+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 5, Issue 32, January 26, 2007. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 32 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: MISCELLANEOUS. 09: NAVIGATION. 10: PHP. 11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 12: TOOLS. 13: TYPOGRAPHY. 14: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 15: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Getting Started with Practical Web Accessibility By Jukka 'Yucca' Korpela. "This document presents the practical basics of accessibility. It can be read as a standalone primer, or used as the basic material for a short course. After finishing it, you will know a useful set of rules, the reasons behind them, and how to apply them in authoring..." http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/acc/ Section 508 Amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 By Wikipedia. "Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended, was enacted by the Workforce Investment Act of 1998, Pub. L. No. 105-220, 112 Stat. 936 (Aug. 7, 1998), and is codified at 29 U.S.C. 794d..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_508 Accessibility for All to Services and Terminals for Next Generation Networks By COST219ter Initiative. "...The purpose of this book is to give the reader an overall picture of the current situation with the latest trends in products and services that can be used by as many people as possible including people with disabilities and older people..." http://www.tiresias.org/cost219ter/inclusive_future/index.htm +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Quick CSS Mockups with Photoshop By Casper Voogt. "It may seem like we're trying to party like it's 1999, but rest assured, we're not. Casper Voogt shows us a way to use Photoshop, ImageReady, and slices to produce mockups that utilize clean XHTML and CSS." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/quickcssmockupswithphotoshop Upcoming CSS3 Support in Opera By David Storey. "SS3 development work is going full steam ahead for most browsers. At Opera this is no exception. Most people don't have the privilege of testing out our latest internal builds, which will go into a future release of our browser, so I thought I'd share with you some of the great work our developers have been up to in regards to CSS3. A lot of work is going into selectors, and there is a quite extensive list of extra support added to those already implemented in Opera 9.1. New in the latest builds include..." http://my.opera.com/dstorey/blog/show.dml/701902 Using CSS to Style Thumbnails and Captions By Thierry Koblentz. "The challenge: captions must be centered underneath their image; captions may contain up to three lines of text; elements must flow (number of image/caption pairs in a row depends on the width of the parent container); thumbnails may be of various widths; text resizing must not break the layout; markup must be semantic (no structural hack); markup must be "hook free" (no ID, no CLASS); CSS must be plain and simple (no filters, no Conditional Comments); must be browser-friendly..." http://www.tjkdesign.com/articles/how_to_style_thumbnail_and_caption.asp +03: DREAMWEAVER. CSS Design Basics with Dreamweaver - Part 1: Learning About Doctype By Adrian Senior. "Understand the importance of setting a correct doctype and how to prevent your web pages from dropping into "quirks" mode." http://tinyurl.com/ywhc4e CSS Design Basics with Dreamweaver - Part 2: Styling (X)HTML Elements By Adrian Senior. "Learn how to use Apply styles to HTML tags that exist within your web pages and learn shorthand and longhand CSS." http://tinyurl.com/2e5krc +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Usability Heuristics for Web Development Teams By Lisa Herrod. "Often when clients have a relatively low budget for usability testing, or a short amount of time in which to conduct it, an 'expert' or an 'heuristic' review will be run by an experienced usability practitioner. There are slight differences between the two, with the expert review entailing a less formal evaluation process than the heuristic review. But all things considered, they're pretty much in the same ballpark time wise- So I suppose that means cost wise too." http://tinyurl.com/2yl2j3 Do Not Do a Usability Test Now! By Derrick Parkhurst. "...With all of these potential problems, what have we learned? We have learned that we need to spend more time on design of our usability test before we learn anything about usability. Do Not Do a Usability Test Now!. Sometimes cheap (or free) can cost you more in the long run than paying up front." http://tinyurl.com/yufvel Dissenting Opinion By Kevin Godby. "...I'd like to present my ideas on what a usability study is for, improve upon the development process presented by Derrick Parkhurst, and argue against some specific points he made...Many of the problems mentioned above should be addressed in the design phase of the project and the solutions should be established well before the user testing phase begins." http://kevin.godby.org/2007/01/20/dissenting-opinion/ +05: EVENTS. Designing Accessible Web Sites February 13 or April 12, 2007. Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A. http://uttc.umn.edu/training/courses/description.jsp?secName=DSIGN111 HTML: Basics February 15 or March 27, 2007. Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A. http://uttc.umn.edu/training/courses/description.jsp?secName=HTML101 HTML: Beyond the Basics April 17, 2007. Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A. http://uttc.umn.edu/training/courses/description.jsp?secName=HTML201 Dreamweaver 8: Creating Basic Web Pages February 20 and 22; March 28 and 30; or April 24 and 26, 2007. Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A. http://uttc.umn.edu/training/courses/description.jsp?secName=DW101 Web Design and Development April 3-5, 2007. Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A. http://uttc.umn.edu/training/courses/description.jsp?secName=WEBDD101 Dreamweaver 8: Cascading Style Sheets April 11, 2007. Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A. http://uttc.umn.edu/training/courses/description.jsp?secName=DW211 Institutional Web Management Workshop 2007 (IWMW 2007) July 16-18, 2007. York, United Kingdom. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2007/ +06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Paper Prototyping By Shawn Medero. "As interfaces become ever more complex and development schedules seem to get shorter and shorter, you may find it useful to give up your user-interface modeling software for awhile in favor of something simpler. All you need is paper, pens, scissors, and your imagination..." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/paperprototyping +07: JAVASCRIPT. Event-Driven Web Application Design By Christian Heilmann. Christian Heilmann explains a method of building web apps by using events. It lets code to be more modular and maintainable. He also helps close the gap between the framework-based approach to development and web standards. http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/01/17/event-plan/ YUI Theater: Douglas Crockford, The JavaScript Programming Language By Eric Miraglia. "Douglas Crockford provides a comprehensive introduction to the JavaScript Programming Language. I've shared on YUIBlog and in the YUI Theater two presentations created by Yahoo! JavaScript Architect Douglas Crockford ('Advanced JavaScript' and 'An Inconvenient API: The Theory of the Dom'). Today I'm happy to announce that Douglas's more foundational talk 'The JavaScript Programming Language,' is publicly available on Yahoo! Video. In this presentation, which is meant to be the beginning of the three-course sequence (followed by 'Theory of the DOM' and then 'Advanced JavaScript'), Douglas explores not only the language as it is today but also how the language came to be the way it is. It's always worth pointing out that ideas and perspectives are Douglas's own and that the many egregious flaws in video graphic craftsmanship are mine. Files are available from Yahoo! Video (Flash) or as iPod-compatible .m4v files..." http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/01/24/video-crockford-tjpl/ The JavaScript Environmentalist By Jonathan Snook. "As a JavaScript developer, you are in many ways an environmentalist. JavaScript is a language unlike most other languages. For when it comes to JavaScript development, we must consider the mantra of the environmentalist: Reduce, reuse, recycle..." http://snook.ca/archives/javascript/the_javascript_environmentalist/ Explaining Ajax, Transcribed By Jeremy Keith. "...I had the presentation transcribed and I've posted it in the articles section. Don't forget: the RSS feed of the articles section itself doubles up as a podcast..." http://adactio.com/journal/1239 Adobe Spry and Obtrusive, Inaccessible JavaScript By Roger Johansson. "In these days of JavaScript framework mega-hype it is nice to see 'Progressive enhancement' at least being mentioned (though pretty well hidden) in the documentation for Adobe's Spry framework. However, just like Jeremy Keith notes in Spryjax, the example is not what I would call progressive enhancement. Sadly, the demos and examples I have looked at reflect this - they do not use progressive enhancement at all, and they definitely do not degrade gracefully. In addition to that, many examples contain invalid HTML by the way of custom attributes..." http://tinyurl.com/ysuebs Improving Ajax Applications for JAWS Users By Gez Lemon and Steve Faulkner. "Popular screen readers use a virtual buffer to allow users to interact with web content, whereby the virtual buffer provides a mechanism for screen reader users to interact with web content. This article uncovers undocumented behavior in JAWS 7.1 and later, which allows web developers to build Ajax applications that update the virtual buffer without any interaction from the user..." http://tinyurl.com/yr5j6m Improving Accessibility for Today's AJAX - To Hack or Not? By Bob