+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 5, Issue 26, December 14, 2006.

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

++ISSUE 26 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: JAVASCRIPT.
07: MISCELLANEOUS.
08: NAVIGATION.
09: PHP.
10: TOOLS.
11: TYPOGRAPHY.
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.

First Ever Global Accessibility Survey Reveals Only 3 Percent of Websites Tested Reach Minimum Levels
By Nomensa.
"UK-based web accessibility agency Nomensa released the results of the first ever global website accessibility survey today. The report, which was commissioned by the United Nations (UN), reveals that 97 percent of websites tested fail to achieve the minimum web accessibility level..."
http://tinyurl.com/y2abo8

Designing Simple, Accessible Forms
By John Oxton.
"John Oxton demonstrates how it's possible to keep forms simple in order to attract and retain clients, while also ensuring they are in keeping with your site..."
http://www.netmag.co.uk/zine/home/designing-simple-accessible-forms

Web Accessibility Groups Not Sharing Best Practices With Designers?
By Steve Lee.
"...Yes, web designers need to work with accessibility experts and usability gurus in order to learn the skills which are not trivial. No, the accessibility guys are not holding out for profit. They want to see a step change in accessibility of web sites and services, including those using cutting edge features..."
http://elgg.net/stevelee/weblog/142346.html

Open Source Screen Readers?
By Chris Hofstater.
"A few years ago, a handful of Stanford University Computer Scientists and professors from their business school worked together on a paper discussing the relative security of free and open source systems versus security in proprietary software systems..."
http://tinyurl.com/yj7rbn


+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

CSS Mobile Profile 2.0
By W3C.
"The CSS Working Group released a Working Draft of CSS Mobile Profile 2.0. This subset of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) 2.1 is a baseline for implementations of CSS on constrained devices like mobile phones, written to ensure interoperability and for alignment with OMA's Wireless CSS Specification 1.1."
http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-css-mobile-20061208/

Hot Dates with CSS
By Christian Montoya.
"Dressing up your dates makes them stand out nicely, and you can do it in such a way that they scale well with the rest of your layout (even an elastic layout like this one)."
http://lab.christianmontoya.com/css-dates/

Overlapping Tabbed Navigation in CSS
By Shape Shed.
"A tutorial showing how overlapping tabbed navigation is possible in CSS and can be cross-browser compatible, accessible and javascript free..."
http://www.shapeshed.com/journal/overlapping_tabbed_navigation_in_css/

10 Steps to Better CSS
By Shape Shed.
"Coding CSS can quickly get out of control. By following a few simple guidelines you can make your life a lot easier..."
http://www.shapeshed.com/journal/10_steps_to_better_css/

Showing Good Form 
By James Edwards.
"Earlier this year, I forget exactly when (it's been a good year), I was building a client site that needed very specific form widgets, where the fields are arranged in a grid. Building this was a challenge not just in CSS, but in choosing the proper markup - how should such a widget be constructed?"
http://24ways.org/2006/showing-good-form

A CSS-based Form Template
By Prabhath Sirisena.
"Earlier this year I posted an article on a CSS-based form template, originally done for the Sahana interface. It was modified based on the feedback I received from the readers who stumbled upon the article, and the final version made it to the Sahana system..."
http://nidahas.com/sandbox/form_template.html

Setting a Decent Table
By Kathy Marks.
"So, here's my own personal take on tables. Never use them for site-wide layout, unless you plan on leaving town soon after. Never use them when a CSS solution is available. Never use them if you can't make them accessible. However, if you get in a real bind and have struggled to find a CSS solution but can't, it's acceptable to use an occasional accessible table. Not preferable, just acceptable..."
http://www.kathymarks.com/archives/2006/11/setting_a_decent_table.html

Opacity Bugs
By Dave Shea.
"Given its relative new-ness of implementation, I hadn't put the CSS opacity property through its paces yet. I found a situation today where it seemed to fit, and was a little surprised by the results. Seems that of the three browsers that attempt to support it, only Opera really does it justice. Check out this test page and you'll see what I mean. Hover the image to see the effects I'm describing..."
http://mezzoblue.com/archives/2006/12/12/opacity_bugs/

How One Person Developed the Edge
By Jenny Mok.
When we redesigned the Edge, we not only gave it a fresh look, but we made it easier to use. From the inside out, we developed a framework that makes the newsletter more flexible to build, design, edit, and view. To achieve this, we used Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which enables us to separate design from content. Creating the CSS layout required some serious forethought because one of the requirements was to create one Dreamweaver template that all pages would be based on. This is how I approached and built the Edge using CSS..."
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/css_edge_redesign.html


+03: EVENTS.

