+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 5, Issue 19, November 3, 2006. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 19 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: NAVIGATION. 11: PHP. 12: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 13: TOOLS. 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 FAQ By W3C. "Here are answers to some frequently asked questions (FAQ) about Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0..." http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/wcag2faq.html Designing for Dyslexics: Part 2 of 3 By Mel Pedley. "In Part 1 of this series, we looked briefly at what dyslexia is and some of the generic problems dyslexics face when surfing the web. In this segment, I'm going to focus on a particular hot topic for dyslexics - colour contrast. You may well follow W3C recommendations regarding colour contrast but you may be creating problems for as many as 10% of your site visitors..." http://accessites.org/gbcms_xml/news_page.php?id=26#n26 Blind Web Surfers Sue For Accessibility By Seth Sutel. "'Links list dialogue.' 'Links list view.' 'Your Account - Two of 164.' This is what the Internet sounds like to Chris Danielsen. Danielsen is blind. He's using a software program called Jaws that converts the text on a Web page into a computerized voice that comes out through a speaker, allowing him to surf the Web using keyboard commands instead of a mouse - the same way lots of blind people use the Internet..." http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061024/ap_on_bi_ge/business_of_life Target Accessibility Lawsuit Falls on Deaf Ears By Kim Krause Berg. "...It's not about who can buy earrings and toasters from Target, or not. It's not about whether JAWS struggles with mangled up code. Websites that do work are a click away. It's whether or not companies are united in the belief that the Internet is a global medium, or just limited to whatever was agreed on during that 9am coffee and donuts meeting last Tuesday. If the potential for a lawsuit is not making a dent in corporate-speak, what will?..." http://cre8pc.com/blog/archives/122 Toronto Interacts Presentation By Joe Clark. Joe Clark's speaker's notes from this event. http://joeclark.org/appearances/tint/ Just How Accessible is the Web? BBC 1's Click, Investigates By Henry Swan. "Click, the BBC's flagship technology program, took a look at how easy (or not!) it is to access the internet if you have a disability..." http://tinyurl.com/ym2ovx Firefox 2.0 and Access Keys By Gez Lemon. "Firefox 2.0 uses Shift+Alt as the keystroke combination to invoke access keys. On the surface, this appears to be a great idea, as it avoids clashing with the shortcut keys used for the browser. Unfortunately, the new behavior has been poorly implemented and breaks all websites that have implemented access keys using numeric values, as access keys specified with numeric values cannot be accessed in Firefox 2.0." http://juicystudio.com/article/firefox2-accesskeys.php +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. IE7 CSS Tweak Show and Tell By Jeffrey Zeldman. "Partly because the beta was carefully rolled out over many months, the release of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 has largely been a non-event, for developers as well as journalists. While not at the level of Mozilla Firefox, IE7 is far more standards-compliant than IE6, which was way more compliant than IE5.5, which beat the pants off IE5. To make IE6 render standards-compliant pages correctly, web designers came up with a Wikipedia's worth of hacks. In IE7, those hacks aren't necessary; some actually cause problems..." http://www.zeldman.com/2006/10/27/ie7showandtell/ On Having Layout By Ingo Chao. "A lot of Internet Explorer's rendering inconsistencies can be fixed by giving an element 'layout.' John Gallant and Holly Bergevin classified these inconsistencies as 'dimensional bugs,' meaning that they can often be solved by applying a width or height. This leads to a question of why 'layout' can change the rendering of and the relationships between elements. The question, albeit a good one, is hard to answer. In this article, the authors focus on some aspects of this complicated matter. For more thorough discussions and examples, please refer to the links provided." http://www.satzansatz.de/cssd/onhavinglayout.html The Cascade: Part 2 (Finally!) By Lachlan Hunt. "Exactly one year ago from this day, I published part 1 in a series of articles about CSS cascading and inheritance. However, due to various factors (mostly laziness), the sequel never got published- Until now..." http://lachy.id.au/log/2006/10/cascade2 CSS: Image Replacement By Mike Cherim. "...When the image is an important part of the site and really needs to be embedded in the mark-up, and you still want to offer cool non-JavaScript effects, all while not limiting accessibility, my solution fits the bill..." http://mikecherim.com/experiments/css_image_replacement.php +03: COLOR. Five Simple Steps to Designing with Colour Part 2: A Few Basics By Mark Boulton. "...At its heart, colour theory is concerned with the creation of colour combinations via relationships. The relationships are created by the position of the colours on the colour wheel. The complexity of colour theory really kicks in when you start taking into account different