Easton. "...I want to ask about a proposed technique, but first the set up..." http://tinyurl.com/2pdgz6 +08: MISCELLANEOUS. Interview with Doug Bowman By John Allsopp. "...our newest columnist John Allsopp interviews influential designer Doug Bowman about the current state of web design, his expectations for 2007 and his return to speaking at Web Directions North, coming up in February in Vancouver, BC." http://www.digital-web.com/articles/douglas_bowman2/ Meet the Professionals - Molly E. Holzschlag Video Interview, Part 1 By Kazuhito Kidachi. "Interview with the experts in various fields who play an important role in the world of Web. In this episode, we talked with Molly E. Holzschlag who is the current leader of WaSP. She is working vigorously to spread and to raise awareness for Web Standards. Filmed in Sydney, Australia,September, 2006." http://videocast.mitsue.co.jp/english/archives/2006/000039.html Meet the Professionals - Molly E. Holzschlag Video Interview, Part 2 By Kazuhito Kidachi. http://videocast.mitsue.co.jp/english/archives/2006/000041.html +09: NAVIGATION. Words that Work: Search Words Versus Website Words By Gerry McGovern. "Do people search using basic, simple, old words? But when they arrive at a website are they moved to action by more emotive, sophisticated words?" http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2007/nt-2007-01-22-words-that-work.htm +10: PHP. Data Types, Literals, Variables, and Constants - Part 2 By Ellie Quigley. "This week we look at valid names, declaring, initializing and displaying variables and mixed data types. We conclude this section with an introduction to form variables." http://www.webreference.com/programming/php/by_example2/index.html PHP Programming Basics By haroon. "This article is the first of a series of PHP guides that aim at teaching you the basics of PHP programming..." http://www.howtoforge.com/php_programming_basics Dynamic XML with PHP By Ben Robinson. "In this article I will show how to generate dynamic XML documents with Object-Oriented PHP. Before I get started, let's get right to the heart of this functionality. Although the code may look fancy, being packaged up inside objects and inheritance, the key elements of this functionality rest in the mysql_list_fields() and mysql_num_fields() functions..." http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/ben_robinson200701017.php3 Convert XML to JSON in PHP By Senthil Velayudham, Edward J Pring, and John Morar. "With the growing popularity of Web 2.0, a new data interchange format called JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is emerging as a useful way to represent data in the business logic running on browsers. Learn how PHP-based server programs can convert XML-formatted enterprise application data into JSON format before sending it to browser applications." http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-xml2jsonphp/ +11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. HTML Standards Process Returning from the Grave By Maciej Stachowiak from the Safari team at Apple. "...On the new HTML Working Group Chart, we have voted to support it with minor changes, and plan to participate. Here are our proposed changes..." http://webkit.org/blog/?p=89 New W3C HTML Working Group Chaired by Microsoft By Roger Johansson. "...I am very uncomfortable with a Microsoft representative being the chair of what is possibly the most important Working Group of the W3C, and definitely the most visible one.." http://tinyurl.com/23fqt5 Bill Gates on Web Standards: Huh? By Roger Johansson. "Judging by his answers, Bill Gates does not really know what Web standards are, or why they are important. Not very surprising, but a bit disappointing. It would have been fantastic if he had been able to give straight, honest, and positive answers to Molly's questions. Especially considering that the new W3C HTML Working Group will be chaired by Microsoft. Microsoft seems extremely concerned about providing tools that make things easy for application programmers. Why is it so hard for them to realize that Web developers are also important? Bill tries to belittle those who are skeptical about Microsoft and Web standards" http://tinyurl.com/2hzltp Microsoft's Commitment to Web Standards By Jesper Ronn-Jensen. "...The biggest issue is not IE's commitment to web standards, but Microsoft and it's developer tools' commitment to web standards. And no, recent support for xhtml validation does not make your tools entirely focused on web standards. I have seen recent books bought by colleagues at work, where every piece of HTML is table based layouts, FONT tags, all capital tags, etc. So there might be a commitment on the strategic level, but it's very badly executed. I'd really appreciate if you post a comment with any examples you stumble upon..." http://tinyurl.com/2ar5v5 Charity Organization By Anne Van Kesteren. "...I wonder how many other people actually think the W3C is some charity organization. It isn't. I'd say the W3C is mostly driven by commercial