+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 5, Issue 18, October 27, 2006. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 18 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: EVALUATION & TESTING. 05: EVENTS. 06: FLASH. 07: JAVASCRIPT. 08: MISCELLANEOUS. 09: NAVIGATION. 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. Barrier-Free Web Design, a.k.a. Web Accessibility 2.0 By Roger Johansson and Tommy Olsson. "Both authors of this article belong firmly in Camp 1. We believe in building websites with no unnecessary barriers, thereby making the Web accessible to as many people as possible. In this article we attempt to explain why we believe that is important and why we do not think including everybody risks excluding people with disabilities." http://tinyurl.com/y7vs4p Accessibility In Trouble 6: Misrepresentation By Mike Davies. "...Web accessibility, protecting the civil rights of disabled people to participate online, is being devalued by web accessibility 'experts' and 'evangelists' out to raise their own profiles, and justify their expenses." http://tinyurl.com/ykhmco Creating Accessible PDFs Using Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional By Greg Pisocky. http://www.document-solutions.com/accessibility_adobe_manual.htm Can WCAG 2.0 be Simpler? By Vladimir Popov. "The new WCAG 2.0 standard draft sparked a hot discussion around web accessibility and the standard direction. The main issue is how to make it simpler and easier to understand for web developer community. The author investigates some WCAG 2.0 success criteria and explains, why they should be solved by improving technology of user agents." http://evolt.org/can_wcag_2_be_simpler Stuff WCAG, Let's do It Ourselves! By Jack Pickard. "...So, what do we think should be mandatory for public sector websites, at least in the UK? Well, here's my opinion..." http://tinyurl.com/ycacys Don't Provide an Accessibility Statement By Peter Krantz. "When I surf the web I see more and more sites providing an accessibility statement. Googling for 'accessibility statement' returns over twelve million pages. What do these statements contain? Why would you want one? Who reads them? This article will try to make two points: 1. accessibility statements are often pointless and 2. you are better off with a 'site help' if you think your target audience need it..." http://www.standards-schmandards.com/2006/just-say-no/ CAPTCHA Usability: Humane Alternative to CAPTCHA By Jesper Ronn-Jensen. "...Since W3C wrote about 'inaccessibility of CAPTCHA' almost a year ago, a new technique has emerged..." http://tinyurl.com/s9npb Web Captioning and Education By Jared Smith. "This article was written to set the framework for the Web Captioning and its uses in Education webcast. It provides an overview of captioning technologies, implications for education, and ideas for future development..." http://ncdae.org/tools/captioning/ Deaf Web Users Fear Being Left Behind By Andrew LaVallee. "...The absence of online captions has emerged as a hot topic in the deaf community. The media providers say they are held back by technological hurdles, and point out that online distribution of TV content is still in its infancy. But advocates for the deaf and hard of hearing say the lack of captions is a slight, since most programs have already been transcribed to comply with Federal Communications Commission rules..." http://tinyurl.com/yckgfw +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Top CSS Tips By Jonathan Snook. "I thought I'd share some of my habits when it comes to doing CSS work and let me warn you, some of what I have to say is probably a little controversial. But what's life without living it on the edge..." http://www.snook.ca/archives/html_and_css/top_css_tips/ Useful Tips for Writing Efficient CSS By Roger Johansson. "Jonathan Snook has posted a few great CSS coding tips in Top CSS Tips. Several of them come down to personal preferences, and it seems my preferences differ a bit from Jonathan's in some cases, so I thought I'd go through his tips and note my take on each of them..." http://tinyurl.com/yl4w42 Tip: Want to Write CSS for a Handheld? By Virginia DeBolt. "...My advice for now is to make lavish and liberal use of display: none for nonessential parts of your pages and make sure your color contrast is going to work on a small screen. Check your pages with CSS switched off to make sure they linearize sensibly (good semantic HTML is the underpinning of everything no matter what kind of device you're designing for). Provide skip navigation links or other navigation aids to make the pages easier to work through..." http://www.webteacher.ws/2006/10/tip-want-to-write-css-for-handheld.html Use Of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) By Brian Kelly. "This document reviews the importance of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and highlights the importance of ensuring that use of CSS complies with CSS standards..." http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/briefings/briefing-34/html/ +03: COLOR. Five Simple Steps to Designing with Colour