+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 5, Issue 20, November 11, 2006.

An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. 

++ISSUE 20 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: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
07: JAVASCRIPT.
08: MISCELLANEOUS.
09: NAVIGATION.
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.

Accessibility Quick Checks (Part 1 of 3: Coding)
By Jack Pickard.
"One of the things I've been doing at work recently is to work on a web checklist, the idea of which is to provide some quick and easy tests for someone other than the developer to carry out. Reading through it, it occurred to me that something along pretty much the same lines might be useful to people in general, so I've revisited the idea here. It's important to remember that you should obviously take more than this into consideration when building a site, but testing for these things will give you a flavor of whether or not a site is likely to be accessible (amongst other things)."
http://tinyurl.com/ygyk82

Accessibility Quick Checks (Part 2 of 3: Content)
By Jack Pickard.
http://tinyurl.com/yk86uf

Accessibility Quick Checks (Part 3 of 3: Function)
By Jack Pickard.
http://tinyurl.com/ydgnvs

Tabindex At Your Peril
By Mel Pedley.
"...I consider tab indexing to be the spawn of Satan - especially when it does run contrary to the 'natural' or expected tab order on a page...."
http://blackwidows.co.uk/blog/?p=79

Accesskeys: Where Are We Now?
By Mel Pedley.
"...Are we just expending a lot of effort to implement an concept that, whilst nice enough in theory, never really caught on amongst users in reality?"
http://blackwidows.co.uk/blog/?p=80

Almost Getting it Right with Access Keys
By Matt Bailey.
"Access keys are a method commonly used by web developers trying to make their sites more accessible. They allow the use of keyboard triggers to navigate your website. This navigation is most commonly achieved using the Alt key plus the designated trigger key. Unfortunately, Access keys have a flawed implementation in almost every circumstance..."
http://tinyurl.com/wez97

Cascading Style Sheets And Accessibility
By Marco Bertoni.
"This article is the first of a series that will discuss how Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) can be used to make Web sites more accessible. This introductory discussion is not meant to be exhaustive. Subsequent articles will delve deeper and cover more advanced topics..."
http://xhtml.com/en/css/css-and-accessibility/

Do the Rights of the Disabled Extend to the Blind on the Web?
By Bob Tedeschi.
"According to an advocacy group, Target declined last year to make its Web site fully accessible to blind people with specialized screen-reading technology last year. If true - and Target has denied the accusation in court - it was a public relations blunder, and it may have been illegal as well..."
http://tinyurl.com/y7td5p

The Open and Closed Project
By Joe Clark.
"The Open & Closed Project is a research project headquartered in Toronto. Our main goal is to write a set of standards for the four fields of accessible media - captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing. We'll develop those standards through research and evidence-gathering. Where research or evidence is missing on a certain topic, we'll carry it out ourselves."
http://openandclosed.org/

IBM Home Page Reader is Dead
Source: IBM-HPR Mailing List
"...IBM does not have plans for any further updates of HPR..."
http://tinyurl.com/u8ozw

IE7 and Various Screen Readers and Screen Enlargers
By Kelly Ford.
"Since we announced the release of IE7, we've noticed many questions and discussion about how well the program works with various screen readers and screen enlargers on the net. We wanted to provide the latest information we have from the various manufacturers of these products and answer some concerns around automatic updates."
http://tinyurl.com/y3qzkc


+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Counter Intuitive
By Dave Shea.
"...every time I style an ordered list I wish there were some way to style list item counters independently of the content. Sure you could wrap extra markup around the content to achieve that somewhat, but it's not always practical and rarely desirable. But, there is a way. There's the counter-increment and counter-reset properties. As a part of generated content, I've simply overlooked them. Turns out they're good at this sort of thing..."
http://mezzoblue.com/archives/2006/11/01/counter_intu/

Newly Supported CSS Selectors in IE7
By John Gallant and Holly Bergevin.
"If you know a little about CSS selectors, you have probably discovered how limiting they can be in some ways. Well get ready to expand your CSS horizons, because IE7 has extended its selector support quite a bit, and we want you to become aware of the things these newly supported CSS combinator tools will do for you. All too soon we coders will be expected to know and use this stuff, so put on that thinking-cap and set the selector to 'Combinators.' Here we go..."
http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=1C603

Again With the Browser Support Charts
By John Allsopp.
"If you had told me over 8 years ago, when we were first doing our browser CSS support charts that in late 2006 I'd still be compiling charts of how well new browsers support CSS (and the answer being 'OK') I really don't think I'd have believed you. Think about this: the web is now more than twice the age it was then. Yet, we still need to worry about at least one of the browsers which was around back then (well, at least a bit)."
http://westciv.typepad.com/dog_or_higher/2006/11/again_with_the_.html


+03: COLOR.

