+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 5, Issue 34, February 9, 2007. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 34 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: DREAMWEAVER. 05: EVALUATION & TESTING. 06: EVENTS. 07: FLASH. 08: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 09: JAVASCRIPT. 10: MISCELLANEOUS. 11: NAVIGATION. 12: PHP. 13: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 14: TOOLS. 15: TYPOGRAPHY. 16: USABILITY. 17: XML. SECTION TWO: 18: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Letter to Tim Berners-Lee: Time to Cancel WCAG 2 By Joe Clark. "The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2) have attracted little or no support from standards-compliant Web developers, grassroots people with disabilities, or really anyone other than the multinational corporations that stack the WCAG Working Group...It is so faulty in its existing form that it is essentially unfixable...The Working Group, and its domination by big business, are the cause of great suspicion and concern...It is time for the W3C to accept reality and cancel the entire project." http://joeclark.org/access/webaccess/WCAG/TBL/ Writing Alternate Text for Images By Sarah Horton. "...In this article, I explore the editorial aspects of writing alternate text for both functional and content images by working through a series of images in different contexts. But let's lay the groundwork by first discussing the purpose of alternate text and its role in universal design...." http://www.informit.com/guides/content.asp?g=webdesign&seqNum=307&rl=1 Accessibility as a Platform to Build Upon By Emil Stenstrom. "...Don't believe those who say accessibility rules out everything else. Use accessibility as a platform to build other apps on top of. Only require more for extras, not the basics." http://friendlybit.com/html/accessibility-as-a-platform-to-build-upon/ The Trouble with Accesskey By Karl Dawson. "Last night I delivered a short presentation on the use of access keys to Refresh Cambridge...You can view my presentation online and if you do wish to print it (or view source), you'll find some extra links too." http://thatstandardsguy.co.uk/presentations/accesskey/ Oracle Sued by Blind Workers in Texas By Dan Goodin. "Oracle is being taken to task in a lawsuit that complains software it sold to the state of Texas is unusable by blind employees." http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/05/oracle_sued/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. CSS Techniques I Use All the Time By Christian Montoya. "I'm always learning new things with CSS. It's interesting because I've thought of myself as a CSS expert for a while now (I'll challenge anyone to a competition, seriously) but I still keep learning and improving. I've come across some techniques lately that are extremely valuable and worth sharing. Have a look..." http://tinyurl.com/22j7d5 Why 'Conditional Comments' are Bad, Repeat: Bad By Jens Meiert. "Conditional Comments (CC) are an unadvisable thing to use. In fact, they contradict the goal to separate structure from presentation, and they will outrun you one day. But first things first. For those (in this case yet happy) developers who don't know what 'Conditional Comments/ are, please consider Microsoft's 'specification' or embrace the following..." http://tinyurl.com/28butw Why I Avoid Using Conditional Comments By Christian Montoya. "I'm not making this post as an argument against conditional comments, but this is my personal reason for avoiding them. To be honest, I'm afraid of the possibility that someday, the section will be filled with this..." http://tinyurl.com/2y9tzl Multi-Column Layouts Climb Out of the Box By Alan Pearce. "'Holy Grail', 'One True Layout', pain in the @$$'... Alan Pearce presents a cleaner approach to designing multi-column layouts." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/multicolumnlayouts New CSS Properties in Safari By Roger Johansson. "It seems like the Safari team has been pretty busy implementing new CSS properties lately. First out is text-stroke, a new (and non-standard, so not for real-world use) CSS property that can be used to control the fill and stroke colours as well as the stroke width of text. A description and a couple of examples are available in Introducing Text-Stroke..." http://tinyurl.com/2dzhnv eduStyle By Stewart Foss. "eduStyle is a design gallery to showcase excellent College or UniversityÊ web sites. It was inspired by sites like Stylegala or CSS Vault. I used them often to try and get design inspiration, but often had a hard time finding examples that would be workable on a higher-ed websites. So after many evenings and weekends eduStyle was born." http://www.edustyle.net/ CSS3 info By Joost de Valk. "CSS3 is the new kid in the stylesheet family. It offers exciting new possibilities to create an impact with your designs, allows you to use more diverse style sheets for a variety of occasions and lots more. We created this site because we want to share our experiences of CSS3 with you, and want nothing more than to simply be the biggest online resource covering CSS3. (Hey, we're ambitious!)