+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 5, Issue 22, November 22, 2006. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 22 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: DREAMWEAVER. 04: EVALUATION & TESTING. 05: EVENTS. 06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 07: JAVASCRIPT. 08: NAVIGATION. 09: PHP. 10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 11: TOOLS. 12: USABILITY. 13: XML. SECTION TWO: 14: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Advisory Committee Faces Major Hurdles with Section 508 Revision By Wade-Hahn Chan. "Section 508, a provision of the federal Rehabilitation Act requiring the federal agencies make their information technology accessible to people with disabilities, is proving to be challenging for the standards body that is now revising the standards. The current iteration of the section is plagued with interoperability problems, language issues and an inability to adapt to emerging technologies, according to members of the Section 508 Advisory Committee who spoke on a panel at the 2006 Interagency Disability Education Awareness Showcase today..." http://www.fcw.com/article96831-11-15-06-Web&printLayout Contextual Web Accessibility - Maximizing the Benefit of Accessibility Guidelines By David Sloan et al. "We argue that while work to optimize the accessibility of the World Wide Web through the publication and dissemination of a range of guidelines is of great importance, there is also the need for a more holistic approach to maximizing the role of the Web in enabling disabled people to access information, services and experiences. The persistently disappointingly low levels of usability of Web content for disabled people indicates that focusing on the adoption of accessibility guidelines by content authors, tool developers and policy makers is not sufficient for a truly inclusive Web. This approach fails to acknowledge the role of the Web as an enabler in a broader context and may stifle creative use of Web content and experiences to enhance social inclusion." http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/w4a-2006/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Inline Elements and Padding By Russ Weakley. "Have you ever tried to add padding to
  • elements that have been set to 'display: inline'? Did you find that the padding seemed to be rendering in an unusual way? Inline elements and padding explains why this occurs and one method that can be used to overcome the problem." http://maxdesign.com.au/presentation/inline/ CSS Line-Height and Valid Values By Tiffany B. Brown. "A look at a CSS line-height 'gotcha'" http://tiffanybbrown.com/2006/11/20/css-line-height-and-valid-values/ CSS Styling for Print and Other Media By Ian Lloyd. "If you've been wanting to harness the full power of CSS for the presentation of printed pages, but could only find superficial treatments of the topic, we've got just the article for you. Pro CSS Techniques will be arriving in bookstores soon, but we've got a sneak peek at Ian's comprehensive chapter on styling for print and other media as this week's feature." http://tinyurl.com/ybaw5d CSS Image Shadow By Natalie Jost. "This is a simple CSS shadow for images (no background image), but it's not something you'll want to use with all images. This method doesn't work with varying sizes, so you'll only use it if you're working with images which are the same size all the time, like thumbnails for instance." http://www.standardsforlife.com/css-image-shadow A CSS Drop Shadow By Stu Nicholls. "Just an example of a drop shadow applied to a div without using graphics..." http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menu/shadow.html Simple Fluid Drop Shadows By Stu Nicholls. http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menu/shadow2.html Multi-Position Shadow Boxing By Stu Nicholls. http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menu/shadow_boxing.html +03: DREAMWEAVER. Dreamweaver 8 for Windows Loses FTP Login Settings By Adobe. Some Windows users are reporting that their FTP usernames and passwords in their Dreamweaver site definitions are deleted when they close and re-open Dreamweaver 8 or when they reboot their machine. This issue does not occur in earlier versions of Dreamweaver." http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=3491671c +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Process Research Via Focus Groups By DeeDee DeMulling. "I don't recommend using focus groups to gather your user research, but I do recommend using them to provide clarification and expansion of the data you have gathered during site visits. After conducting a site visit study at a handful of sites in your target population, hosting a focus group will help you to validate what you observed and be able to define patterns of behavior across the wider audience..." http://tinyurl.com/y7zpqr Bring Your Personas to Life! By Zef Fugaz. "Method acting can take your personas from the page to the stage. Think beyond traditional practice to give emotional life to your personas." http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/bring_your_pers +05: EVENTS. Webstock Mini December 6, 2006. Wellington, New Zealand http://webstock.org.nz/ An Event Apart Boston March 26 -27, 2007. Boston, Massachusetts U.S.A. http://www.aneventapart.com/news/2006/11/an_event_apart_2007.php +06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Visio Replacement? You Be the Judge An Introduction to the Newest Simulation Tools By Scott McDowell. "In the same way that the Internet took us to the next level of interaction, complete with rich visuals, simulations are doing the same for application definition. McDowell