+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 5, Issue 11, September 7, 2006. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 11 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: COLOR. 04: DREAMWEAVER. 05: EVALUATION & TESTING. 06: EVENTS. 07: FLASH. 08: JAVASCRIPT. 09: MISCELLANEOUS. 10: PHP. 11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 12: TOOLS. 13: TYPOGRAPHY. 14: USABILITY. 15: XML. SECTION TWO: 16: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. WCAG 2.0: The New W3C Web Accessibility Guidelines Evaluated By Trenton Moss. "The second version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is in final working draft and will soon be officially released. Version 1 of the guidelines 1 came under much criticism for being vague, full of jargon and extremely difficult to use. The W3C has been working on version 2.0 of the guidelines 2 for over 5 years now, but has it been worth the wait?..." http://tinyurl.com/pljbv What's Happening in WCAG 2? By Jack Pickard. "...I was wanting to know what's happened recently, particularly in regards to the areas that I feel are weak in WCAG 2.0: has the Working Group picked up on things and started to strengthen them? I have to be honest here, and say no, not that I could find, anyway...I'm beginning to think like that arch-skeptic Joe Clark and wonder if the working group has put their fingers in their ears over this issue and are singing 'la la la I can't hear you' because it doesn't fit with their preconceived ideas of how WCAG 2.0 should look for it to include validity." http://www.thepickards.co.uk/index.php/200609/whats-happening-in-wcag-2/ Precedent By Joe Clark. "It was later revealed on the Blind Canadians mailing list that two people have filed a human-rights complaint against Ticketmaster because of its inaccessible site. This will be a Canadian first. Such an action had been mentioned many months ago; I had warned them to proceed with caution." http://blog.fawny.org/2006/08/31/ticketmaster/ Turned Away at the Virtual Box Office By Christopher Danielsen. "...As far as I can tell, the only good news in the area of visual verification is that the Internet community is becoming more aware of the issue, which will hopefully give other companies doing business on the Web pause before adopting this technology without considering the needs of blind consumers..." http://tinyurl.com/m9xq2 Geek in the Park: Pragmatic Accessibility By Bruce Lawson. "My notes, combined with some notes Patrick gave me, are reproduced. These are dense, as we talked for two hours, as this is just our crib sheet rather than a full transcript..." http://tinyurl.com/rqk2w Using the title Attribute By Gez Lemon. "The title attribute is intended to provide supplementary information about an element; for example, it might be used to provide extra information about the target of a link. Although the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG) requires access to all content, current user agents provide very poor access to title text information, and what access they do provide is typically inaccessible for people with disabilities." http://juicystudio.com/article/using-title-attribute.php Apple Offers Universal Access with Leopard "Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs demonstrates Universal Access, an application that will be bundled with the company's new operating system Leopard. The program has features such as voiceover enhancements, Braille support and closed captioning." http://zdnet.com.com/1606-2-6103740.html Cultivating and Maintaining Web Accessibility Expertise and Institutional Support in Higher Education By Paul R. Bohman. "...Institutions should seek to establish flexible, comprehensive, holistic systems with the long-term goal of sustainability. Throughout the process, participants should strive to remember that the real purpose of web accessibility is not merely legal compliance. The real purpose is to create a more inclusive society in which people with disabilities enjoy the same opportunities and freedoms as the rest of the population." http://www.paulbohman.com/webaccessibility/web_expertise_and_support.php Public Institutions' Web Accessibility Evaluation, Plans for Improvement, and Annual Reporting By The Illinois Board of Higher Education (IBHE). IBHE has recently started requiring all public universities and community colleges in Illinois to report on their current state of web accessibility and their plans to improve accessibility. The following are results from the first year. http://www.ibhe.state.il.us/urg/reportlist.asp +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. CSS Mastery: Fixed-Width, Liquid, and Elastic Layouts and Faux Columns By Andy Budd, Cameron Moll and Simon Collison. "So far (in the previous article), all the examples have used widths defined in pixels. This type of layout is known as fixed-width layout, or sometimes "ice layout" due to its rigid nature. This week we look at fixed-width, liquid and elastic layouts." http://www.webreference.com/authoring/style/sheets/css_mastery2/ IE6 Resize Bug (position: relative becomes fixed) By Emil Stenstrom. "One bug kept popping up on the sites I built, and I was almost going insane. The bug I'm talking about is specific to Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) and has to do with what happens when you resize the page." http://friendlybit.com/css/ie6-resize-bug/ CSS Frames v2, Full-Height By Roger Johansson. Way back in August of 2003 I wrote a short article called CSS Frames, in which I described a technique to emulate the visual appearance of HTML frames with CSS. That is more than three years ago, so I think it's about time to revisit the technique and improve it a bit, especially as the original CSS Frames demo page has been receiving loads of traffic lately. I only had to take a quick look at the code to tell that it's been a few years since I made the demo. Looking at old code can be a bit embarrassing sometimes. The demo contains a list of browsers that I had tested the technique in. 