rewrite the whole thing. Keep reading to learn how.." http://www.devshed.com/c/a/PHP/PHP-Functions/ Determine Class Type With These 10 PHP Variable Testing Functions By Melonfire. "This document outlines the more useful functions available in a toolkit of PHP functions designed specifically to test variables and find out if they belong to a particular character class." http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-6099676.html Introducing Visitor Objects in PHP 5 By Alejandro Gervasio. "Although the articleÕs title may seem a bit intimidating, the truth is that things are much simpler than you think. Like many other programming languages, PHP also allows you to construct and use visitor objects with minor hassles. But, before I go deeper into the subject, first letÕs ask ourselves the following question: what are visitor objects, after all?" http://www.devshed.com/c/a/PHP/Introducing-Visitor-Objects-in-PHP-5/ Understanding the Zend Framework, Part 4: When there is no feed, the Zend_HTTP_Client By Tyler Anderson. "...Parts 3 and 4 deal with the actual RSS and Atom feeds..." http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-php-zend4/ OSCON 2006: Getting Rich with PHP5 By Kevin Yank. "This week, Kevin Yank is reporting from OSCON 2006 in Portland, OR. PHP's creator, Rasmus Lerdorf, gave a surprising talk on building PHP rich web applications using PHP5-surprising, because fully half the talk focused on low-level PHP optimization techniques. The slides are available online." http://tinyurl.com/mdery Five Common PHP Database Problems By Jack Herrington. "Discover five common database problems that occur in PHP applications -- including database schema design, database access, and the business logic code that uses the database -- as well as their solutions." http://tinyurl.com/m4ehk +10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Visual Vs. Structural By Tommy Olsson. "According to a recent poll on a big web design forum, the knee-jerk reflex of most web designers, when asked to design a new website, is to fire up Photoshop. To another group of designers, this will seem like a rather backwards approach; they will mark up the content, semantically, before applying the layout and design. Does the choice of approach - visual vs structural - have any impact on the accessibility or usability of the site? Will there be any aesthetic differences between the two?.." http://accessites.org/gbcms_xml/news_page.php?id=19 +11: TOOLS. Page Strength By Matt Inman and Rand Fishkin. This tool tells "the relative importance/visibility of a webpage; the potential strength/ability of a page to rank in the search engines, data on popularity; links and mentions of the page across the web." http://www.seomoz.org/tools/page-strength.php CSS Optimiser By cssoptimiser.com. "Online CSS Optimizer is a web tool for reducing the file size of cascading style sheets. In order to save more space optimized files would be messy even so you may output it as a file. Non-valid or hacked (for certain browsers) CSS files may result in error." http://www.cssoptimiser.com/ Em Calculator By Piotr 'Riddle' Petrus. Online tool calculates em size equivalent to px size. http://riddle.pl/emcalc/ +12: USABILITY. Utilizing the Cut-Off Look to Encourage Users To Scroll By Jared Spool. "...Basically, users have no trouble scrolling, as long as the page is designed to accommodate it...If our clients are finding their users aren't scrolling, we suggest they look for a reason beyond 'Users donÕt expect to scroll' and see if maybe the design of the page is preventing it. By going for that Cut-Off look, they might find their users are suddenly happy to scroll." http://tinyurl.com/f3eol Screen Resolution and Page Layout By Jakob Nielsen. "Optimize Web pages for 1024 x 768, but use a liquid layout that stretches well for any resolution, from 800 x 600 to 1280 x 1024." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/screen_resolution.html Usability Case Library By Rosson and Carroll. A library that contains case studies developed to illustrate and raise issues related to the scenario-based development framework introduced by Rosson and Carroll's textbook Usability Engineering. http://ucs.ist.psu.edu/ In the Race With Google, It's Consistency vs. 'Wow' By Saul Hansell. "...Do Internet users prefer services that are consistent and predictable, like those offered by Yahoo, or are they more interested in Google's wow factor? These two approaches define a pivotal front in the battle for online loyalty between the major players in the Internet search business..." http://tinyurl.com/prec7 Customer Experience and the 'Wow' Factor By Mark Hurst. "...The Web business isn't about "wow" versus anything else - it's about which companies address customers' basic unmet needs the most. If it comes packaged in a "wow" interface, so much the better - but that's not what keeps people coming back, and referring their friends..." http://www.goodexperience.com/blog/archives/000867.php Truth Sells on the Web By Gerry McGovern. The Web is where people go to be informed. We're on the Web because we don't believe the hype, because we want to get some more facts. We're driven by logic not by impulse. We trust the reviews of other customers because they're like us, and we know that organizations lie to us...Honesty is selling on the Web. Honest websites are not better because they are morally superior but because they are more believable and trustworthy." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2006/nt-2006-07-31-truth.htm +13: XML. Eight Steps to Serving Better (X)HTML By Tantek Celik. "...continuing with my experiences from An Event Apart, here is a summary of my code critiques..." http://tantek.com/log/2006/07.html#d27t1218 [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.]