By Mark Boulton. "Designing with colour is perhaps the element of graphic design which is the most difficult to get right. Why? Well, because it is the most subjective. For some, a palette of dark gray with splashes of bright pink will be just great; to others it would just be all wrong. Too many designers, whether schooled in colour-theory or not, end up making subjective decisions about colour and then when it comes to explaining those decisions to a client, things begin to unravel.This first post in the series will be dealing with looking at tone and the value of limiting your palette..." http://tinyurl.com/yc33ol +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Heuristic Evaluation By Emma Tonkin. "Heuristic evaluation is a method of user testing, which enables a product to be assessed in order to identify usability problems - that is, places where the product is not easy to use. It is a discount ('quick and dirty') method, which means that it is cheap and requires relatively little expertise..." http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/briefings/briefing-89/html/ Interactive Heuristic Evaluation Toolkit http://www.id-book.com/catherb/ +05: EVENTS. In Depth CSS XHTML Techniques with Eric Meyer December 7-8, 2006. London, United Kingdom. http://www.carsonworkshops.com/design-dev/meyer/7-8DEC2006.html UIE (User Interface Engineering) Web Application Summit January 21-23, 2007. Monterey, California U.S.A. http://www.uie.com/events/web_app_summit/2007/ ATIA (Assistive Technology Industry Association) 2007 Conference and Exhibition January 24-27, 2007. Orlando, Florida U.S.A. http://www.atia.org/conf_2007.html CC 2007 6th Creativity and Cognition Conference June 13-15, 2007. Washington, D.C. U.S.A. http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/CC2007/ +06: FLASH. The Rise of Flash Video, Part 2 By Tom Green. "Part One of Tom Green's series traced Flash video's rise to prominence on sites such as YouTube and MySpace (the article fortuitously appearing on the day Google's purchase of YouTube was announced). Now, in part two, Tom, a well-known authority on Flash, tackles what may be the biggest question about Flash video-its quality-and then touches on digital rights management (DRM), and video as content." http://www.digital-web.com/articles/the_rise_of_flash_video_part_2/ FLV Playback skins with Captionate Captioning Support By Andrew Kirkpatrick. "Providing captions in Flash just got easier. Adobe is making skins for the FLVPlayback component available for use. The skins were crated by Michael Jordan and are being provided by Adobe for developers to use. To use these skins..." http://blogs.adobe.com/accessibility/2006/10/captionskins.html +07: JAVASCRIPT. Bonsai - A Loopless Tree Menu Using Event Delegation By Christian Heilmann. "As a response to all the libraries out there advocating lots of methods to retrieve collections of elements to loop over or attach other methods to I just wanted to remind people that looping is slow and sometimes not really needed. As a proof I set up a 13 lines hierarchical tree menu script that does not need any loop at all..." http://icant.co.uk/sandbox/bonzaimenu/ Event Delegation versus Event Handling By Christian Heilmann. http://icant.co.uk/sandbox/eventdelegation/ Print to Preview By Pete McVicar. "Going from the browser to the printer has always been a bit of a guessing game. In this article, Pete McVicar shows us a method for providing users with a reliable print preview." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/printtopreview Introducing Key Concepts for Form Validation with the DOM By Alejandro Gervasio. "If you're looking for ways to validate the data submitted on your web forms, you'll be interested in this article. It's the first in a series that explains how to use the DOM to supplement your server-side validation techniques..." http://tinyurl.com/y5zfeb Extending Prototypes of Built-In Objects By David Andersson (liorean). "You should never, ever, under any circumstances extend Object.prototype with new members unless you own all the code in the entire production environment...You should avoid, if at all possible, extending Array.prototype with new members...In general, Array objects should be used for their array-like behavior. If all you want to get is a way to map keys to values, use an Object object instead..." http://tinyurl.com/g8qa9 Using a Sledgehammer to Crack a Nut By Ian Lloyd. "...my questions are 'why is it necessary to have all these scripts for a lowly login screen' (possible answer: it's just to preload them into cache on a simple screen) but more importantly, why not just use a simple form as demonstrated earlier? Why use that proverbial sledgehammer to crack that nut? One of the arguments against using, or rather requiring, JavaScript is device-independence. Many mobile devices have flaky or no JavaScript support, yet a service as simple as a bookmark sharing site should (in theory) work quite nicely on these devices. However, with the JavaScript roadblock up, many will be turned away..." http://tinyurl.com/y8sqje Ajax and Accessibility: You're