Presenting Data and Information
One Day Workshop with Edward Tufte
January 29, 2007 in San Diego, California U.S.A.	
January 30 or 31, 2007 in Los Angeles, California U.S.A.
February 2, 2007 in Phoenix, Arizona U.S.A.
https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/courses

HCIEd 2007
Annual Conference for Human Computer Interface Educators from Industry and Academia
March 29-30, 2007.
Aveiro, Portugal
http://www.bcs-hci.org.uk/hcied2007/


+04: FLASH.

The Demise of Flash: 8 Main Reasons
By Tadeusz Szewczyk.
"As a former Flash developer turned CSS zealot in the last 3 years I want to present the 8 main reasons for the demise of flash..."
http://fadtastic.net/2006/12/11/the-demise-of-flash-8-main-reasons/

Anti-Flash Standardistas - You're Cutting Off Your Nose to Spite Your Face
By P.J. Onori.
"The more I read attacks on Flash, the more I end up shaking my head in confusion. Honestly, I am a little surprised this is still being debated..."
http://fadtastic.net/2006/12/03/anti-flash/


+05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

How to Get Clients to Look at Wireframes...Properly
By Caroline Jarrett.
"It was the same old story. I was working with Whitney Quesenbery on some wireframes for a client's web site. As usual, she'd done a lovely job on the design. As usual, I'd fussed around with content. We'd done our usual cross-checking and refinement. Proudly, we emailed them off..."
http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article3568.asp


+06: JAVASCRIPT.

Writing Responsible JavaScript
By Drew McLellan.
"Drew McLellan investigates some of the ways JavaScript can be written to help it co-exist responsibly within your pages, and other pages too. We could all do with a little bit more peaceful co-existence over the holidays, couldn't we auntie. Pass the gravy."
http://24ways.org/2006/writing-responsible-javascript

Revealing Relationships Can Be Good Form
By Ian Lloyd.
"Ian Lloyd labels up and ships out a tip for improving the usability of form labels. Whilst checking the labels on the gifts under your tree, why not take some time out to check the labels on your forms and see where it might be appropriate to add some extra touches."
http://24ways.org/2006/revealing-relationships-can-be-good-form

Dear JavaScript Library Developers...
By Christian Heilmann.
"I am now publishing my wish list for any JavaScript library developers or maintainers. Before you start a new library or expect people to be able to use yours immediately you might want to give these points some thought. For library users this list might be a good 'heads up' to see how much work has to go into using a library or how to pick the right library for the job at hand..."
http://www.wait-till-i.com/index.php?p=366

Accessible JavaScript: Beyond the Mouse
By James Edwards.
"In this article, I'd like to provide a little gratification to those attempting to make their web applications accessible. To achieve this, I'll talk about some of the more basic, solvable issues relating to JavaScript accessibility, as we take an introduction to device-independent scripting..."
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/accessible-javascript


+07: MISCELLANEOUS.

Joe Clark Talks - 'It's time for Tim Berners-Lee to accept defeat'
By Steve Faulkner.
"When people talk about web accessibility he is hard to avoid. Invariably Joe Clark's name, work or reputation as a fierce intellect and his 'scorched earth' critiques of WCAG 2.0 amongst other subjects, will be a part of the conversational landscape. You may not agree with him, but he usually has something thought provoking to say. Joe talks here about the Open and Closed Project and other things. "
http://ability.aol.com/ability/index.php?ID=239&catID=

Tips for Designing Powerful RIAs: An Interview with David Malouf and Bill Scott
By Jared M. Spool and Joshua Porter.
"UIE's Jared M. Spool and Joshua Porter recently had the chance to talk with expert web application designers, Bill Scott and David Malouf, to discuss Rich Internet Application (RIA) development, AJAX, and other important issues surrounding the creation of sophisticated web apps..."
http://www.uie.com/articles/malouf_scott_interview/

Project Management Made Easy
By D. Keith Robinson.
"A few months ago I had an epiphany of sorts. I realized that I was pretty good at managing projects. Must of the projects that I manage come in on-time, on- or under-budget and with relatively few problems. More importantly the projects I manage usually leave everyone involved happy and feeling like they'd accomplished something. Now, don't get me wrong, I've been managing projects for years and it's not always been like that. I used to really hate managing projects, probably because I didn't really know how and I made project management into something much more complicated than it is..."
http://www.dkeithrobinson.com/entry/project_management_made_easy/

Does Technology Make Managers Lazy?
By Gerry McGovern.
"...It amazes me the amount of organizations out there that still believe that to create a better intranet or public website, all they need to do is choose the right content management software. These organizations are not thinking about the quality and effectiveness of the content. They'll employ junior people to put up this content, and then a couple of years later they'll wonder where it all went wrong. I've yet to meet an organization that has successfully implemented personalization either for their intranet or their public website. This is not because the concept of personalization is wrong. Properly implemented, it is a very sophisticated and powerful way to give customers what they want. There are many reasons it fails miserably, however. One of them is that organizations feel that all they need to do is install this fancy software, turn it on, and, hey presto, a wonderful website emerges. No need to worry about the quality of the content. No need to worry about how well it is structured and organized. The magic software looks after all that..."
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2006/nt-2006-12-11-management.htm


+08: NAVIGATION.
 	
