+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 5, Issue 13, September 22, 2006. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 13 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: ASSOCIATIONS. 03: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. 04: EVENTS. 05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 06: JAVASCRIPT. 07: MISCELLANEOUS. 08: NAVIGATION. 09: PHP. 10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 11: TOOLS. 12: TYPOGRAPHY. 13: USABILITY. 14: XML. SECTION TWO: 15: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Are You Google's Gopher? By Alan Connor. "For all the elaborate projects that computers are working on, there are still some things these machines are very poor at. One of these is seeing. A computer will recognize that something is an image, but will have no idea what it is an image of. So a project to, say, label all the images on the web will need to get humans to pitch in and help. But who is going to sit around saying what they see for hours at a time? Enter Dr von Ahn, with a new game. ...For his part, Dr von Ahn talks of better browsing for the visually impaired, and better cataloguing of data..." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/5336284.stm Google Image Labeler By Google. "Welcome to Google Image Labeler, a new feature of Google Image Search that allows you to label random images to help improve the quality of Google's image search results." http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/ Is Legally Mandated Accessibility a Benefit? By Joe Dolson. "Although I'm an enthusiastic supporter of the principles of accessibility, the practical definition is challenging to really pin down. Given the widely criticized WCAG 2.0 and the sometimes questionable expectations of Section 508 accessibility guidelines, I'm have to wonder whether a legal accessibility requirement is really practical." http://tinyurl.com/hkmq2 Accessibility vs. Visual Design - Why Can't We All Just Get Along? By Jared Smith. "...The goal of both design and accessibility is to improve the user experience. Designers must understand that accessibiliters will never stop asking them for high levels of accessibility. Asking them to do so would be similar to them asking designers to stop using color because it's just too darn colorful. Accessibiliters must stop demanding every new fangled accessibility widget, tool, and guideline implementation that comes around. As long as designers understand the issues of accessibility and provide as much accessibility as is feasible within the constraints they are truly faced with, I believe that most in the accessibility community will respect and understand that decision. They should be happy that the wooden wheelchair ramp is available, even though deep inside they know that the golden, motorized ramp would be wicked cool. If they still criticize, then they should be ignored as they do not understand the constraints most designers are faced with. This does not, however, mean that they will stop being proponents for better accessibility, just like designers will never stop being proponents for better design." http://webaim.org/blog/2006/09/13/access_vs_design/ Accessibility, Law and Target.com By Jim Thatcher. "...In her ruling, Judge Patel stressed the importance of the connection between the bricks and mortar Target stores and the web site, dismissing the NFB complaint 'To the extent that Target.com offers information and services unconnected to Target stores, which do not affect the enjoyment of goods and services offered in Target stores.' This strongly suggests to me that the entire suit would have been dismissed had the defendant been Priceline.com or Amazon.com. However, even the issue of the nature of the relationship between the bricks and mortar store and the web site will be addressed as the suit moves forward; the Court had this to say in Endnote 4: 'It appears from a review of the web site in question-which the court notes is not in evidence but nonetheless does raise some questions-that Target treats Target.com as an extension of its stores, as part of its overall integrated merchandising efforts. See www.target.com. This suggests to the court that perhaps with more evidence, the court's determination of what may be covered under the ADA in this kind of integrated merchandising may be subject to amendment. The web site is a means to gain access to the store and it is ironic that Target, through its merchandising efforts on the one hand, seeks to reach greater numbers of customers and enlarge its consumer-base, while on the other hand it seeks to escape the requirements of the ADA.' So the NFB vs. Target suit will play out. Perhaps there will be a settlement without a final court decision. In any case the question of legal support for the fundamental idea that access to the web is a civil right is still being formed." http://jimthatcher.com/law-target.htm Web Accessibility Evaluation of Target Website By Jon Gunderson. This is Jon Gunderson's report generated with the Functional Web Accessibility Evaluator (FAE) on the top 32 pages of the Target website. http://fae.cita.uiuc.edu/report.php?id=w45117cc9aae0f&pc=32&type=summary National Federation of the Blind v. Target Corporation By Wikipedia. The case made it into Wikipedia. http://tinyurl.com/hlynp +02: ASSOCIATIONS. Web Industry Professionals Association