hues, shades and tones. It can all get a bit too much. So here, I'm keeping things very simple and I'm starting at the beginning with primary colours..." http://tinyurl.com/yfyhdy +04: DREAMWEAVER. IE7 Spells Trouble By Trond Ulseth. "...Installing IE7 can indeed mess up your Dreamweaver settings..." http://trond.ulseth.no/index.cfm/2006/10/27/IE7-spells-trouble Dreamweaver 8 Keyboard Shortcuts - PC By Noble Desktop. "Here are many of Dreamweaver's keyboard shortcuts. Some of them are the little known, hidden keystrokes! There is a PDF, printable version to the right, or just scroll down to find the shortcut you need..." http://www.nobledesktop.com/shortcuts-dreamweaver8-pc.html Dreamweaver 8 Keyboard Shortcuts - Mac By Noble Desktop. http://www.nobledesktop.com/shortcuts-dreamweaver8-mac.html Dreamweaver 8 Code Collapse By Scott Fegette. "...When working in complex code blocks, have you ever wished you could hide sections you aren't working on to make navigation a little easier? With Dreamweaver 8's code collapse feature, you can collapse any tag, function or block- saving valuable scrolling time and most importantly... your sanity..." http://tinyurl.com/ybwu7f Guidance on When to Use Templates, Library Items, and SSIs By Jolantha Belik. "Learn the different options Dreamweaver gives you to reuse content on many web pages." http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/ssi_lbi_template.html +05: EVALUATION & TESTING. How Many Users Should You Test With in Usability Testing? (Latest Research) By Frank Spillers. "Question: How many users do you need to test with for a usability test? Answer 1: = 5 users (Jakob Nielsen and Thomas Landauer, 1993). Answer 2: = 15 users (Laurie Faulkner, 2004)...So, which is it, 5 or 15? And why are we arguing about an extra 10 users, doesn't one need to test with at least 100 or more users for statistical significance, accuracy and validity?..." http://tinyurl.com/smec4 Personas: the Podcasts By Steve Mulder. "Too busy to decide if you want to buy the book? Try the podcasts, which take you on a whirlwind tour of the book's content...For the industrious, you can also download the PowerPoint slides..." http://www.practicalpersonas.com/2006/10/personas_the_podcasts.html Which Personas Are You Targeting? By Debra Levin. An introduction to user personas. http://newsletter.refinery.com/e_article000334332.cfm?x=b11,0,w Developing User Personas By Emma Tonkin. "When designing a Web site or program, the obvious question to ask at once is, 'who are my audience?' It seems natural to design with users in mind, and just as natural to wish to build a product that is satisfactory to all one's users - however, experience shows that it is difficult to design something that appeals to everybody... Instead, it is useful to start with a few sample profiles of users, typical examples of the audience to whom the design should appeal, and design to their needs. Not only is it easier for the designer, but the result is usually more appealing to the user community..." http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/briefings/briefing-90/html/ +06: EVENTS. Adobe Contribute Online Live Seminar Series November 14, 2006. 12:00 - 1:00 PM US/Eastern http://tinyurl.com/yex58k Introduction to Dreamweaver 8 (Online Adobe Event) November 15, 2006. 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM US/Eastern http://tinyurl.com/qt2xs Best Practices: A Closer Look at CSS and XML in Dreamweaver 8 (Online Adobe Event) November 15, 2006. 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM US/Eastern http://tinyurl.com/qt2xs +07: FLASH. Making Flash Websites Searchable By Jeff Kamerer. "Follow these tips to achieve search engine visibility when using Flash in your websites..." http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/flash_searchability.html +08: JAVASCRIPT. The Impact of Ajax on User Experience - Part 1 By Cindy Lu. "...in Ajax-based application, new functions and interaction techniques aimed at enriching user experience have allowed the user to do more on the web in a more efficient, effective and fun way. In Part 2, we will look at some of the problems created using Ajax. " http://www.apogeehk.com/articles/AjaxUserExperienceStrategiesPart1.html An Introduction to AJAX By Emma Tonkin. "The popularity of AJAX is due to the many advantages of the technology, but several pitfalls remain related to the informality of the standard, its disadvantages and limitations, potential usability issues and the idiosyncrasies of various browsers and platforms. However, the level of interest from industry groups and communities means that it is undergoing active and rapid development in all these areas..." http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/briefings/briefing-93/html/ AJAX and Usability Issues By Emma Tonkin. "...The concerns surrounding adoption of AJAX are not unfamiliar; many stem from user and developer experience of Flash. Like Flash, the technologies comprising AJAX may be used in many different ways; some are more prone to usability or accessibility issues than others. The establishment of standard frameworks, and the increasing standardization of the technologies behind AJAX, is likely to improve the situation for the Web developer. In the meantime, the key for developers is to remember is that despite the availability of new approaches, good design