+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 5, Issue 24, December 1, 2006. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 24 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: EVENTS. 04: FLASH. 05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 06: MISCELLANEOUS. 07: NAVIGATION. 08: PHP. 09: TOOLS. 10: TYPOGRAPHY. 11: USABILITY. 12: XML. SECTION TWO: 13: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. SMIL - Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language By John Foliot. An S5 presentation on SMIL. http://soap.stanford.edu/presentations/smil/ WCAG 2: The Emperor Defends His New Clothes By Jack Pickard. "...Are they prepared to look down and see the document they are valiantly trying to force upon us is taking them away from accessible websites? Or will they insist on the rest of us wearing The Emperor's New Accessibility Guidelines." http://tinyurl.com/ymaj8c China Information Accessibility Forum By Rich Schwerdtfeger. "...Recent indications are that China is looking to adopt the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0..." http://tinyurl.com/ycb646 Are Social Networking Sites Accessible to People with Vision Loss? By American Foundation for the Blind. "...Using JAWS and Window-Eyes-popular assistive technology products that provide access to information on a computer screen-AFB evaluated these sites to see if a blind computer user, with basic screen reader skills, could independently register, create a standard profile, post photos, and interact with other group members..." http://tinyurl.com/uuem8 CAPTCHAs on Social Networking Sites Shut Out Blind Users By American Foundation for the Blind. "AFB is urging MySpace, Friendster and Facebook to offer an audio alternative to their CAPTCHAs." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jrgMlufa7w Accessible and Usable Web Design By Joshua Kaufman. "This is the seventh and final installment of my graduate school work: my final thesis report, Accessible and Usable Web Design. For a background on my graduate work, please read the preface of the first installment, the interaction design process." http://unraveled.com/archives/2006/11/accessible-usable-web-design Accessible UK Government Website E-Petition By Ian Fenn. "In the United Kingdom, Ian Fenn has created an online petition on the Prime Minister's website in an attempt to improve the standard of accessibility on UK Government websites." http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/govaccessibility/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Templating Solutions with CSS: Style Organization Designed To Last By Dave Shea. "...In this first article, I'll outline some basic long-term CSS management strategies that will set the stage for what's to come..." http://www.informit.com/guides/content.asp?g=webdesign&seqNum=236&rl=1 The Browsers: Build for the Ideal By Dave Shea. "This article, which has been divided into two parts due to length, will detail a browser management method that accounts for the most common browsers out there today: Internet Explorer 5 for Mac; Internet Explorer 5.01, 5.5, and 6.0 for Windows; Mozilla Firefox; Safari; and Opera..." http://www.informit.com/guides/content.asp?g=webdesign&seqNum=244&rl=1 Complexity: Layout and Style Variations By Dave Shea. "CSS is all about separating the look of the page out from the underlying structure and content within the HTML. But why stop there?..." http://www.informit.com/guides/content.asp?g=webdesign&seqNum=258&rl=1 IE Expressions Ignore CSS Media Types By Roger Johansson. "...in some cases IE will apply CSS that it shouldn't..." http://tinyurl.com/yf997v CSS 3: Cascading Style Sheets By css3.com. "A comprehensive CSS tutorial for web developers." http://css3.com/ CSS Reference By Nat Dunn. "Modify the code below and click Run to practice your CSS." http://www.css-ref.com/ CSS Cheat Sheet By Leslie Franke. http://lesliefranke.com/files/reference/csscheatsheet.html +03: EVENTS. Learn How to Develop e-Learning Tools January 19, 2007. Portland, Oregon U.S.A. http://www.stcwvc.org/janesmith_elearning_workshop.html Vancouver PHP Conference 2007 February 12-13, 2007. Vancouver, Canada http://vancouver.php.net/ +04: FLASH. The Rise of Flash Video, Part 3 By Tom Green. "Tom Green has taken us on a journey through the world of Flash video in this series, starting with an account of Flash video's rise to dominance on the web (fortuitously published on the same day as Google's purchase of Flash-using YouTube) in Part 1. Continuing on in Part 2, he tackled the issues of quality and compression. Now, in Part 3, he presents a step-by-step guide to preparing video for the web, using Flash and other software, with a whole bunch of expert tips and resources to help you do it right the first time." http://www.digital-web.com/articles/the_rise_of_flash_video_part_3/ Making the Best of Video Using Flash By Jonathan Christopher. "Including any form of multimedia within a website has an ugly history behind it. Browser inconsistencies, required third party plugins, and the need for a proper codec made including multimedia a true problem. Even worse, it made it very difficult for any potential readers to successfully view your media. By far the most difficult piece of multimedia to effectively include in any document would be video..." http://mondaybynoon.com/2006/11/27/making-the-best-of-video-using-flash/ +05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Information Architecture 3.0 By Peter Morville. "Of course, user hostile web sites are only the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface lurk multitudes of Web 2.0 startups and Ajaxian mashups that are way behind schedule and horribly over budget. Apparently, nobody told the entrepreneurs about the step change in design and development cost between pages and applications. But, that's enough gloom and doom, as the future's quite bright, especially for information architects who find ways to connect the timeless principles of design and organization with new transmedia models of interaction, co-creation, tagging, and user participation." http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000149.php Enterprise Information Architecture: A Semantic and Organizational Foundation By Tom Reamy. "People disagree on what happens when IAs grow up, but Tom Reamy knows. He offers a foundation for information architecture as it advances, grappling with problems across the