Color: An Investigation
By Joshua David McClurg Genevese.
"Many of us learned design on the job, as the internet took our careers down unexpected paths. We've focused on our most immediate and practical needs so we could sharpen our skills and meet deadlines. But the new professionalism in web design calls us to a higher standard and a deeper understanding of design's concepts, complexities, and historical underpinnings. It's time to immerse ourselves in what we missed, as columnist Joshua David McClurg Genevese takes us back to school in the first of three articles on color."
http://www.digital-web.com/articles/color_an_investigation/


+04: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Eyetracking of Forms: Should we Accept the Conclusions?
By Caroline Jarrett.
"For ages, I've longed to do some eyetracking experiments on how users look at forms. And recently, I've been delighted to see the next best thing: excellent work by Matteo Penzo and his team..."
http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article3507.asp

The Various Approaches to Evaluation and Measurement
By Intranet Benchmarking Forum.
"How intranet teams often evaluate and measure for the wrong reasons and without fully grasping what their intranet is for..."
http://tinyurl.com/y4nsea

Task-Centered User Interface Design: 4.1 Cognitive Walkthroughs
By Clayton Lewis and John Rieman. 
"The cognitive walkthrough is a formalized way of imagining people's thoughts and actions when they use an interface for the first time..."
http://hcibib.org/tcuid/chap-4.html#4-1


+05: EVENTS.

International Day of Disabled Persons
2006 Theme: "E-Accessibility" 
December 3, 2006.
http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/enable/disiddp.htm

A Practical Guide to Usability Testing
December 7 2006.
London, United Kingdom
http://www.userfocus.co.uk/training/usabilitytest.html

PHP Throwdown (24 hour coding marathon)
January 27, 2007.
http://phpthrowdown.com/


+06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

Card Sorting
By Joshua Kaufman.
"If you're designing a system to organize content, you can either come up with your own labeling system - which may or may not be shared by others - or you can talk to the actual users of the system and learn how they perceive its content. There are many methods of gathering this user data, but they can often be both time-consuming and costly. Fortunately, there's hope: one method that is generally inexpensive, quick, and easy is card sorting."
http://unraveled.com/archives/2006/11/card-sorting


+07: JAVASCRIPT.

Flash, JavaScript, and Providing Alternative Content
By Jonathan Christopher.
"The point I'm trying to make is that in this era of ever advancing Web technologies, it's still extremely important to provide alternate content. Readers come first, above your JavaScript animations and Flash movies. While it's completely great to offer those enhancements, there is a lot you can do to make sure a reader isn't faced with any barriers when it comes to a site you put together. In the end, as always, it's up to you."
http://tinyurl.com/y23jrs

PPK on JavaScript: The DOM - Part 1
By Peter-Paul Koch.
"In 1998, the W3C published its Level 1 DOM specification, which all browser vendors implemented. This week we're going to spend most of our time working with the Level 1 DOM, but we'll also take a look at the old Level 0 DOM, especially at its useful form-field properties."
http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/ppk1/index.html

EJ - The Only JavaScript Library You'll Ever Need
By Robert Nyman.
"The web is littered with full-blown JavaScript libraries who say they will save your day and make your web development life much easier. You get encouraged to include these 'mere 80 KB' libraries that is supposed to be the solution to all your needs, and practically make the web site work by itself. Needless to say, I'm not a big follower of JavaScript libraries,, especially since they almost always include lots of superfluous code, so I thought I'd put together a tiny library with only essential JavaScript functions..."
http://tinyurl.com/yys3kr