How Google Finds Your Needle in the Web's Haystack
By David Austin.
"As we'll see, the trick is to ask the web itself to rank the importance of pages..."
http://www.ams.org/featurecolumn/archive/pagerank.html

Dropdown Low Down
By Tyssen Design.
"Dropdown (horizontal) or flyout (vertical) menus abound on websites and come in many different flavors. They are also put together in a number of different ways, some done with javascript, some with 'pure' CSS and some a mixture of both. They also have varying degrees of usability and accessibility..."
http://www.tyssendesign.com.au/articles/css/dropdown-low-down


+09: PHP.

Debugging Techniques for PHP Programmers
By Tyler Anderson.
"Explore various methods for debugging PHP applications, including turning on error reporting in Apache and PHP, and by placing strategic print statements to locate the source of more difficult bugs through a simple example PHP script. The PHPeclipse plug-in for Eclipse, a slick development environment with real-time syntax parsing abilities, will also be covered, as well as the DBG debugger extension for PHPeclipse."
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-debug/

Securing PHP Contact Forms
By Jonathan Nicol.
"One of the great benefits of PHP is that it is quick and easy for non-programmers to learn the basics of the language and begin to add server-side logic to their websites. This simplicity is a double edged sword, as many novice programmers are unaware of PHP's security vulnerabilities and inadvertently create web applications that..."
http://f6design.com/journal/2006/12/09/securing-php-contact-forms/

Batch Processing with PHP
By Jack Herrington.
"What do you do when you have a feature in your Web application that takes longer than a second or two to finish? You need some type of offline processing solution. Check out several methods for offline servicing of long-running jobs in your PHP application..."
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-php-batch/

The Basics of Implementing Adapter Objects with PHP
By Alejandro Gervasio.
"DevShed takes a look at another of the design patterns in a new series starting with this new tutorial a look at the implementation of Adapter objects in PHP. You may have already encountered situations in coding PHP applications in which you would like to use inheritance, but could not for one reason or another. Fortunately, there is an alternative for these situations that can help you achieve the same result. In this first article in a two part series, you'll learn about the adapter pattern.They start off with the basics of the Adapter pattern and move quickly into the first definition of a class using them a directory processor. Once that's built, they show how it all works with a more practical example."
http://tinyurl.com/y6ytul

Supporting Legacy Browsers, or Not
By Mike Cherim.
"So what are the goals: 1. The content itself must be accessible to all users. 2. Styling support for older browsers isn't necessary..."
http://green-beast.com/blog/?p=148

Supporting Legacy Browsers, or Not
By Mel Pedley.
"Following a conversation about the problems of supplying accessible content to old (legacy) browsers Mike Cherim came up with a PHP solution that would allow developers to serve very plain content to legacy browsers but rich content to everyone else. There's nothing wrong with Mike's code but I felt it could be tidied up and, possibly, tweaked to give faster performance. After all, if you're going to use this on a big, high traffic site, performance could become an issue."
http://blackwidows.co.uk/blog/?p=86


+10: TOOLS.

Firebug 1.0 Beta
By Joe Hewitt.
Firebug 1.0 Beta is out. It has some wonderful new features. "Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page."
http://www.getfirebug.com/

cssdocs.org
By Pete Freitag.
"I have just launched another documentation shortcut site, this time for CSS: cssdocs.org. It allows you to get to CSS documentation from the url, for instance type in: cssdocs.org/text-decoration to go to the W3C documentation for the text-decoration property."
http://cssdocs.org/


+11: TYPOGRAPHY.

Compose to a Vertical Rhythm
By Richard Rutter.
Richard Rutter scrutinizes the typographical proportions and spacing that gives a written page its rhythm. Help your page sing like the herald angels, and still have time for a mince pie and brandy.
http://24ways.org/2006/compose-to-a-vertical-rhythm


+12: USABILITY.

