+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 5, Issue 08, August 16, 2006. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 08 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: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 07: JAVASCRIPT. 08: MISCELLANEOUS. 09: PHP. 10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 11: TOOLS. 12: TYPOGRAPHY. 13: USABILITY. 14: XML. SECTION TWO: 14: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Accessibility: WCAG 2.0 and You By Tim Dungan (aka ptvGuy). "What do we do in the face of all this debate? Quite simply, those of us that actually make websites and care about making them useful and accessible to real people are just going to have to go on doing the best we can on our own-as, in fact, we've pretty much been doing. We will continue to use our own brains to think about what we're doing and how we can make it as useful as possible to all users. That's all there is to it. We're already going above and beyond the requirements of our sites. So, before we get too carried away, keep this in mind. Even the home page of the W3C itself only claims WCAG 1, level 1 compliance. Yes, we can and should go above that. Section 508 alone gets into levels 1 and 2. However, lets not lose track of our underlying budget and time limitations. We don't expect an accessible building to have a hospital built into it. We don't have to go that far with our websites either. WCAG 2.0, like WCAG 1.0 before it, is a set of guidelines. It's not a wall or a fence. If it leads you where you need to go, great. If not, then you gotta find your own way. After all, it's you that your clients and users depend on, not the W3C. " http://www.ptvguy.com/2006/06/08/accessibility-wcag-20-and-you/ Lack of Access = Barrier to Access By Joe Dolson. "...An accessible web developer's job is to remove barriers to access, if working on an existing site, or to minimize the barriers they create when designing an original site..." http://tinyurl.com/flywo Misunderstanding Accessible Design By Joe Dolson "...CSS is just as susceptible to inaccessibility as the next design technology. This is because it is a design tool, not the content itself. The first step to creating accessible web content is to write accessible HTML. If you've organized your HTML semantically, using your block elements correctly, not littering the page with extra or
tags and using your tags for tabular data, then you've accomplished the greatest part to building an accessible website..." http://tinyurl.com/m5q86 Accessibility Series - tbody By Sandra Clark. "This is an article in an occasional series on common mistakes in markup and accessibility. While its fine to always talk about what the guidelines are, sometimes its also good to talk about what not to do or how to do something properly." http://www.shayna.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.display_entry&id=145 Useful Guides to Accessibility By Mencap. "Mencap has produced some useful guides on how to make your information and services more accessible for people with a learning disability." http://www.mencap.org.uk/html/accessibility/accessibility_guides.asp#232 New Research for Socitm Insight Shows Even the Best Websites Can Cause Problems For Disabled Users By egovmonitor. According to Stefan Haselwimmer, MD of the Usability Exchange, the results of the testing highlight the importance of carrying out disabled user testing when evaluating website accessibility - something that is recommended by accessibility guidance such as the British Standards Institution's PAS 78. 'Such testing can also highlight many of the usability issues that affect non-disabled users' he says. http://www.egovmonitor.com/node/6859/print +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. CSS Showcase: Navigation Menus, Tabs and Techniques By Vitaly Friedman. http://www.alvit.de/css-showcase/ Turning Lists into Trees By Michal Wojciechowski. "In this article, I will present a technique to display a multi-level unordered list in the form of a tree with lines connecting nodes." http://odyniec.net/articles/turning-lists-into-trees/ Displaying Percentages By Dave Stone. http://www.barenakedapp.com/the-design/displaying-percentages Make Better Web Pages by Understanding the CSS Box Model By Melonfire. "...one of the most important concepts a developer can understand is the so-called CSS 'box model', which underpins most of CSS layout and positioning. This article provides a brief introduction to this box model, explaining what it is and how you can use it to make better decisions about positioning your HTML elements on a Web page..." http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-6105783.html +03: EVALUATION & TESTING. Data Visualization of Web Stats: Logarithmic Charts and the Drooping Tail By Jakob Nielsen. "Using a linear diagram to plot data from website traffic logs can lead you to overlook important conclusions. Sometimes advanced visualizations are worth the effort." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/visualizing-traffic-analysis.html +04: EVENTS. DealBITS Training Library Contest from lynda.com August 14-20, 2006. Enter to win a one-year Online Training Library premium subscription from lynda.com. http://www.tidbits.com/dealbits/lynda/?14@@!dbc=16050609514 User Interface Engineering (UIE) Virtual Seminars http://www.uie.com/events/virtual_seminars/ AJAX Seminar October 2-4, 2006. Santa Clara, California U.S.A. http://ajaxseminar.com/ Fundamentos Web October 3-5, 2006. Oviedo, Asturias, Spain http://www.fundamentosweb.org/2006/programa/ Behaviour and Information Technology Conference October 10, 2006. London, United Kingdom http://www.event-solutions.info/pages/event.asp?ecode=CD1040 User Focus October 13, 2006. Washington, DC, U.S.A. http://www.upa-dc-metro.org/conference/ XTech WebDev: Essential Web Developer Training October 31, 2006. London, United Kingdom http://webdev.xtech.org/ User Friendly 2006 November 3-5, 2006. Hangzhou, China. http://www.upachina.org/userfriendly2006/default_en.htm +05: FLASH. Using Flash Player 8 Filters for Good By Tinic Uro. "...We've had many discussion internally of how we could make the Flash Player more accessible for disabled users and I can already tell you that there are plenty of ideas which will eventually make their way into the player. The list of things to do is really long. But for the time being let me show you a little example of how a filter can make something which used to be difficult very easy now. If you ever had to deal with accessibility for the visually impaired you might know that Flash does not follow the high contrast settings of Windows. This is a real problem and prevents the deployment of Flash applications in many cases. While native integration is still missing in Flash Player 8 you can offer clients a way of enabling this, using the ColorMatrixFilter..." http://tinyurl.com/ouyue +06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. The Bulletin of Information Architecture The August/September 2006 issue of the ASIS&T Bulletin includes a special section on information architecture with a nice mix of philosophical and practical articles. http://www.asis.org/bulletin.html +07: JAVASCRIPT. JSON By Wikipedia. "JSON (pronounced...like the English given name 'Jason'), which stands for 'JavaScript Object Notation', is a lightweight computer data interchange format. JSON is a subset of the object literal notation of JavaScript but its use does not require JavaScript..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON JSON All The Way By Drew McLellan. "I'm increasingly coming around to the realization that JSON is pretty much the best way to consume external data within JavaScript. If you're providing a web service or API that's returning data in XML format, you really need to start offering a JSON output option if you want to encourage use of your service. It's becoming essential." http://allinthehead.com/retro/298/json-all-the-way +08: MISCELLANEOUS. Dan Cederholm Interview By Ryan Carson. "In this interview, Ryan Carson from Carson Workshops talks to Dan Cederholm, web designer, author and one half of the duo behind Corkd.com." http://www.thinkvitamin.com/interviews/webapps/dan-cederholm/ Gel (Good Experience Live) 2006 Video Clips http://gelconference.com/whatis.php +09: PHP. PHP Video: Processing Forms with PHP - part 1 By Stefan Mischook. "In this video, I review a few key aspects about forms that relate directly to form processing with PHP...." http://www.killerphp.com/articles/php-video-php-forms/ +10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Angry Indeed By Eric A. Meyer. "...It's the most concise indictment possible that the first part of the W3C's mission statement, the fragment they put right on their home page, 'Leading the Web to Its Full Potential...', has been betrayed..." http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/08/14/angry-indeed/ Angry, Not: Zeldman, Meyer, and Fair Concerns About the W3C By Molly E. Holzschlag. "Eric Meyer has written a great post, 'Angry Indeed 'and one that's going to be read and linked to. A lot. I agree with many of Eric's perspectives on this issue and therein lies the great irony of the entire conversation as to the relevance and strength of the W3C..." http://tinyurl.com/fow7l Just What Has Microsoft Been Doing for IE 7? Slashdot thread. "Jeff Reifman writes 'Last week, Windows columnist Paul Thurrott ripped into Microsoft for ignoring CSS standards with its upcoming Internet Explorer 7.0. 'Microsoft has set back Web development by an immeasurable amount of time. My advice is simple: Boycott IE. It's a cancer on the Web that must be stopped. IE isn't secure and isn't standards-compliant, which makes it unworkable both for end users and Web content creators.' With the redesign of my own site last month, I discovered just how non-compliant IE is with basic CSS: IE 52% vs. Firefox 93%. Is Microsoft purely incompetent and tone-deaf to customers - or simply counting on IE's non-compliance remaining a de-facto standard?" http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/07/1824250 IE7 Not CSS Compliant - Argh, Here We Go Again! By Richard MacManus. "It's disappointing that IE7 will perform so poorly in regards to CSS and web standards, particularly as I came away from that Webstock conference optimistic that IE7 would finally put an end to IE's poor record with CSS." http://blogs.zdnet.com/web2explorer/index.php?p=254 IE and CSS 'Compliance' By Chris Wilson. "...The one thing that really burns my personal toast is that we've been working hard to improve our standards support in IE7, and I believe it is simply wrong to think that we've only moved the needle 2%. In fact, we prioritized IE7 around 3 things - security, end user experience, and standards improvements in the platform. When I look back at the work my team has done in the platform, we have done only these things. No proprietary features added, just standards improvements. (Look forward to an upcoming IEBlog post from Markus Mielke listing out the CSS changes we've done in IE7.) I feel that we've addressed the biggest problems and shortcomings from IE6 for web developers and designers, and we're hard at work shipping IE7 and getting ready to doing it again in the next release. As I previously stated, our goal is to make the lives of web developers better by improving standards support in IE. I think we've done a lot in IE7 to do just that, and I'm looking forward to doing even