Doing it Wrong (Hijax) By Rob Cherny. "...The server-side code you've normally used can be simply tweaked to support returning a subset of data. I've used this to great success several times. You'll love it. Remember, scripting and Ajax should 'enhance' an application, unless you can get away with more for valid reasons. It's just like JavaScript-based form validation: Unless you have a valid reason, you're always going to want to use server-side validation as well, however the client can save you time and energy if it supports the features you're after." http://tinyurl.com/yay5pm Accessible Ajax, A Basic Hijax Example By Rob Cherny. "After posting my article, "Ajax and Accessibility: You're Doing it Wrong (Hijax)", Jeremy Keith, the fellow who coined the term, actually posted asking about working examples. Well, I didn't have any that I could share off hand, but I posted a few things which were in the same spirit of working Accessible Ajax, or Hijax. Thinking about it more, I figured, well, it's pretty easy, I'll just slap together a sample. So away we go..." http://www.cherny.com/webdev/41/accessible-ajax-a-basic-hijax-example AJAX Accessibility Overview By Becky Gibson. "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) is a hot new technology on the Internet that allows the incremental update of portions of a Web page without reloading the entire page. This has great performance benefits and provides a medium for developing rich Internet applications. Accessibility concerns have arisen with the increased use of JavaScript and AJAX on the Web. This article introduces AJAX and discusses some of the accessibility issues and best practices..." http://www-306.ibm.com/able/resources/ajaxaccessibility.html Quiz: AJAX - Automatically Move Focus? By Bob Easton. "...What about the people who use screen magnifiers? What if the target area is beyond the field of view of the screen magnifier? The same for people with low vision who have bumped up text size. What are the ramifications of moving the page relatively large increments to expose the new focus? Is this a good user experience?..." http://tinyurl.com/y7fq96 +08: MISCELLANEOUS. Shirley Kaiser Interview By Meryl K. Evans. "Two prolific and experienced women of the web join forces for this week's issue. Shirley Kaiser, author of the new book Deliver First Class Web Sites: 101 Essential Checklists, created websitetips.com in 1996, and she's learned a lot about web design and development in the years since then. Shirley talks about charging clients, tackling redesigns, testing sites, and other practical matters, as she's interviewed by Meryl K. Evans, well-known content maven and frequent contributor to Digital Web Magazine. http://www.digital-web.com/articles/shirley_kaiser/ Long Tails and Short Queries: An Interview with Amanda Spink By Christina Wodtke. "Why haven't we figured out search yet? Amanda Spink talks with Christina Wodtke on why searchers still can't ask a useful question of a search engine, and how Google may be part of the problem rather than part of the solution." http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/long_tails_and_ Where the Rubber Meets the Road: Web Accessibility and Pragmatism By Bruce Lawson. "At last, the podcast audio and transcript of the talk Patrick Lauke and I gave at Geek In The Park." http://tinyurl.com/yh752x Archived Webcasts By National Center on Disability and Access to Education (NCDAE). "NCDAE produces audio Webcasts on a quarterly basis. Each Webcast includes panelist from industry, education, and government that discuss questions about various aspects of accessibility and distance education." http://ncdae.org/activities/#webcast +09: NAVIGATION. Preparing a Website for SEO Success By Mike Cherim. "Building a website and wanting it to be found and indexed by search engines, like most things in life, requires a little preparation. In this article I will offer some suggestions on what developers need to consider and do..." http://green-beast.com/blog/?p=121 Enhancing Web Site Navigation Using The LINK Element By Brian Kelly. "This document provides advice on how the HTML element can be used to improve the navigation of Web sites." http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/briefings/briefing-10/html/ +10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. The Semantic Code By Abhijit Nadgouda. "I had been introduced to the concept of Semantic Markup much earlier. But it is one of the things that is not a technical necessity, so I remained at the surface for a long time. I recently got chance to delve into the whys and hows that I would like to share with you, or rather discuss with you. Semantic Markup, by itself, is a vast subject, we will focus on the web design subset of it for the purpose of this article, lets call it Semantic HTML..." http://fadtastic.net/2006/10/19/the-semantic-code/ Bulletproof HTML: 37 Steps to Perfect Markup By Tommy Olsson. "This article highlights and answers some of the most frequently asked questions about HTML. HTML is the foundation of the Web, and both developers and designers need to understand