JavaScript Frameworks - Concept vs. Code Libraries
By Robert Nyman.
"Personally, I've never been a fan of huge JavaScript libraries, an opinion that was probably clear from what I wrote in my EJ - The only JavaScript library you'll ever need post. Even if they're written by very competent web developers, they almost always consist of more functions and methods that are necessary. However, I'd like to take this opportunity to explain the important difference between the two major types of JavaScript libraries: concept and code libraries..."
http://tinyurl.com/y7alav

Scripts in XHTML
By Lachlan Hunt.
"I frequently come across people who aren't aware of the problems with using scripts inside XHTML documents. One of these problems is particularly fatal because it can cause a well-formedness error, but it's not seen as an issue when documents are served as text/html..."
http://lachy.id.au/log/2006/11/xhtml-script

Dynamic CSS Changes
By Ryan Campbell.
"When changing the appearance of a site through the use of JavaScript, we usually see developers either switch the stylesheet of the page or change the class of an element. And then, on occasion, we see the practice of changing appearance right in the JavaScript with the style property. On their own, these methods are all fairly reliable, but they don't play too nicely together."
http://particletree.com/notebook/dynamic-css-changes/

CSS Photo Shuffler
By Carl Camera.
"A Javascript + CSS replacement for Flash photo fading slideshow. Inspired by Richard Rutter's image fade demonstration..."
http://iamacamera.org/sandbox/photoshuffler/


+08: MISCELLANEOUS.

Leveraging HTML and JavaScript in Apollo Applications (video)
By Chris Brichford.
"Session from 2006 Adobe Max developer conference. Chris Brichford (Engineer on Apollo team) talks about how you will be able to leverage  HTML and JavaScript within Apollo (both as a top level application language and within Flash)."
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1551903488172905143

Interview with D. Keith Robinson
By David Peralty. 
"For me, Keith Robinson needs no introduction. A great writer, and designer among other things, I see his name popping up all over the place. You might have read some of his works on LifeHacker, A List Apart, among other places. I shot him an e-mail hoping to get his perspective on all the things going on with the blogosphere..."
http://tinyurl.com/y66org


+09: NAVIGATION.

Multiple Skip Links
By Mel Pedley.
"...Where there is a clear need for more than one skip link on a page, perhaps a visible skip link just before each section, or column, that requires it might be the best approach. In theory, this places less strain on the user to remember a whole list of links and means that they don't have to deal with a whole bunch of links at the top of every page before they get to some meaningful content."
http://blackwidows.co.uk/blog/?p=78


+10: PHP.

Pro PHP Security/Preventing SQL Injection
By Chris Snyder and Michael Southwell.
"PHP is an extremely powerful yet easy-to-learn scripting language, affording even relatively inexperienced programmers the opportunity to create complex, dynamic websites. It is, however, notoriously difficult to ensure privacy and security of internet services. In this book, we will provide you with the security background every web developer needs, along with PHP-specific knowledge and code that you can use to protect the integrity of your own applications. We begin with an overview of server security that shows you how to assess privacy in a shared hosting environment, keep developers out of production servers, maintain up-to-date software, provide encrypted channels, and control access to your systems..."
http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/ProPHPSecurity_excerpt.php3

XML Validation in PHP
By Pascal Opitz.
"Working with user input that needs to be valid XML, it turns out that PHP5 has a built-in validation function..."
http://www.contentwithstyle.co.uk/Blog/132/xml-validation-in-php/


+11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

Have Your Say about the Future of HTML
By Molly E. Holzschlag.
"...Any questions, comments, criticisms, complaints or feature requests are welcome. Now is the time to speak up. No comment is too dumb; no question is too hard or too simple; no criticism is too harsh. If you have anything at all to say, we are listening..."
http://www.molly.com/2006/11/07/have-your-say-about-the-future-of-html/

Status of ISO 9241
By User Focus.
"Most people know that ISO 9241 is a usability standard, but did you know that it's currently being revised and will eventually contain over 50 parts? Whatever your area of interest in usability, the new ISO 9241 is bound to have a part that has an impact on your work. Find out the titles and the status of various parts with our handy table."
http://www.userfocus.co.uk/resources/iso9241/futureparts.html


+12: TOOLS.