more..." http://blogs.msdn.com/cwilso/archive/2006/08/10/694584.aspx Google Valid and Strict By Roger Johansson. "...The myth that Google is using invalid markup to save bandwidth is clearly just a myth. Whether the reason is backwards compatibility, fear of change, developer ignorance, the server platform inflexibility, that they just don't care, or something else, I can only guess. But it sure isn't saving them any bandwidth." http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200608/google_valid_and_strict/ +11: TOOLS. Tails (Firefox Extension) By Calvin Yu. "Tails is a Firefox extension that will display the presence of microformats on a webpage." http://blog.codeeg.com/tails-firefox-extension-03/ HexColorPicker By LuckySoftware. HexColorPicker is a html plugin for Mac OS X's builtin colorpicker. http://www.luckysoftware.dk/hexcolorpicker.php +12: TYPOGRAPHY. Designing With Code: Creating a Resizable Interface By Kris Hadlock. "In this article, I'll explain how to use CSS to create resizable interfaces with very little code. I'll also take a look at some limitations of this approach and how to surpass them using JavaScript. A live example can be seen here and the source code that is used in the article can be downloaded here." http://www.informit.com/guides/content.asp?g=webdesign&seqNum=279&rl=1 +13: USABILITY. 'Dumbing Down' vs 'Writing More Intelligently' By Russ Weakley. "...When asked to write content for websites, scientists often ignore many of their target audiences and write specifically for their peers - other scientists in the same field...I have always had problems with the phrase 'dumbing down'. Scientists sometimes assume that they are more intelligent than their audiences and that attempting to communicate clearly with anyone outside their profession is beneath them...The answer I have always wanted to give to these people is: 'No, I don't want you to dumb it down. I would like you to write more intelligently. I'd like you to understand who you are communicating to, develop some empathy with these audiences and attempt to communicate clearly with these people'..." http://www.maxdesign.com.au/2006/08/11/dumbing-down/ The Long Neck By Gerry McGovern. "All websites have a very small set of killer tasks that really matter to the customer. Web management is about perfecting the completion of these tasks..." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2006/nt-2006-08-14-long-neck.htm Participatory Design - and Why It's More Than UCD By Ann Light. "The buzz at the Participatory Design Conference (PDC2006) this month in Trento, Italy, was all about dissemination of methods. In the last few years, this community has watched a number of its more radical ideas for working with users go mainstream. ...Ask people what they do? Involve them in discussions about how things are going to work? Listen to them and use their ideas? Participatory methods have lost their value to shock..." http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article3334.asp Vision Quest: How Low-Resolution Displays Have Changed the Way We Read, Write, and Interact By Jonathan Follett. "Communication happens when behaviour changes--when the message you've carefully designed is not only received, but understood and acted upon. Join Jon Follett as he explores how we can best communicate on the web where low resolution monitors and tiny mobile screens are the delivery methods for our missives." http://www.digital-web.com/articles/vision_quest/ Display 2.0: A Look Forward to the High-Definition Web and Its Effect on Our Digital Experience By Jonathan Follett. "In the next few years, the adoption of high-resolution displays-with 150 or more pixels per inch-will significantly alter our conception of what the Web and networked applications can potentially be..." http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000114.php +14: XML. Frequently Asked Questions About XHTML vs HTML By SitePoint. http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=393445 Microformats Cheat Sheet By Brian Suda. "This is a very early iteration of a microformats cheat sheet..." http://suda.co.uk/projects/microformats/cheatsheet/ Beginning to Style Your RSS Feed By Jonathan Christopher. "...Given the wide range of exposure surrounding RSS, I think it's really important to handle your feed in a way that will be usable by as many people as possible. One way to accomplish that is to apply a bit of structure and style to your feed in case an inexperienced user were to somehow find their way to your RSS via their browser..." http://mondaybynoon.com/2006/08/14/beginning-to-style-your-rss-feed/ SVG12: Brief Clarification on Formal Objections By Bjoern Hoehrmann. "Dear Scalable Vector Graphics Working Group, Thank you for informing me...about a possible misunderstanding on part of the SVG Working Group about what constitutes a formal objection in terms of the W3C Process..." http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2006Aug/0009 SVG Tiny 1.2 in Candidate Wreckommendation Stage By Ian Hickson. Today the W3C announced that SVG Tiny 1.2 entered the Candidate Recommendation stage. To do this they had to violate the W3C process..." http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1155235213&count=1 What's Wrong With The SVG Working Group By Robert O'Callahan. "The current draft of SVG 1.2 Tiny defines to work in a way that's incompatible with the de-facto standard implemented by all major browsers for the HTML element. It is, apparently, compatible with the W3C's WebCGM Recommendation...Wake up, W3C. We need you and this kind of nonsense isn't doing anyone any good." http://tinyurl.com/pshxt [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +15: 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.]