remains essential..." http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/briefings/briefing-94/html/ AJAX Design Terminology By Cameron Moll. "...The point of this article is to associate traditional GUI (graphical user interface), terminology with desktop-like web UI (user interface) interaction..." http://www.cameronmoll.com/archives/001336.html +09: MISCELLANEOUS. Getting Real, the Book By 37signals. "Discover the smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web-based application." This book is now available online at no cost. http://gettingreal.37signals.com/toc.php IDEA (Information: Design, Experience, Access) 2006 (Podcasts and slides) "...We have audio from every talk, and slides from many of them..." http://www.ideaconference.org/blog/?p=46 Interview with Founding women: Ligaya Turmelle and Elizabeth Naramore By reische. "I'm pleased to present the first of many planned interviews for the phpWomen site. I am starting the series at the beginning. My two victims, er? guests, started the frenzy that has become phpWomen.org..." http://tinyurl.com/y8wlr7 +10: NAVIGATION. What Tourists Really Want on the Web By Gerry McGovern. What are the implications of the Long Neck for the management of a website - and the delivery of the maximum return on investment for that website? 1) Your customers are highly impatient. 2) They have a small set of Long Neck tasks that they will quickly scan your webpages for. 3) If they see these Long Neck tasks addressed prominently and with clarity, you will pass that vital test of relevance. If you present the important Long Neck care words on your homepage and other key pages, then you will keep the attention of your impatient customers. Instead of reaching for the Back button, your customers will be clicking on one of your links to complete the task they came to your website to complete. http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2006/nt-2006-10-30-tourism.htm +11: PHP. Practical PHP Programming Wiki By Paul Hudson. "My original book has been online over two years, and in print as PHP in a Nutshell for one, so now I'm taking it a step further: all the content is available on this site as a wiki. Not only will this make it easier for me to keep the content up to date (as and when I have the time - no promises!), but it also means that you can make changes yourself..." http://hudzilla.org/phpwiki/index.php?title=Main_Page Why Don't We See More Women in the PHP World? By Manuel Lemos. "This post lets you know about a new initiative to bring together the women that work with PHP throughout the world. It explains how spreading the word is vital for the success of communities of specific interests. The article also tells what you can do to help." http://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/59-Where-are-the-PHP-women.html Introducing the Chain of Responsibility Between PHP Objects By Alejandro Gervasio. "This article, the first of three parts, introduces you to the chain of responsibility pattern in PHP 5. This pattern is useful when a specific class cannot deal with a particular task, and must therefore transfer a program's execution to another class with the appropriate capability." http://tinyurl.com/y262cp +12: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Reinventing HTML By Tim Berners-Lee. "It is really important to have real developers on the ground involved with the development of HTML. It is also really important to have browser makers intimately involved and committed. And also all the other stakeholders, including users and user companies and makers of related products....Some things are clearer with hindsight of several years. It is necessary to evolve HTML incrementally. The attempt to get the world to switch to XML, including quotes around attribute values and slashes in empty tags and namespaces all at once didn't work." http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/166 How Not to Fix HTML By Joe Clark. "Tim Berners-Lee decides to actually do something for a change. Unfortunately, it's the wrong thing...So we're starting our fixes with HTML? Why? Because five people posted on their blogs about it? More than five people posted about WCAG 2. Why aren't we starting there? HTML is working OK but Web accessibility guidelines are in trouble. So why is HTML a priority fix?..." http://blog.fawny.org/2006/10/28/tbl-html/ Reinventing HTML: Discuss By W3C Quality Assurance. "By now many have seen Tim Berners-Lee on Reinventing HTML...Ironically, comments are disabled on breadcrumbs, the DIG research group blog. Comments are welcome here..." http://www.w3.org/QA/2006/10/reinventing_html_discuss.html The W3C and WCAG By Jack Pickard. "...So, if you belong to a company that can pay to be a Member of the W3C, you can influence the standards of the entire internet. If you don't belong to a company that can afford to pay - or if you're a private individual - then at best you've got a right to express an opinion but your opinion carries no weight....If the W3C isn't prepared to give web developers and web users a say in how they plan the web should be developed, then I don't think the W3C has any right at all to tell us what to do. I certainly don't remember voting for 'em. What we want is a democracy, not a dictatorship...If the W3C truly wants to be the standards body on the internet, they need to learn to