Incorporated (WIPA) of Australia http://wipa.org.au/ +03: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. CSS: Text Shadows By Mike Cherim. "This Text Shadows experiment isn't something that I think I would ever actually use, but I was intrigued by it..." http://mikecherim.com/gbcms_xml/news_page.php?id=13#n13 BIR (Bob Image Replacement) By Neal Venditto. "..My technique involves the use of the z-index property. Basically, I encase the text of a header element in a span element, thus having semantic markup. I give the header element a background, and give the span element a negative z-index so that it is placed behind this header. Should the image not show, the text is perfectly visible. I have to add a z-index of 1 to the body for the text not to be completely buried, however. So, this is an excerpt from an HTML document utilizing the method..." http://neal.venditto.org/articles/12/bir Ryan Rollovers By Ryan Roberts. "This is an example technique for using image replacement CSS buttons which are fully accessible for users with images disabled." http://www.thevisualprocess.com/dev/rollover/ +04: EVENTS. Accessibility Summit 2006 October 10-12, 2006. Cambridge, Massachusetts U.S.A. http://wiki.mozilla.org/Accessibility_Hackfest_2006 Small Talk 1: Jeffrey Zeldman October 17, 2006. New York, New York U.S.A. http://www.amosdesigns.net/myBlog/?p=12 Accessing Higher Ground Conference: Accessible Media, Web and Technology Conference for Education, for Businesses, for Web and Media Designers November 8-10, 2006. Boulder, Colorado U.S.A. http://www.colorado.edu/atconference/ International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference March 19-24, 2007. Los Angeles, California U.S.A. http://www.csun.edu/cod/conf/index.htm +05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Real Wireframes Get Real Results By Stephen Turbek. "Information architects, afraid to step on designers' toes, may actually render wireframes unusable. Stephen Turbek talks about Verizon, the similarities between wireframes and iPods, and how to get real." http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/real_wireframes Whole Lotta IA Survey Results Now Available By Louis Rosenfeld. "For the new edition of the polar bear book (almost done!), Peter Morville and I conducted five surveys of the information architecture community. All of the results are now available via the IA Institute web site, and cover the following topics..." http://louisrosenfeld.com/home/bloug_archive/000478.html +06: JAVASCRIPT. Objectifying JavaScript By Jonathan Snook. "Object-oriented programming techniques can greatly improve both the structure and readability of your code, but it can be a little difficult to get a grasp on objects in JavaScript's unique implementation. Read along as "Behind the Curtain" columnist Jonathan Snook presents the foundational details behind creating objects in JavaScript, and points out the implications and variations of each creation mechanism." http://www.digital-web.com/articles/objectifying_javascript/ Data Validation with JavaScript and Regular Expressions By Tony Patton. "Discover how regular expressions offer a simple and elegant way to manipulate text within JavaScript. Tony Patton also explores how JavaScript's regular expression simplifies data validation." http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-6116248.html Adventures in JavaScript Testing By Thomas Fuchs. "As promised, here are the slides on unit testing JavaScript from my talk at RailsConf Europe..." http://mir.aculo.us/articles/2006/09/16/adventures-in-javascript-testing Automatic Pullquotes with JavaScript and CSS By Roger Johansson. As you may have noticed, there are now pullquotes in some articles on this site. I think they can be a nice design element and a good way of highlighting important phrases. As with most things there are several ways of creating pullquotes, the most straightforward being copying the text you want and paste it into a blockquote element. I didn't want to do that for several reasons. The main reason is the amount of work involved. I could go through my older articles to add pullquotes, but what if I should decide that I no longer want pullquotes? I'd have to go through every article again to remove the quotes. Lots of work. I wanted a way to add pullquotes without having to duplicate text in the markup, and came up with a JavaScript based technique." http://tinyurl.com/qn48a +07: MISCELLANEOUS. Trenton Moss Interview (Podcast): What is Accessibility and what does it mean to me? By Roger Kondrat. "Recently I had the opportunity to sit down and discuss Accessibility with WebCredible's Head of Accessibility Trenton Moss. Trenton has been doing this sort of work for a number of years and some clients are from the FTSE 25. In this podcast Trenton introduces himself, discusses what Accessibility is and the value for businesses if they utilize his services, as well he discusses the different pricing options for companies e.g. large or small enterprise have different cost realities." http://tinyurl.com/hj2kd SpoolCast By Jared Spool. Casts number 1.1 to 1.4 discuss the new Brown University home page and other topics. http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/tag/podcasts/spoolcast/ Web Standards with Imagination (Podcast series) By Dustin Diaz. "A JavaScript, CSS, (X)HTML web log focusing on