explores the ins and outs of new simulation tools. Will one of them work for you?" http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/visio_replaceme Thoughts on the Impending Death of Information Architecture By Joshua Porter. "IA as it has lived will soon die. Not because it wasn't valuable, not because IA's didn't do great work, but because the Web is moving on. The problem is that IA models information, not relationships." http://tinyurl.com/yjofsh +07: JAVASCRIPT. PPK on JavaScript: The DOM - Part 3 By Peter-Paul Koch. "This week we look at text nodes, node lists, forms and the level 0 DOM, DOM hyperspace and markers. The W3C DOM defines a few methods for getting and changing texts, but the core string methods and properties are more useful and versatile." http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/ppk3/index.html Too Much Accessibility - Multiple JavaScript Event Handlers By Bim Egan. "...Ensuring that users can make JavaScript events work, regardless of the way that they access your web page is vital. Users should be able to activate JavaScript events whether they use a mouse, keyboard, pointing / switch device or any other means of navigation. However, if two or more event handlers, designed to perform the same task are used, the effect can be the opposite of the one you intended..." http://tinyurl.com/ycadt7 +08: NAVIGATION. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Partner on Open Source Search Protocol By Juan Carlos Perez. "In a rare collaborative effort, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, which compete directly in Internet search and other online services, plan to announce on Thursday their support for the open source, Sitemap Protocol based on XML (Extensible Markup Language)." http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/11/15/HNsitemaps_1.html Sitemaps.org "Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site. Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site." http://www.sitemaps.org/ Revenge of the meta-tag! By Brian Turner "Many people in SEO groan at the thought of meta-tags. After all, meta-tags for ranking is dead for SEO, isn't it? Not quite..." http://www.seomoz.org/blogdetail.php?ID=1540 +09: PHP. PHP Convert RGB from/to HTML Hex Color By AnyExample.com. "This article provides two functions for converting HTML color (like #AAED43) to three RGB values ($r = 170, $g = 237, $b = 67) and converting RGB values to HTML color." http://tinyurl.com/yg95ct +10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. May The Source be with You By Andy Rutledge. "A long time ago in a vir.tu.al domain far, far away...The war between the Standardista Rebels and The Legacy Empire wages on. The Empirecs armies and spies, led by the evil Kludge lord Darth Gates, have driven the Standardistas far across MySpace." http://www.andyrutledge.com/web-wars.php +11: TOOLS. Basic Accessibility Analyzer By Peter Krantz. "This is the basic accessibility checking service (BACC). BACC uses the Ruby Accessibility Analysis Kit (RAAKT) to check for basic accessibility issues in HTML documents. Currently it is mainly used for testing of RAAKT. If you find errors, please report bugs at the RAAKT project page. Learn more about the accessibility evaluation carried out." http://peterkrantz.com/bacc/ Truwex: Website Validation Tool By Vladimir Popov. "An online tool to check web accessibility, privacy, quality, performance. It checks a single page and shows results on a web page screenshot and in the HTML code." http://checkwebsite.erigami.com/accessibility.html Office 2000 HTML Filter 2.0 By Microsoft. "The Office HTML Filter is a tool you can use to remove Office-specific markup tags embedded in Office 2000 documents saved as HTML..." http://tinyurl.com/3okuf +12: USABILITY. Digital Divide: The Three Stages By Jakob Nielsen. "The economic divide is a non-issue, but the usability and empowerment divides alienate huge population groups who miss out on the Internet's potential." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/digital-divide.html Improving User Workflows with Single-Page User Interfaces By Joost Willemsen. "...Perhaps the most important challenge for designers of single-page Web applications is the tradeoff between flexibility and usability. As an application's flexibility increases, its usability decreases. The reason for this is its signal-to-noise ratio-that is, the ratio of relevant to irrelevant information on a page. If this ratio is high, an application is more usable. However, a Web application that is very flexible may offer too many possibilities and thus raise the level of noise in the ratio (5). So the challenge is to keep an application page as simple as possible. Packing a page with loads of cool controls is technically possible, but it's not a good idea. Show only what is relevant to the task at hand and offer other functionality as needed." http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000149.php +13: XML. The XML Decade By Uche Ogbuji. "IBM Systems Journal recently published an issue dedicated to XML's 10th anniversary. It is primarily a collection of interesting papers for XML application techniques, but some of its articles offer general discussion of the technical, economic and even cultural effects of XML. There is a lot in these papers to draw from in thinking about why XML has been successful, and what it would take for XML to continue its success. This article expands on some of these topics that are especially relevant to readers of this column." http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-think38.html [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +14: 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.]