+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 5, Issue 44, April 20, 2007. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 44 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: FLASH 07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 08: JAVASCRIPT. 09: MISCELLANEOUS. 10: NAVIGATION. 11: PHP. 12: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 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. Initiative Spurs User-Friendly Technology By Sacramento State University. "Sacramento State is stepping up efforts to make its information technology services and instructional materials accessible to persons with disabilities. The move is part of the CSU system's Accessible Technology Initiative. The three priorities of the initiative are: web accessibility, which will bring all campus web pages in compliance with accessibility standards; instructional materials accessibility, which will provide for textbooks and printed material, as well as electronic presentations, to meet accessibility standards; and accessible electronic and information technology procurement, which ensures that all products purchased will adhere to accessibility standards.'Our goal is to have these services ready for all students, faculty, staff and the campus community, regardless of disability, before they need to ask for them'..." http://tinyurl.com/yv8exu Taking Accessibility to an International Level By Henny Swan. "Over the last few months I've been closely watching the progress of the December 2006 United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. This marks an exciting shift in the accessibility arena as it is the first time that accessibility is mentioned in an international human rights initiative. While the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) publishes technical guidelines on how to make websites accessible there has been no global movement to date that outlines the framework of what must be done..." http://tinyurl.com/yuj24k It Pays to Play by the Rules - Compliance, Accessibility and SEO By Mark Jackson. "If you can deliver an accessible website, you may have just created a tremendous market growth opportunity for yourself..." http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3625527 Adding Value: Providing Transcripts for Podcasts By Sharon Perry. "I've just listened to a podcast by EASI (Equal Access to Software and Information) on RSS/Podcast Basics. As well as covering the basics of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds and podcasting, it also briefly touched on podcast accessibility..." http://tinyurl.com/2et9ak +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Reset Styles By Eric A Meyer. "...here's my version of reset.css, based off of the YUI styles." http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/04/12/reset-styles/ Reworked Reset By Eric A Meyer. "Here's the latest version of my 'baseline' style sheet, with some changes based on feedback from readers on the original post..." http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/04/14/reworked-reset/ What Happens in Quirks Mode? By Jukka K. Korpela. "In Quirks Mode, browsers have been observed to behave in the following ways, though not all browsers exhibit all of these features..." http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/quirks-mode.html Create a Teaser Thumbnail List Using CSS: Part 1 - Updated By Zoe Gillenwater. "Teaser thumbnail lists are those lists of items made up of a title, short description, and thumbnail. They're often used to provide short teasers that link to more information about the products, articles, or sections of the site being listed. This tutorial will go over one way to structure the XHTML and CSS to create such a list that maximizes flexibility for the site owner and accessibility for the end user. The resulting list will feature a fixed-width, grid-like design, with the thumbnails aligned to the left and the title and description for each item sitting to the right. All with only 23 lines of CSS! This updated version of the original tutorial, published in March 2006, includes slightly modified CSS to allow the list to accept text that is very short or images that are very tall without overlaps occurring. Fortunately, the CSS required for this enhancement is not significantly more than the CSS required for the first version, so even if you don't anticipate having short text or tall images, it's best to use this new version from now on." http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=8885A Positioning By Tommy Olsson. "In the first article in a brand new column here at Digital Web, we begin our series examining the fundamental skills that any web designer should master. Online veteran and markup expert Tommy Olsson takes a detailed look at the sometimes confusing art of CSS positioning." http://www.digital-web.com/articles/web_design_101_positioning/ +03: DREAMWEAVER. Understanding the New Dreamweaver CS3 CSS Layouts By Stephanie Sullivan. "Jumpstart your web designs by