stand on their own two feet, and not in someone else's pocket. If organization is financially dependent on other businesses then why shouldn't we assume that their standards are not independent at all, but are directly influenced by those businesses? That is precisely what we should assume - because no-one other than those businesses gets a vote. One way of demonstrating this is to look at WCAG 2.0..." http://www.thepickards.co.uk/index.php/200610/the-w3c-and-wcag/ Why Tim Berners-Lee is Wrong By Elliotte Rusty Harold. "...XHTML is not the problem. Well-formedness is certainly not the problem. Hell, even namespaces aren't really the problem although they're clunky and ugly and everyone hates them. The problem is that the W3C has abandoned HTML for years. HTML hasn't moved forward since 1999. No wonder browser vendors are getting antsy..." http://cafe.elharo.com/xml/why-tim-berners-lee-is-wrong/ Fixing HTML By Lachlan Hunt. "...I'm not disputing...claims about the problems with the WCAG working group or the WCAG 2.0 guidelines...But to imply that the W3C doesn't need to do anything about (X)HTML or the HTML working group is misguided. Something desperately needs to be done with each of the HTML, XForms and WCAG working groups; they're all in serious trouble and their problems need to be fixed..." http://lachy.id.au/log/2006/10/fixing-html Constitution of a New Website By Bruce Lawson. "I've written a Constitution for the new website - a (hopefully) simple explanation of principles that all can agree, and from which more detailed policies can be derived..." http://tinyurl.com/y3al2b IE7: Were They Ready? By Simon Griffin. "...Thirteen of the FTSE 100 homepages that we tested were broken in IE7 - although not significantly so. ...Generalizing our findings to the internet as a whole - which is admittedly of dubious meaning and therefore should be taken with a pinch of salt - suggests that there are around 12.7 million websites in need of a little TLC as a result of the introduction of IE7..." http://www.etre.com/blog/2006/10/ie7_were_they_ready/ +13: TOOLS. OATS (Open Source Assistive Technology Software) "OATSoft is dedicated to improving Assistive Technology and computer accessibility through the power of Open Source development techniques. OATSoft makes the best Open Source Assistive Technology Software (OATS) easy to find. Users and developers meet at OATSoft to create better software." http://www.oatsoft.org/ Websites as Graphs - an HTML DOM Visualizer Applet By Sala Aharef. An online tool that maps the hierarchy of a web site as a graph, with color-coded indications of link, table, div, img, form, and other elements. http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/ Explanation: http://www.aharef.info/2006/05/websites_as_graphs.htm +14: USABILITY. The Average Web Page By Andrew B. King. "...Although these are preliminary results, the data gives us an idea of the size and composition of the average web page. Without compression and CSS images, the average web page is about 130K in size, with a 25K HTML file, small GIFs and larger JPEGs, PNGs, and SWF files when used. For those pages that use them external scripts averaged in total 37.5K and external style sheets averaged in total 28.7K per page. The HTML figures are in line with the home page trend I reported on in Speed Up Your Site where the average home page HTML file size grew from 8,297 to 28,290 bytes from 1996 to 2002. However as web pages become more complex, each individual component adds size and HTTP requests to the total page payload...." http://www.optimizationweek.com/reviews/average-web-page/ Optimizing Page Load Time By Aaron Hopkins. Aaron Hopkins discusses techniques to make your applications load faster. http://www.die.net/musings/page_load_time/ Minimal-Feedback Hints for Remembering Passwords By Morten Hertzum. "Passwords are a widely used mechanism for user authentication and are thus critical to the security of many systems. To provide effective security, passwords should be known to the password holder but remain unknown to everybody else. While personal information and real words are relatively easy for a user to remember, they make weak passwords from a security point of view because vulnerable to informed guessing and dictionary attacks." http://tinyurl.com/y4rqxm Actual Browser Sizes (final) By Thomas Baekdal. "...The report finds, among other things, that the majority of people browse maximized or very close to it. That Mac user have bigger screens, but their browser are the same size as on any other platform. And, in order to support 95% of your visitors, you need to design for a maximum size of 776x424px." http://www.baekdal.com/reports/actual-browser-sizes/ +15: XML. RSS and Atom in Action: Newsfeed Formats Part 2 By Dave Johnson. "In 2003, a group of bloggers came together to create a new standard, which would later be known as Atom. They wanted to start fresh and do things right this time. As a result, all the major blog servers either support Atom now or have plans to do so. To learn more, read on." http://www.webreference.com/reviews/rss_atom_action2/ Migrating to XForms By Paul Sobocinski. "Paul Sobocinski explains how to start using XForms now by showing PHP code that will convert from XHTML to XForms and back to XHTML." http://tinyurl.com/yc7so8 [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.]