it." http://www.sitepoint.com/article/html-37-steps-perfect-markup Introduction to Microformats 2 By Andy Mitchell. "Microformats are small and gentle syntactic touch-ups for your web pages. They have one major purpose: to make your data readable by both man and machine. They are the technical diplomats of the Web; allowing the same piece of data to be shared among many applications and people. What is more, they do this in an easy and pragmatic way..." http://tinyurl.com/y9rj8w Where Microformats will Take Us By Andy Mitchell. "This article is about gazing into the crystal ball, to see what kind of Web will be possible when microformats can be found in the vast majority of web pages..." http://tinyurl.com/yfqhne Following the WSG Microformats Event By Stuart Colville. Presentations and podcasts from a Web Standards Group Microformats event. http://tinyurl.com/vl9dm GRDDL Primer By W3C. "GRDDL is a mechanism for Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages. It is a technique for obtaining RDF data from XML documents and in particular XHTML pages..." http://www.w3.org/TR/grddl-primer/ Semantic Web Data Integration with hCalendar and GRDDL By Dan Connolly. XML Conference and Exposition 2005 presentation slides. http://www.w3.org/2002/12/cal/mash/slides +11: TOOLS. hCard Creator By Tantek Celik. "This user interface, and the code behind it, is provided as an example for the benefit of microformat open standards developers, and to demonstrate the clear one to one correspondence between microformat fields and microformat code. The code generated by this interface may be used for semantic web pages, structured blogging, or any other application that requires markup that is simultaneously human presentable and machine readable." http://microformats.org/code/hcard/creator hCalendar Creator http://microformats.org/code/hcalendar/creator hReview Creator http://microformats.org/code/hreview/creator +12: TYPOGRAPHY. Typography School (Video) David Dabner. "Veteran graphic design/typography and letterpress teacher from the London College of Printing: David Dabner talks... giving an insight into the principles of design, creative letterpress and why computers make students sloppy..." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xg5O0l7ybY +13: USABILITY. Productivity and Screen Size By Jakob Nielsen. "...Skilled performance almost never happens on the Web, because users constantly encounter new pages; that is, they spend most of their time pondering options and trying to understand the content that's being presented. This is why most websites should lay off the fancy drag-and-drop features and focus on the simplest possible interaction techniques that are common to all sites. If your site works the way people are used to working, they can concentrate on your content...Here's how to estimate productivity improvements: Involve a broad spectrum of representative users (not just experts). Have the users perform representative tasks (not just a few low-level operations). Don't tell users how to do the tasks; observe their real behavior..." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/screen-productivity.html What Your Website can Learn from Starbucks By Gerry McGovern. "A fast, convenient website gains customers. A poorly designed website loses customers. I want to buy a new laptop. I used to buy IBM ThinkPads and was really happy with them. Lenovo took over the ThinkPad range. Last year I went to the Lenovo website. I was a loyal customer. I wanted to buy from them. The website was awful. I went to a competitor..." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2006/nt-2006-10-23-starbucks.htm UI Conf: My Higlights from UI11 By Jesper Ronn-Jensen. Jesper Ronn-Jensen's notes from the User Interface 11 conference. http://justaddwater.dk/2006/10/18/ui-conf-my-higlights-from-ui11/ +14: XML. Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful to Feelings By Brad Fults. "Ian Hickson wrote a piece awhile ago called Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful. He introduces several main points against sending XHTML documents with a text/html MIME type, which, I believe, are wholly unconvincing. I'll comment on or refute each of his points below..." http://h3h.net/2005/12/xhtml-harmful-to-feelings/ RSS and Atom in Action: News Feed Formats By Dave Johnson. "The most popular news feed format is RSS, but the formats have forked into two opposing camps which don't agree on what the RSS letters stand for. Clarity will dawn as you learn about the history of RSS, the RSS fork and the most widely used RSS formats." http://www.webreference.com/reviews/rss_atom_action/index.html Creating a Custom RSS Feed with PHP and MySQL By Kris Hadlock. "RSS has become the standard technology for syndicating information to large audiences. Many people have something to say, but its finding the right audience for your voice that matters. A great place to start is by creating your own RSS feed and adding to it as often as you can." http://www.webreference.com/authoring/languages/xml/rss/custom_feeds/ [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.]