basing them on the starter CSS Layouts that ship with Dreamweaver CS3." http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/css_starter_pages.html Migrating from Adobe GoLive CS2 to Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 By Adobe. "Learn what you need to do to get your GoLive sites to work in Dreamweaver CS3." http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/migrate_golive_dreamweaver.html +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Cue: A Usability Testing Bake-Off By Jared Spool. "...Because we're often working by ourselves, having an external reference point to compare our work to is important. For apple pie bakers, the bake-off is where we can learn from others. In the world of usability testing, the CUE studies are quickly becoming the focal point for these comparisons." http://tinyurl.com/27kzsy +05: EVENTS. Todcon: The Other Dreamweaver Conference June 11-13, 2007. Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S.A. http://www.todcon.org/ AusWeb 07 June 30 -July 4, 2007. Charlesworth Bay, Australia. http://ausweb.scu.edu.au/ IADIS: International Conference WWW/Internet 2007 October 5-8, 2007 Vila Real, Portugal. http://www.internet-conf.org/ UI12: User Interface 12 Conference November 5-8, 2007. Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A. http://www.uie.com/events/uiconf/2007/ +06: FLASH. Captioning in Flash CS3 By Andrew Kirkpatrick. "want to highlight my favorite new feature in Flash CS3 - Flash captioning. There is a new component, named FLVPlaybackCaptioning, which works in cooperation with the FLVPlayback component to make delivering captioning in Flash really easy." http://blogs.adobe.com/accessibility/2007/04/captioning_in_flash_cs3.html +07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. IA Summit Sessions "Here's the full list of presentations and panels..." http://www.iasummit.org/2007/conferenceProgram.htm Enterprise IA Methodologies By James Robertson. "Information architects working within enterprises are confronted by unique challenges, relating to organizational culture, business processes, and internal politics. James Robertson pulls the strands of situational spaghetti to get to the root of the project." http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/enterprise-ia +08: JAVASCRIPT. Accessing Form Data via JavaScript and the DOM By Tony Patton. "Accessing and manipulating the various elements on a Web page is a common endeavor that is easily accomplished with JavaScript and the HTML Document Object Model (DOM). In this article, I examine the various ways to access page elements and describe how to create them..." http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-6175942.html +09: MISCELLANEOUS. Ten Questions for Lachlan Hunt By Russ Weakley. "Lachlan Hunt is a freelance, front-end web developer, primarily developing with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. He has been working professionally in the industry for 3 years. As a developer and advocate of web standards, he is well known for his involvement with the community through his blog, Lachy's Log, participation in various mailing lists, including WSG, and involvement with the development of web standards including HTML and CSS through public mailing lists and, more recently, as a W3C Invited Expert. Lachlan talks about HTML5, XHTML2, WHATWG, specs, top posting, JavaScript, XBL and more! " http://webstandardsgroup.org/features/lachlan-hunt.cfm +10: NAVIGATION. Styling Links By Jonathan Nicol. "A couple of months back I wrote a post about the importance of making links look like links. From the comments left by readers it was clear that peoples opinions differ widely on the best way to style links, so I thought I'd follow up with a brief survey of the various ways it is possible to make links stand out on a page. I won't be talking in this article about links in navigation menus, headings, or buttons, only inline links that appear within the body copy of a web page. We cannot rely on visual context to make it obvious to users that inline links are clickable, and therefore their appearance is crucial." http://f6design.com/journal/2007/04/14/styling-links/ Sitemaps are Stupid By Lyle Kantrovich. "I've thought that sitemaps are a Bad Idea for about 10 years now. Ten year later I finally got around to writing a blog post about why I think they are stupid. Here are a few things to consider..." http://tinyurl.com/yt4zwo +11: PHP. PHP 5 Security Techniques By Larry Ullman. "Most beginning programmers fail to understand the truth about security: there is no such thing as "secure" or "insecure." The wise programmer knows that the real question is how secure a site is. The focus in this sample chapter is therefore how to make your applications more secure." http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=712187&f1 Why Are PHP Books and Videos Hard for People? By Stefan Mischook. "I've read 20+ books on PHP and have watched many videos. One thing that I found consistent about all of them was