usability and accessibility. Podcasts include Dustin Diaz with featured guests for discussion and interviews. Expect cheesy jokes and humor as part of the weekly show." http://odeo.com/channel/68201/view Adobe Interview: Kevin Lynch, VP/Product Marketing, Knowledge Worker Business Unit (KWBU) By Kurt Foss. "Acrobat Connect has a collaboration-builder SDK for building Flash applications that work within real-time meetings. They can be highly interactive-can really change the experience of a web meeting. It's not just screen sharing anymore; it could be something like a Jeopardy-like quiz that you use to train your sales force. Or it could be an interactive, real-time inventory system that is tied to a back-end system. It's really unlimited in what you could do, and it changes the mind set of what can be done inside a real-time meeting." http://www.acrobatusers.com/articles/2006/09/interview_k_lynch/ +08: NAVIGATION. The Effects of Lower-literacy on Mental Models to Support Website Navigation By Celeste Lyn Paul. "...This is a difficult issue, because how do you accommodate both higher-literacy and lower-literacy users, especially when your site must contain some level of terminology because it is identifiable to those who have some kind of exposure to the domain. How can you close an educational divide when education is the barrier?..." http://tinyurl.com/kr5ns Accessibility's Impact On Search By Rob Garner. "While the company (Target) asserts that it has designed the site within all applicable laws, it is difficult to understand why it omitted key design attributes at the expense of search engine visibility and sales. The e-commerce industry is extremely competitive in both paid and natural search, and to most e-commerce marketers, the use of alt-text on images and image maps is Search Engine Optimization 101. By not using the basic design tactics used by many of its competitors, this ecommerce retailer is being left in the dust..." http://tinyurl.com/hehj4 Ambient Signifiers By Ross Howard. "When navigating a complex system-be it a website or a large transport network-it's easy to get lost. Ross Howard points out how subtle signifiers can make a big difference." http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/ambient_signifi Index Me, Baby! By Russ Weakley. "I've just come away from a day long seminar on SEO where hiding text was described as a bad practice - regardless of the purpose or CSS method used...it is better to experiment rather than hypothesize. The four pages below have unique keywords, the same link value (there is currently only one link to these pages anywhere on the web), the same page title value, the same number of keywords mentioned on each page and the same character count on each page. Each of them uses a different method to display or hide content. Will Google treat these pages differently (refusing to index them?) or is this just a crude and badly executed test?..." http://www.maxdesign.com.au/2006/09/15/index-me-baby/ +09: PHP. Highlighting What Section of a Website the User Is In By Eli White III and Jonathan Eisenhamer. "Although a site may not always warrant a full multilayer navigation menu, most websites usually have at least a few different sections. Often many pages have links back to the top pages of each section, and therefore it is useful to highlight which section the user is currently in. Listing 9.2.1 looks at the URL of the current web page and, based on that, determines what section of the website it is in and changes the section menu." http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/white-eisenhamer20060911.php3 Regular Expressions Cheat Sheet By Dave Child. "Regular Expressions are very powerful, and many people find their unusual syntax hard to get to grips with. This A4 reference serves as a guide to regular expression patterns and options." http://tinyurl.com/fx3lw What Can PHP Learn From Ruby On Rails? By Chris Hartjes. Slides from Chris Hartjes' php/db|works conference presentation. http://tinyurl.com/gokvc PHP 5 Tutorial By Kevin S. Floyd. "This tutorial is designed for students in Web Development classes at Macon State College. It assumes that the student already has familiarity with the eXtensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML), basic programming skills, and with the rudiments of database design and Structured Query Language (SQL). Example scripts run under PHP 5, Apache 2 or IIS 6.0, and Microsoft Windows 2003 Server. XHTML output displays properly under current versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox." http://msconline.maconstate.edu/tutorials/PHP/default.htm +10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Why Standards Still Matter By Roger Johansson. "The last couple of years may have seen an increase in the level of interest and action around web standards. But it still isn't filtering down to the mainstream..." http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/design/why-standards-still-matter The Web Standards War is Far From Over By Robert Nyman. "...You may know everything there is to know about web standards, but remember that you are indeed a minority. Spread the word to other web developers, use best practices and show system developers and decision makers all the benefits of using web standards. Most people are interested in a lot of time saved and money gained and/or saved, so