..." http://www.css3.info/ +03: COLOR. Ensuring Accessibility for People With Color-Deficient Vision By Pabini Gabriel-Petit. "This article is Part IV of my series 'Color Theory for Digital Displays.' It describes how you can use color in applications and on Web pages to ensure that they are accessible to people who have color-deficient vision. If you do not consider the needs of people with color-deficient vision when choosing color schemes for applications and Web pages, those you create may be difficult to use or even indecipherable for about one in twelve users." http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000164.php +04: DREAMWEAVER. The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part One By Sheri German. "There is a concern among educators that web design is often being taught poorly - even at the college level - and without regard for standards. In some cases it is because the instructor has not updated her skills since the turn of the century. In other cases it is because there is a perception that it is too hard to teach and learn CSS. Yes, it is true that one must go slowly, start simple, and build skills in a systematic way. Still, after some experimentation and a few of my own lessons learned the hard way, I came up with some beginning exercises that seem to instill the essential concepts without overwhelming the students. In this series I would like to share some of these lesson plans with my fellow educators who, like me, would like to start their students out with 'best practices'. Each lesson plan includes step-by-step exercises along with the starter and completed example files for each. In this first tutorial in the series, the students will construct a simple page, learn to wrap text around an image, and learn how to divide the page into a series of divs that will later provide the hooks for positioning page areas with CSS. " http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=3D074 +05: EVALUATION & TESTING. Low-Fi Usability Testing By Jeff Atwood. "Pop quiz, hotshot. How do you know if your application works? Sure, maybe your app compiles. Maybe it passes all the unit tests. Maybe it ran the QA gauntlet successfully. Maybe it was successfully deployed to the production server, or packaged into an installer. Maybe your beta testers even signed off on it. But that doesn't mean it works..." http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000779.html Hallway Testing "Forums for Quick, Free Usability Feedback..." http://www.hallwaytesting.com/ +06: EVENTS. IDC 2007 Information Design Conference 2007 March 29-30, 2007. London, United Kingdom http://www.informationdesignassociation.org/idc2007/ Highland Fling April 5, 2007. Edinburgh, Scotland. http://thehighlandfling.com/2007/ SOUPS 2007 Symposium On Usable Privacy and Security July 18-20, 2007. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. http://cups.cs.cmu.edu/soups/2007/ Jazzing IT up with MERLOT August 7-10, 2007. New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.A. http://conference.merlot.org/2007/ Hypertext 2007 September 10-12, 2007. Eighteenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia Manchester, United Kingdom http://www.sigweb.org/ht07/ RailsConf Europe 2007 September 17-19, 2007. Berlin, Germany http://conferences.oreillynet.com/railseurope/ HighEdWebDev 2007 October 14-17, 2007. Rochester, New York, U.S.A. http://www.highedweb.org/ +07: FLASH. How to Write Valid HTML/XHTML Code to Include Flash By Robert Nyman. "Hopefully, you're someone who cares about web standards and wants to have valid code for the sake of web browsers' rendering and for you as a web developer, to more easily spot errors right away. Then, when including Flash content in your web page, the default code output from various tools and web sites out there is invalid (at least when it comes to using them with a strict DOCTYPE, which I'd really recommend you to go with). So, what should a poor caring web developer do?..." http://tinyurl.com/yqdmoq Flash Embedding Cage Match By Bobby van der Sluis. "Ever had to embed Flash into a web page and just been plain confounded about the best way to do it? Be confused no more! Bobby van der Sluis cuts through the arguments and opinions about the many techniques available..." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/flashembedcagematch +08: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Information Architecture, Meet the Enterprise Web By Peter Morville and Lou Rosenfeld. Chapter 19 of the new 3rd edition of the Polar Bear Book, 'Information Architecture for the World Wide Web'. http://www.cmswatch.com/Feature/158-Enterprise-IA The Holy Grail of Information Architecture By Christopher Fahey. "...I call this the 'Holy Grail of Information Architecture'. It's a mythical, versatile, and powerful document format that almost every IA has fantasized about. Depending on who you talk to, embodies most or all of the following qualities..." http://tinyurl.com/35gqm8 +09: JAVASCRIPT. What Has AJAX Ajax Done For Us Anyway? James Edwards. "The slides for my talk at last night's WSG (Web Standards Group Meeting) meet in Melbourne are now online..." http://www.brothercake.com/presentations/what_has_ajax_done/ Using Variables and Built-in Functions to Update Your Web Pages Automatically By Thau!. "With JavaScript you can update the content on your pages automatically - every day, every hour, or every second. Here, you'll learn about a simple script that automatically changes the date on your web page." http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/the_book/index.html Graceful Degradation and Progressive Enhancement By Tommy Olsson. Graceful degradation and progressive enhancement are two sides of the same coin. Both are -- in this context -- applied to make a web site accessible to any user agent, while providing improved aesthetics and/or usability for more capable browsers. The difference between the two is where you begin your approach..." http://tinyurl.com/2xtugr XMLHttpRequest Functions By Peter-Paul Koch. "This is the XMLHttpRequest function I always use; see quirksmode.js, the script file that's used in every page on this site. It is presented very shortly; section 10A of the book treats these functions in detail." http://www.quirksmode.org/js/xmlhttp.html +10: MISCELLANEOUS. Eric Meyer - A Candid Chat 'bout CSS and Stuff (Interview) By Amy Armitage. "What's so great about this CSS Guru? What makes so many people attend his conferences, visit and comment his blog daily, or buy his published books?" http://blog.lunarpages.com/2007/01/31/eric-meyer-interview-css/ Interview with Aaron Wall By Mihaela Lica. "Why an interview with Aaron Wall? To put it simple, because he is the author of the Web's most popular 'SEO Book' and one of the first 100 Google qualified professionals in the world..." http://www.ewriting.pamil-visions.com/2007/02/05/ Chat with Molly for BBC Backstage By Ian Forrester. "Ian Forrester from BBC Backstage interviews me about W3C, WaSP, Microsoft, developer education, communities and other issues of interest to the community." http://blip.tv/file/140923 Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us By Michel Michael Wesch. "Web 2.0 in just under 5 minutes." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE +11: NAVIGATION. Wikiasari: The Convergence of Usability and SEO? By Lisa Halabi. "...Ultimately, usability is key to ensuring a good ranking. Concentrate on delivering good usability, employ some basic SEO tactics (such as placing keywords in the page title, headings and links) and the rest will follow naturally. Usability and SEO go hand in hand." http://tinyurl.com/29moov +12: PHP. PHP and XML Sitting in a Tree By Kerri Hicks. "Developers and designers will both benefit from reading this week's article. XML is becoming an increasingly attractive data format, whose potential we're still in the infant stages of grasping, and PHP5 introduces a nifty, time-saving, ingenious way to use PHP to harness XML: SimpleXML. Not into the alphabet soup world of programming? Never fear, this article was written specifically so that designers and project managers can follow along and be able to converse intelligently with the geekier members of their teams." http://www.digital-web.com/articles/php_and_xml_sitting_in_a_tree/ Processing Forms with PHP, a Beginner's Guide By Joe Dolson. "The beginning stages of a web-based form are very simple: you read the HTML guide, learn about select menus, options, form labels, radio inputs and all the myriad ways you can inveigle information from your visitors. You also learn about the action and method attributes. Great. So all of this HTML you've learned is wonderful - but won't actually do anything. You need to provide some kind of back-end rules to actually make any use of this information..." http://www.joedolson.com/articles/2007/02/processing-forms-with-php/ Decision Making Using PHP Switch Statement By Haroon Ahmad. "Today I am going to discuss Switch Statement. The basic concept of Switch is similar to the IF-ELSE statement; it helps you to write decision making code just like IF-ELSE but it is a little more organized, elegant and handy when dealing with complex logics as compare to IF-ELSE." http://tinyurl.com/2hevnh PHP Security From The Inside By Federico Biancuzzi. "Stefan Esser is the founder of both the Hardened-PHP Project and the PHP Security Response Team (which he recently left). Federico Biancuzzi discussed with him how the PHP Security Response Team works, why he resigned from it, what features he plans to add to his own hardening patch, the interaction between Apache and PHP, the upcoming "Month of PHP bugs" initiative, and common mistakes in the design of well-known applications such as WordPress." http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/432/1 +13: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. International Liaison Group By Web Standards Project. Molly Holzschlag announces a new working group dedicated to sharing resources globally. http://www.webstandards.org/action/ilg/ The Time to Abandon