entities..." http://annevankesteren.nl/2007/01/w3c Microsoft Makes Accessible and Standards Compliant HTML Email Impossible By Roger Johansson. "...HTML email, when created by people who know what they are doing, was heading in the right direction with regards to semantics and Web standards. But Microsoft just made anything but the simplest designs impossible to achieve without resorting to really dirty, old-school tricks. Well, they didn't really do that, but because of Outlook's huge market share that is the practical result of their decision..." http://tinyurl.com/2qwkww Adding hCard to Your Site With Microformats By Bence Kucsan. "Microformats are a new and simple to implement way to handle your existing data on your website, to enable its exchange with web apps like Google Maps or flickr or even with desktop apps like Mail or Outlook. Sweet..." http://tinyurl.com/2d8vj7 +12: TOOLS. Demographics Prediction By Microsoft. "You can use adCenter technology to predict a customer's age, gender, and other demographic information according to his or her online behavior-that is, from search queries and webpage views. General Distribution is the breakdown by age of MSN Search users-based on a one-month MSN Search log-regardless of search query used. Predicted Distribution is the predicted breakdown by age of MSN Search users for a single search query, based on the adLabs predictive model." http://adlab.msn.com/DPUI/DPUI.aspx Datalogger By Userfocus. "Most people use Microsoft Excel to analyses the results of usability tests, but did you know you can use it to collect the data too? This Excel Workbook allows you to measure task completion rates, analyses questionnaire data, and summarize participant comments. It even includes a timer so you can measure time-on-task. Amongst other changes, this new version includes printing enhancements,improved data analysis and alternative usability questionnaires." http://www.userfocus.co.uk/resources/datalogger.html +13: TYPOGRAPHY. Indent or Center Verse Quotations By Richard Rutter. "Verse is usually set flush left and ragged right, and verse quotations within prose should not be deprived of their chosen form. But to distinguish verse quotations from surrounding prose, they should be indented or centered on the longest line..." http://tinyurl.com/2z7z2y +14: USABILITY. The Improving Online Customer Experience By Mark Hurst. "...compare how hard it is to find your most basic, important information on your site, versus on Wikipedia. If Wikipedia is easier, you might reconsider your options. And enough talk about colors creating an emotional experience. When people go online to answer a question, they don't care what color, typeface, associated graphics, or website domain is showing on the page. They just want a quick and easy experience." http://www.goodexperience.com/blog/archives/001182.php Simplicity > Clarity > Being Understood: Mark Rothko, etc. By Matt Linderman. "...As they gained maturity and experience, these great artists recognized the power of stripping down their ideas. The more powerful a concept is, the less you need to dress it up. Simplicity > clarity > being understood." http://tinyurl.com/ypp4j6 The Laws of Simplicity - Law 1: Reduce By Todd Warfel. "I've recently finished a great book by John Maeda titled The Laws of Simplicity. In his book, Maeda covers 10 laws of simplicity. The first law is Reduce - the simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction. Sounds pretty simple, right? Maeda is quick to point out, however, that you must be careful of what you remove. It's not as easy as simply stripping things out, but instead removing what isn't critical to the product or service..." http://toddwarfel.com/archives/the-laws-of-simplicity-law-1-reduce/ You Say You Want a Resolution By Jason Santa Maria. "The topic of screen resolution in web design has once again reared its ugly and multifaceted head. Jeremy Keith and Roger Johansson still say 'nay.' Well, I'm saying 'yay,' with some conditions. I know many people take a hard-lined approach to this, saying that fixed-width 1024px sites are wrong most, if not all, of the time. This post is not meant to once again pose the tired questions of 'What base resolution should we aim for?' or 'Can we all start designing for 1024px?,' instead I want to throw an opinion for wider sites into the mix. Don't get me wrong, I'm not for a 1024px web from now on, just that 1024px can be right under certain conditions. (For the sake of brevity and clarity, I'll refer to these sites respectively as 800px and 1024px though I realize that the 'live' area is less.)..." http://tinyurl.com/22o389 Web Usability By Mel Pedley. "Anybody can design and put up a web site. It's even claimed that there are more web pages than there are people in the world! Given the sheer number of sites out there, the ultimate goal should be to have an effective site..." http://blackwidows.co.uk/blog/?p=91 [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +15: 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.]