'Mozilla Firebird 0.61' is mentioned as one of them. Like I said, it was a while ago. So here is an update..." http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200609/css_frames_v2_fullheight/ CSS Shortcomings By Robert Nyman. "For many web developers, CSS means numerous of ways to create flexible designs, control fonts in a powerful manner and a central location for controlling the entire look of your web site. Unfortunately, CSS is far from perfect so I thought I'd list the most common disappointments I have, given the current state of CSS support, and I will also go a little into what your options are and what the future holds." http://www.robertnyman.com/2006/09/06/css-shortcomings/ +03: COLOR. Effective Color Contrast By Aries Arditi. "This article by Aries Arditi provides basic guidelines for making effective color choices in print and on the Web that work for nearly everyone. To understand them best, you need to understand the three perceptual attributes of color: hue, lightness and saturation, in the particular way that vision scientists use them." http://www.lighthouse.org/color_contrast.htm +04: DREAMWEAVER. Can Microsoft Expression Web Designer Touch Dreamweaver? By Meryl Evans. "Look out, Dreamweaver. Consider Microsoft Expression Web Designer as Dreamweaver's new rival. Don't look at this competition in the iPod vs. everybody way, but rather in the Dell vs. HP way..." http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=602975&rl=1 +05: EVALUATION & TESTING. Usability Test Facilitation Techniques By DeeDee DeMulling. "A great usability test facilitator does more than just show up on the day of the test, they spend some time making sure they understand the product, objectives of the business and concerns from the project team. A great facilitator participates in the test planning process so they understand and help define the learning objectives for the test session." http://tinyurl.com/obklf Giving Usability Methods the Critical Eye By Dan Brown. "...I don't think there's anything earth-shattering here, but I do think usability tests could benefit from a good dose of critical thinking, especially about objectives. A test's goals serves as the foundation for the entire effort, and proceeding without them - or with poorly formulated goals - leads to generating lots of meaningless data. It's easy enough for clients to say that they want the site learnable and memorable, and that users should complete tasks efficiently and feel very satisfied at the end, but in creating tests such goals are no more useful than 'to determine if the site is usable.'..." http://tinyurl.com/mr5ra Learning How to Focus on Field Studies By Jared Spool. "Here's a fun little exercise you can use when training observers before they go out on field visits." http://tinyurl.com/qnvbx +06: EVENTS. Accessibility in 2006 September 12, 2006. London, United Kingdom http://www.webcredible.co.uk/services/accessibility-2006.shtml W3C Print Symposium (W3C print technologies including XSL, XSLT, SVG Print, CSS Paged Media and XHTML Print.) October 17, 2006. Heidelberg, Germany http://www.w3c.de/Events/2006/PrintSymposium_en.html Mac Cowboys December 10, 2006. Wickenburg, Arizona, U.S.A. http://www.maccowboys.com/ IUI 2007 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces January 28-31, 2007. Hawaii, U.S.A. http://www.iuiconf.org/ +07: FLASH. Visit with the RNIB (Royal National Institute for the Blind) By Niqui Merret. Niqui Merret and Aral Balkan, two Flash developers, visit the RNIB to find out first hand how vision impaired people use the web. http://niquimerret.com/?p=16 +08: JAVASCRIPT. The Future is Hybrids - How JavaScript can Purify Pure CSS Solutions By Christian Heilmann. "Over the last few months there were more and more requests on mailing lists and articles published how you can achieve functionality with pure CSS that was traditionally achieved with JavaScript. This post will explain why that is an interesting concept, but hopefully make you aware of the benefits of JavaScript enhanced solutions versus pure CSS solutions..." http://www.wait-till-i.com/index.php?p=327 JavaScript Panel Podcast: "JavaScript Libraries: Friend Or Foe?" Presentation from at media 2006. "Cameron Adams, Stuart Langridge, Peter Paul Koch, Simon Willison and Dan Webb discuss JavaScript libraries." http://tinyurl.com/kufxq +09: MISCELLANEOUS. Berners-Lee Calls for Web 2.0 Calm By Gavin Clarke. "Five years after the first internet bubble burst, we're now witnessing the backlash against Web 2.0 and a plethora of me-too business plans, marketing pitches and analyst reports exploiting the nebulous phrase. Tim Berners-Lee, the individual credited with inventing the web and giving so many of us jobs, has become the most prominent individual so-far to point out that the Web 2.0 emperor is naked. Berners-Lee has dismissed Web 2.0 as useless jargon nobody can explain and a set of technology that tries to achieve exactly the same thing as 'Web 