enterprise." http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/enterprise Information Architecture Is Not Dead...But It Might Be Stuck By Scott Weisbrod. "...information architecture is stuck. While this implies a problem with the practice, I'm going to suggest that it really has more to do with the practitioners. The practitioners are stuck and the conversation is not evolving. Not enough of us are getting uncomfortable and knocking down fences to reach out to other people from other fields and engaging in meaningful conversation about design and business problems. The conversation is stuck and we need to evolve." http://www.scottweisbrod.com/index.php/?p=204 +06: MISCELLANEOUS. From Data to Wisdom: An Interview with Paco Underhill By Liz Danzico. "How can the simple act of watching people make better products? Paco Underhill, the foremost expert in behavior market research, talks about the pyramid of knowledge, worshipping at the altar of the CEO, and the need to supersize or specialize." http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/from-data-to-wisdom +07: NAVIGATION. Click Here and Other Meaningless Link Phrases By Roger Johansson. "A while ago Emil Stenstrom wrote an article about one of those things that you have to keep educating clients about: writing good and informative link phrases. As you might guess from the title, Emil specifically talks about the use of 'click here' in Click here to read this article, but there are several other meaningless link phrases that seem almost as popular as forcing links to open in new windows..." http://tinyurl.com/yhnhkq +08: PHP. How to Create Thumbnails with PHP and GD By Christian Heilmann. This small article will explain how you create a thumbnail from an image in PHP. Furthermore you learn how to batch process a whole folder of images and create their thumbnails. http://icant.co.uk/articles/phpthumbnails/ +09: TOOLS. DOMTool By Stuart Colville. "Online tool that takes "HTML as an input and output the correct DOM methods for inserting that content into a document..." http://muffinresearch.co.uk/code/javascript/DOMTool/ DOMTool Related Blog Post: http://muffinresearch.co.uk/archives/2006/11/28/domtool/ kuler By Adobe Labs. "kuler helps you explore, create and share color themes for your web pages, design projects and other creative work..." http://kuler.adobe.com/ Quick Thumbnail "The fastest way to resize your pictures and images. Choose an image file, select some resize options, and hit Resize it. Your image will be uploaded to the server and resized, and then any or all of the resized images will be provided in a single convenient view. Not only can you get simultaneous generation of different sizes but you can enlarge your images too." http://quickthumbnail.com/ +10: TYPOGRAPHY. Safari Better than Firefox? By Jeffrey Zeldman. "...If your content will sometimes include italicized text, you naturally want to specify a font that contains italics. That's just common sense. Unfortunately, as our screen shots have shown, common sense works against you here, because Firefox, although superior to other browsers in many ways, handles text like a drunken fry-cook. When you specify the font that contains genuine italics (as we did in Test One), Firefox mishandles the roman text that abuts italicized words. When you replace that font with one that contains no italic (Test Two), Firefox fakes the italics crudely, but overall display and legibility are better than the unusable results of Test One. Obviously there are fewer problems if you limit your website to Verdana and Georgia, but more constraints on typography are not what the web needs." http://www.zeldman.com/2006/11/27/safari-beats-firefox/ +11: USABILITY. Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015 By Vincent Flanders. "Originally, this article was entitled 'The Biggest Web Design Mistakes of 2004.' Two years after I wrote this article I realized these mistakes are timeless so I've renamed and re-edited the article." http://tinyurl.com/y3dtqw The Interactive Effects of Website Delay, Breadth, and Familiarity By Andrew B. King. "A recent study examined whether website delay, breadth, and familiarity have interactive effects on user psychology and performance. A significant three-way interaction among all three factors showed that the ill effects of delay can be dampened by familiarity and breadth. Developers are urged to consider site familiarity, breadth, and delay together rather than separately." http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/scent/ User Centered Design: Is It Working? By Donna Maurer. "Here are the slides from my keynote at Ozchi 2006 last week. My talk was called 'User Centered Design: Is It Working?' which is a bit lame, but I really couldn't come up with a better one..." http://www.maadmob.net/donna/blog/archives/000738.html Usability for Developers By Lisa Herrod. "If there's one thing that's caught my attention in the past six months, it's an increase in the variety of web roles incorporating usability. I've noticed this across a number of areas: job posts, industry events, online discussions and personal tagging on social networking sites such as Web Connections." http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2006/11/29/usability-for-developers/ Don't Start With the Home Page By Cameron Moll. "...if you're building a web app. Too often it's the accepted modus operandi to begin image comping, rapid prototyping, or iterative design by designing the home page first. While this practice works well for "brochureware" sites and other forms of brand-heavy design, it's often a myopic approach for applications that are more utilitarian in nature..." http://tinyurl.com/ynz8tp +12: XML. Ducks and Ducklings, An (X)HTML allegory By Daniel Glazman. "I am going to tell you a short story of the World Wide Web, a story of ducks, ducklings and swans. It's an allegory about our most important specification, HTML." Daniel Glazman's presentation slides and text from the November W3C meeting in Tokyo. http://tinyurl.com/yln5sq XSLT as Pretty Printer By Hew Wolff. "Hew Wolff discusses some of the issues surrounding an XSLT style sheet that will pretty print arbitrary XML and includes the style sheet itself." http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2006/11/29/xslt-xml-pretty-printer.html [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +13: 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.]