it shouldn't be hard to sell..." http://tinyurl.com/eqnrt It's Time To Kill Off Transitional DOCTYPES By Jack Pickard. "...A Strict DOCTYPE only removes the chance to use presentational or behavioral elements and attributes. If you aren't using these anyway - and you shouldn't be - then you've no reason to avoid the Strict DOCTYPE..." http://accessites.org/gbcms_xml/news_page.php?id=23#n23 W3C Change: Outreach By Eric A. Meyer. "My first suggestion for improving the W3C is this: every Working Group should have one member whose primary (and possibly sole) responsibility is outreach." http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/09/15/w3c-change-outreach/ W3C Change: Working Groups By Eric A. Meyer. "The second area where I think the W3C could be improved is in how Working Groups are populated and managed." http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/09/17/w3c-change-working-groups/ +11: TOOLS. Tails Export FireFox Extension By Robert de Bruin. An extension for showing and exporting microformats. https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2240/ +12: TYPOGRAPHY. Set Opening Paragraphs Flush Left By Richard Rutter. "he function of a paragraph indent is to mark a pause, setting the paragraph apart from what precedes it. If a paragraph is preceded by a title or subhead, the indent is superfluous and can therefore be omitted..." http://tinyurl.com/zaamr +13: USABILITY. 800x600, Should I Really Care? By Martin Ringlein. "I believe we should approach screen resolution much like we do JavaScript. How many people have JavaScript disabled; come-on, do we really care? However, best-practice tells us to 'degrade, degrade, degrade!!' We should be degrading our layouts for screen resolution just as we do for the technology running our sites." http://www.marylandmedia.com/2006/08/800x600-should-i-really-care.html Optimal Width for 1024px Resolution? By Cameron Moll. "Let's face it: The jump from developing for 800x600 to 1024xn is inevitable; not only inevitable, but just around the corner, too..." http://www.cameronmoll.com/archives/001220.html Why Is It So Hard to Grasp Scrolling? By Ethan Kaplan. "...Flash is like retrofitting a perfectly good industrial building. Sure, its not pretty, but with the right tools, the right people and the right knowledge, it can be made into anything you'd like it to be. 100% flash, 4:3 websites, and their ilk are the gaudy exteriors on otherwise serviceable canvases. Not necessary, and terribly tacky...or the sake of information, let us scroll...Long live XHTML. Long live CSS." http://tinyurl.com/sybal Let Your Users Scroll By Roger Johansson. "There are certain design choices that are very effective in making me want to leave a website as quickly as possible. One of the best is when the designer has decided that the entire layout should use a fixed width and height. With very few exceptions doing that is a really bad idea." http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200609/let_your_users_scroll/ Fixing Your Width: What's the Optimal Size for a Site? By Joe Dolson. "Just in the last few days I've been struggling with a design which just wouldn't quite work the way I wanted. A somewhat unusual layout - four columns, fluid." http://tinyurl.com/pnhlh New Brown University Home Page: Breaking Too Many Rules? By Christian Watson. "It's quite a departure from the traditional university home page and it's certainly cool to wave your mouse around for a while and watch the different 'bands' of content slide up and down. But does it work? Without doing some proper user testing it's impossible to say for sure. However, I have my concerns..." http://www.smileycat.com/miaow/archives/000284.html +14: XML. Understanding HTML, XML and XHTML By Maciej Ceglowski. "It's easy to get confused about HTML and XHTML, and many of the experts out there give misleading advice on the subject. Fortunately, most of the time it doesn't matter. But sometimes it does, and can badly break your content. So make sure you understand the difference, and serve up some good clean markup." http://webkit.org/blog/?p=68 Profiling XML Schema By Paul Kiel. "Five years after XML Schema's release, it has matured into a key XML technology, despite its warts and arguably superior competitors. But how are people actually using it? Paul Kiel's article this week answers that question." http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2006/09/20/profiling-xml-schema.html hCard By microformats wiki. "This page contains useful tips and guidelines for how to author hCards, either from scratch, or by adding markup to existing content..." http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-authoring hCalendar By microformats wiki. "hCalendar is a simple, open, distributed calendaring and events format, based on the iCalendar standard...suitable for embedding in (X)HTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML. hCalendar is one of several open microformat standards..." http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar SVG-Wiki "This is the place for help on Scalable Vector Graphics. This wiki is open for the entire SVG community to edit and use freely, under the conditions of this wiki's license. But, of course, feel free to acknowledge the author of the code and the SVG-Wiki." http://wiki.svg.org/Main_Page [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.]