CLiCk, Speak
By Charles L. Chen.
"CLiCk, Speak is an open source, freely available extension for the Firefox web browser. It is part of the CLC-4-TTS Suite of products, it features a mouse driven interface, and it reads web pages - hence its name. Unlike Fire Vox which is designed for visually impaired users, CLiCk, Speak is designed for sighted users who want text-to-speech functionality. It doesn't identify elements or announce events - two features that are very important for visually impaired users but very annoying for sighted users. It also has a simplified, mouse driven interface that is designed to be easy for users familiar with point-and-click graphical user interfaces. Like Fire Vox, CLiCk, Speak works on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux; and Fire Vox has multilingual support, making it great for users who are trying to learn a foreign language and need to hear foreign language web sites read out to them for practice."
http://clickspeak.clcworld.net/

Playing with CSS Selectors
By Mauricio Samy Silva.
Enter advanced compound CSS selectors into a field. Results are displayed live on the same page.
http://www.maujor.com/tutorial/isel-en.php

rel-lint
By Drew McLellan.
"This is a lint tool (like a non-authoritative validator) for XFN, rel-tag and other microformats that make use of the rel attribute of links. It takes the form of a bookmarklet you can add to your browser and then run against any page. rel-lint will check for known XFN values, flag values it doesn't recognize (even though they may well be correct) and display the tag values for rel-tagged links."
http://tools.microformatic.com/help/xhtml/rel-lint/

Perian
"Perian is a free plugin that enables QuickTime to play almost every popular video format...Perian requires OS X 10.4.7."
http://www.perian.org/


+13: TYPOGRAPHY.

Add Extra Lead Before and After Block Quotations
By Richard Rutter.
However the block quotations are set, there must be a visual distinction between main text and quotation, and again between the quotation and subsequent text..."
http://tinyurl.com/y4rjbz

Stylin' Fonts and Text in CSS
By Charles Wyke-Smith.
"Much of Web design is dealing with type-in paragraphs, headlines, lists, menus, and forms. As a result, the properties in this chapter are essential to making the difference between a site that looks thrown together and one that looks like it has the professional touch. More than any other factor, type makes the clearest visual statement about the quality of your site's offerings. Graphics are the icing on the cake; typography is where good design begins..."
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=600967&f1=rss&rl=1


+14: USABILITY.

Creating a Universal Usability Agenda
By Whitney Quesenbery.
"How do you keep usability, accessibility, and user experience requirements on track while developing standards? It is part of the very nature of standards to focus on details-and in the process, to sometimes lose sight of the real goals. This is especially true when a standards-making process goes on for a long time, a situation is highly political, or most people are focused on technology issues..."
http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000136.php

Five Usability Challenges of Web-Based Applications
By Jared M. Spool.
"...However, in design, the devil is always in the details. The above five usability challenges make web apps different from other types of design. Our research shows designers who are on the lookout and accommodate for them are more likely to create winning applications that delight users."
http://www.uie.com/articles/usability_challenges_of_web_apps/

Some Historical Usability Research
By Colin Lieberman.
"...By following published usability and accessibility guidelines, and by understanding the psychology behind them, we are able to produce work that is findable, scannable, navigable, and usable. We are able to tackle this problem of too much information with good odds of success....More importantly however, is the value of enriching our understanding of the guidelines and studies we read..."
http://www.cactusflower.org/some-historical-usability-research

Selling Usability to Your Manager
By User Focus.
"Before you can implement a usability initiative in your organization, you'll need to convince your manager it's worthwhile. The obvious approach is to use a cost-benefit argument, but experience shows that this approach often fails because many managers find the data unconvincing. An alternative approach is to tailor your argument based on your manager's MBTI personality type. This approach generates many different ideas for selling usability within your organization and is much more persuasive."
http://www.userfocus.co.uk/articles/sellingusability.html

The Ultimate Webdesign Usability Checklist
By Rogier Bikker.
"I noticed that I, and fellow web designers, keep making the same usability mistakes over and over. This checklist with 88 questions is a must read for every web designer who cares about usability..."
http://tinyurl.com/y66g4f


+15: XML.

Do Your Users Know Their RSS from Their Elbow?
By Chris Rourke.
"Whilst we get all excited about social software and Web 2.0, does the average web user care at all?  Should they?"
http://tinyurl.com/ybdt5l

Cracks in the Foundation
By Micah Dubinko.
"Micah Dubinko takes aim at the legion of annoyances caused by XML namespaces."
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2006/11/08/cracks-in-the-foundation.html


[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.]