What Did We Learn This Year?
April McGee and Mary Michaels.
"...annual year-end summary of usability research."
http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/dec06.asp#kath

Web Browsing on Mobile Phones - Characteristics of User Experience
By Virpi Roto.
"...In her dissertation research, Virpi Roto has interviewed users of mobile browsers in several countries, and identified characteristics that help improve the mobile browsing user experience if taken into consideration. In addition to user and use context, all the system components should be taken into account: device, browser, network infrastructure, and web site. A partial outcome of the research is a visualization method called Minimap, which has gathered publicity as the first practical way to view Web pages on a mobile phone. The method has been used in Nokia S60 phones since 2006..."
http://research.nokia.com/people/virpi_roto/dissertation.html

Usability Weaknesses Inherent In Portals
By Joe Lamantia.
"Portal user experiences suffer from a number of inbuilt usability weaknesses that the building blocks are designed to eliminate. For instance, flat tile schemes assume all tiles are structurally the same, and that they have no relationship to any other tiles. This makes all tiles of equal importance to the portal's information architecture. [Welcome to Flatland...] Yet any designer or information architect addressing diverse user needs and goals knows that the priorities of users make some content more important than others, and that the structure of the user experience should reflect these priorities and any necessary relationships..."
http://tinyurl.com/yypqx3

Designing Web Applications for Use
By Larry Constantine.
"Web-based applications, like all software systems, are obviously intended for people to use. Not so obvious is that users may not be the single most important factor in the application design equation. This is not an academic argument, particularly for the harried designer or development manager who must decide how and where to spend limited time and other resources. What should be the real focus of your design efforts?"
http://www.uie.com/articles/designing_web_applications_for_use/

Simplicity Is Highly Overrated
By Don Norman.
"Yes, we want simplicity, but we don't want to give up any of those cool features. Simplicity is highly overrated."
http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/simplicity_is_highly.html

Simplicity
By Joel Spolsky.
"...If you're using the term 'simplicity' to refer to a product in which the user model corresponds closely to the program model, so the product is easy to use, fine, more power to ya. If you're using the term 'simplicity' to refer to a product with a spare, clean visual appearance, so the term is nothing more than an aesthetic description much in the same way you might describe Ralph Lauren clothes as 'Southampton WASP,' fine, more power to ya. Minimalist aesthetics are quite hip these days. But if you think simplicity means 'not very many features' or 'does one thing and does it well,' then I applaud your integrity but you can't go that far with a product that deliberately leaves features out. Even the iPod has gratuitous Solitaire game. Even Ta-da List supports RSS..."
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/12/09.html

Simplicity Ain't So Simple, Part I: Decide What to Hide
By Nick Bradbury.
"...If you're a developer, take a look at your UI and try to figure out whether all those tool buttons really need to be there by default.  Chances are you can hide a lot of them, which will make your application simpler to learn without making it any less powerful..."
http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2006/12/simplicity_aint.html

Simplicity Ain't So Simple, Part II: Stop Showing Off
By Nick Bradbury.
"One mistake I see developers make over and over again is that we make a feature look complicated just because it was hard to create.  We may not be aware of it, but we want our customers to know when we sweated blood during development, so we'll design a feature's user interface in a way that shows off how much work went into it. We're doing our customers a disservice when we do this.  We should instead show off how good we are at making complex things simple..."
http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2006/12/simplicity_aint_1.html

Simplicity Ain't So Simple, Part III: Don't Add Features You Can't Support
By Nick Bradbury.
"...before you add that cool new feature to your software, take a minute to consider whether the benefit to your application is worth the time you'll spend supporting it.  You don't want to find yourself unable to keep up with the competition because you're spending too much time supporting features you didn't really need to add in the first place.."
http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2006/12/simplicity_aint_2.html

The Gift to Be Simple
By Leo Robert Klein.
"People want the features but they don't want the complexity. Furthermore, they'll prove extremely reluctant to try out a site, if in order to accomplish their goals they've got to master every feature on the thing. If this weren't the case, 'Advanced Search' would be the first stop of even our most neophyte users."
http://chicagolibrarian.com/node/22


+13: XML.

XML and the Next Web (and the Previous...)
By Simon St. Laurent.
"XML has changed the Web dramatically over the last decade, though not at all as originally planned. XQuery, though, is gathering steam to drive a new round of potentially invigorating changes, even as Ajax heads down the JSON path..."
http://tinyurl.com/yyo6vp

Making XML Beautiful Again: Introducing Client-Side XSL
By Ian Forrester.
"Ian Forrester gives an introduction to using XML's forgotten child, XSL, as a client-side transformation language. Like a warming wooly scarf against the biting winter wind, Ian shows how XSL can be used to take the edge of even the ugliest XML documents to make them beautiful again. Thou shalt find the winter's rage freeze thy blood less coldly."
http://24ways.org/2006/beautiful-xml-with-xsl


[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.]