Backwards Compatibility is Now, Microsoft By David Andersson (Liorean) "If you've followed the discussion about the W3C HTML WG, you've no doubt read Chris Wilson's comments on it. I'd like to bring one thing up in particular..." http://tinyurl.com/yvtgcn Talking with Microsoft about IE.next By Aaron Gustafson. "You may recall that the DOM Scripting and Microsoft task forces, in collaboration with JS Ninjas, had been compiling a list of issues, needs, and wants for IE.next over the last few months (a list many of you contributed to as well, via your feedback). The list was to focus on what we wanted to see happen in terms of JavaScript support (as IE7 didn't get much of an update in that area), but when it came down to it, there were other areas we really felt needed some love..." http://tinyurl.com/28zs5j +14: TOOLS. Poodle Predictor By GRI Technologies. "Enter your URL above to see what your site will look like in search-engine results...See how search-engine friendly your site is, can the spider crawl it easily? Will it get good rankings?" http://www.gritechnologies.com/tools/spider.go +15: TYPOGRAPHY. At Hyphenated Line-Ends, Leave at Least Two Characters Behind and Take at Least Three Forward By Richard Rutter. "Fi-nally is a conventionally acceptable line-end hyphenation, but final-ly is not, because it takes too little of the word ahead to the next line." http://tinyurl.com/yqerxc Centering Text on the Longest Line By Richard Rutter. "Centering a block is reasonably simple if you know how wide it is...But if you don't know how wide your block - perhaps you're drawing text from a CMS - then things get tricky..." http://www.clagnut.com/blog/1887/ Using Kerning for Better Headlines By Kim Dudley. "The success of a promotional piece is often dependent upon the setup of the text. If the spacing between the lines in a paragraph is too tight, causing the text to be hard to read, it is likely a potential client will skip over much of the content. On the other hand, if the text is set up well it not only effectively delivers the information but it can also portray a specific image or style for the company. The choice of fonts and the spacing of that font's characters goes a long way in the legibility of the text. In this article we will look at how different applications work with a font's kerning information and how you can manually kern your titles and headlines for a more professional look." http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=63B17 +16: USABILITY. PDFs are Evil, Lazy, Slothful and Sinful By Gerry McGovern. "PowerPoints are the curse of the intranet, and PDFs the curse of the Web. PDFs reflect print thinking. On the Web, we need web thinking...Every time I see a website full of PDFs I have this overwhelming desire to hit the Back button, because these websites scream, 'We don't care about your time. We took this print stuff and put it on our site because it saves time for us.' The Web is not print. What may work exceptionally well in print may fail miserably on the Web. Print marketing material is designed to get attention. It is written with the intention that the customer will read it in some external environment. Therefore, it often contains contextual and background information on the organization...Time is everything today. If I have to print out pages before I can complete a task, that's a major inconvenience and a waste of time. Unless you have solid data that says your customers want to print, then don't force them to print..." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2007/nt-2007-02-05-pdf.htm Usability Makes Business Sense By Isabelle Chan. "Good usability transcends age, geography and culture, says usability expert Jakob Nielsen. It doesn't matter if a Web site targets an Internet surfer who is 20 and not 50 years old, or is Asian and not American. The site will succeed in attracting visitors if it is designed according to how humans think and behave." http://www.zdnetindia.com/news/communication/stories/170118.html Broadband Black Holes Persist By Andrew B. King. "Despite President Bush's promise of universal access to broadband by 2007 there are still areas within the US that have little or no coverage. In the UK, broadband has become cheaper than dial-up access. Meanwhile in the US broadband grew to 78.5% in December among active Internet users." http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0701/ +17: XML. W3C Publishes New Web Standards for XML By Patrick Hoffman. "The new Web standards are designed to help businesses request information from a database, transform and access XML data and do bond databases with the Web..." http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2087576,00.asp X/HTML 5 Versus XHTML 2 By xhtml.com. The competition to become the next markup language for the Web is heating up. This article takes a look at what's cool and what's uncool about the competing technologies." http://xhtml.com/en/future/x-html-5-versus-xhtml-2/ [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +18: 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.]