how they were not 'friendly' to non-nerd types..." http://tinyurl.com/32ofdj ZCE (Zend Certified Engineer) Study Group By phpwomen.org. "Get ready to dive in to certification studies! Join fellow phpWomen members in the new ZCE Study Group forum for some question and answer and a lot of test prep." http://tinyurl.com/yus89x +12: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Virginia Tech Tragedy: Lessons Learned in Crisis Communication a Day After the Unthinkable By Karine Joly. "...When a crisis occurs, immediately drop all images, flash, video, from your web site. The VT homepage crashed around 10 a.m. because of traffic. They went to an almost text-only page very early on and it still was difficult to get to the homepage for information....Post statements in print only first. Again, VT was trying to provide as much information as possible and they posted podcasts from their president. A great idea, but with the volume of traffic, I believe the bandwidth required dramatically slowed access to the site...Use an alternative source or site to distribute key information..." http://tinyurl.com/2f9msw Web Standards Documentary Project By Aarron Walter. "The Interactive Media Design department at The Art Institute of Atlanta has been teaching the merits of Web Standards in our curriculum since 2002. Over the years, we have seen many of our students evangelize the importance of Web Standards to their employers in and around Atlanta, Georgia. Below is a selection of audio interviews with some of our students who have introduced Web Standards to their employers, some with a successful outcome, and others not. By documenting students' experiences in the industry, my hope is to learn a bit about how changes are being made, and when their efforts are not successful discover why so we might address issues in the curriculum if possible. In some business situations, adopting Web Standards means tossing aside or rebuilding giant Content Management Systems, which may not currently be seen as a plausible option. Perhaps if the benefits are presented well enough, change is still possible..." http://aarronwalter.com/teaching/web-standards.php Semantics - Why Bother? By Mel Pedley. "A great deal has been written about semantic markup and its importance. Some of this material has been written by purists who defend semantics because they like the logic and structure that semantic markup can convey. That's all very well and good, but what does semantic markup mean? And what practical usage does it have?" http://accessites.org/site/2007/04/semantics-why-bother/ Stop Writing Garbage Code, Please By Mike Cherim. "As most of my readers know, one of the things I do is make themes and templates for WordPress web logs and stand-alone sites. The themes and templates I make are accessible, universal, standards-compliant, and strictly valid. I take a lot of pride in what I produce and I try to turn out nothing but the highest quality stuff. Once users download the fruits of my labor, my responsibility of quality control ends and the users take the reigns. That's when things sometimes go awry. But in many instances, it's not the users' fault..." http://green-beast.com/blog/?p=168 +13: TYPOGRAPHY. Web Typography By Rosie Sherry. "...some small and simple steps that everyone can bear in mind..." http://www.rosiesherry.com/blog/show/Web+typography +14: USABILITY. Scroll Stoppers at MensHealth.com By Jared Spool. "...Observing users reacting to scroll stoppers can give designers the mistaken belief that users don't like to scroll. However, all the evidence we've collected suggests that's not true at all. They love to scroll, assuming the page makes it clear there's something to scroll to." http://tinyurl.com/yojkf5 Show Numbers as Numerals When Writing for Online By Jakob Nielsen. "It's better to use '23' than 'twenty-three' to catch users' eyes when they scan Web pages for facts, according to eyetracking data." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/writing-numbers.html Poll Results: 50.4 Percent of Respondents Maximize Windows By Roger Johansson. "When I posted my recent poll on Web browser window size I was expecting at the very most a couple of hundred comments. I obviously underestimated my readers' willingness to participate, because when I finally closed comments the count was 1070, with the total amount of setups reported landing at 1385. 1070 comments. Wow..." http://tinyurl.com/2f7umw Why Simplicity is Essential to Web Design By Gerry McGovern. "A simple website charges you less time. A complex website charges you more time. Time is your most precious resource." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2007/nt-2007-04-16-simplicity.htm Where are the Women? Where are the Links? By Jeffery Zeldman. "...every time I think I can stop talking about these obvious, simple truths, some crazy bad 90s style train wreck hits me headlong and makes me weep anew." http://www.zeldman.com/2007/04/18/cant-link-with-em/ [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.]