1.0'." http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/30/web_20_berners_lee/ UIE Brain Sparks Audio Library By User Interface Engineering. "Our growing audio library includes podcasts, interviews, and presentations on topics such as tagging, home page design, and user behavior. You can listen to a show ala carte or subscribe to the full podcast feed to hear the great information that Jared Spool, Joshua Porter, and Christine Perfetti deliver." http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/audio/ +10: PHP. Beginning PHP: One Goal at a Time By Ali Al-Athary. "A couple of months ago, I knew almost nothing about PHP, only that is was a programming language that I needed to learn. Today, my whole site relies upon PHP and I have gained the confidence that almost anything is possible using PHP. I accomplished this achievement using methods that I will describe in this article..." http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/ali20060831.php3 PHP 5 Class Basics, Part 1 By Dennis Pallett. "In this first part of a new article series on PHP5 classes and objects you will be introduced to the basic concepts of using classes, the constructor and destructor methods and class inheritance." http://www.phpit.net/article/php5-class-basics-part1/ +11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Educated By Dan Cederholm. "There's a myth that colleges and universities are teaching antiquated web design skills: table-and -spacer-gif-ness, FrontPage 98, etc. Actually, I don't think it's a myth - it's actually happening out there. So after touring Boston University's Center for Digital Imaging Arts yesterday, I was completely surprised. CDIA offers an interactive design program with an emphasis on CSS, web standards and hand-coding - and it's right in my own backyard..." http://www.simplebits.com/notebook/2006/08/30/cdia.html +12: TOOLS. Usability Test Data Logger Tool v3.0 By Todd Zazelenchuk. "Most people use Microsoft Excel to analyst the results of usability tests, but did you know you can use it to collect the data too? This spreadsheet allows you to measure task completion rates, analyze questionnaire data, and summarize participant comments. It even includes a timer so you can measure time-on-task." http://www.userfocus.co.uk/resources/datalogger.html Aptana By Paul Colton. "Aptana is a robust, JavaScript-focused IDE for building dynamic web applications. Highlights include the following features: Code Assist on JavaScript, HTML, and CSS languages, including your own JavaScript functions; Outliner that gives a snapshot view of your JavaScript, HTML; Error and warning notification for your code; Support for Aptana UI customization and extensions; Cross-platform support Free and open source licensed under the Eclipse Public License..." http://www.aptana.com/ +13: TYPOGRAPHY. Add and Delete Vertical Space in Measured Intervals By Richard Rutter. "Headings, subheads, block quotations, footnotes, illustrations, captions and other intrusions into the text create syncopations and variations against the base rhythm of regularly leaded lines. These variations can and should add life to the page, but the main text should also return after each variation precisely on beat and in phase." http://webtypography.net/Rhythm_and_Proportion/Vertical_Motion/2.2.2/ On Fonts for the Web By Richard Rutter. "The availability of fonts for use on the Web, or more specifically the lack thereof, has been getting some welcome attention recently..." http://www.clagnut.com/blog/1798/ +14: USABILITY. User Interface Design Principles for Web Applications By Aral Balkan. "...1. The Client Is Not The User. The client may think she knows what the user wants, but she cannot. This is because the client is not the user. This brings me to the second principle: 2. Don't Give The Client What She Thinks The User Wants. If the client does not know what the user wants and you give her what she is asking for, you are doing her a disservice. You will ultimately be delivering an application that does not meet user's needs. Your client may initially be happy that you have given her exactly what she asked for but will she remain happy when the product is rejected by users?..." http://aralbalkan.com/687 The Laws of Simplicity By John Maeda. "The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction. When in doubt, just remove. But be careful of what you remove...Organization makes a system of many appear fewer..." http://lawsofsimplicity.com/?cat=5&order=ASC&paged=1 CNN Changes Home Page (again) By Joshua Porter. "...Well, recently they've gotten rid of the dropdown that contained extra links. I had mentioned that these types of flyouts were troublesome to people...Many design teams are moving away from full redesigns and moving toward incremental improvements, evolving a design instead of recreating it. This seems like a good approach for CNN. They have so many people using the site that a day's worth of usage is probably enough to let them know if something isn't working. And apparently, their old navigation wasn't working.." http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2006/08/31/cnn-changes-home-page-again/ +15: XML. RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 Compared By Atom Project Wiki. "The purpose of this page is to summarize, as clearly and simply as possible, the differences between the RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 syndication languages." http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +16: 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.]