+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 5, Issue 46, May 4, 2007. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 46 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: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 14: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. hAccessibility By Bruce Lawson and James Craig. "Microformats are a great idea. They allow the embedding of parsable, semantic data (like contact information and event details) into regular web pages. With the right plug-in, that information can be saved directly to your calendar program or address book. Like Microformats, a portion of web accessibility is about making web pages more machine-readable, and by doing so, making them more usable to human beings. Most of the time, Microformats and the principles of accessibility coexist harmoniously..." http://www.webstandards.org/2007/04/27/haccessibility/ Where's WCAG 2? By Joe Dolson. "By which I mean, what is currently going on in the world of the next generation of web content accessibility guidelines? It's been almost a year since I wrote on the feelings against WCAG 2 when it was initially bumped to a 'Last Call Working Draft' ? so it's worth addressing what's been happening since then..." http://www.joedolson.com/articles/2007/04/wheres-wcag-2/ Accessible Web Awards By Accessibility in Focus. "...Our awards are something to be proud of - they'll show people you care about your visitors and the fact you are keeping up-to-date with the latest technologies and guidelines. Not only that, but it'll show you've got the nod from some of the most influential people on the web. So make sure you submit your site..." http://www.accessibilityinfocus.co.uk/ Web Accessibility Principles By WebAIM. http://webaim.org/resources/quickref/ Testing for Web Accessibility By WebAIM. http://webaim.org/resources/evalquickref/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. CSS Specificity for Poker Players By Carl Camera. "Some folks getting on board with CSS tend to get stuck on CSS specificity. The descriptions of which rules override other rules tend to make more sense to programmers than designers, since programmers are used to the concepts of inheritance and overriding properties. If you're not from the programming world and CSS seems a bit confusing, perhaps this analogy may help clear some concepts up. Think of CSS rules as poker hands. The best hand determines an element's style." http://iamacamera.org/default.aspx?id=95 How to Prevent HTML Tables From Becoming Too Wide By Roger Johansson. "The layout model of tables differ from that of block level elements in that they will normally expand beyond their specified width to make their contents fit. At first that may sound like a good thing - and it often is - but it makes it possible for oversized content to make text unreadable or completely break a site's layout, especially in Internet Explorer..." http://tinyurl.com/2bdom4 CSS Support in Email Clients Still Pretty Poor By Andy Budd. "While speaking at web design world, one attendee asked me a question about styling emails with CSS. I gave my stock answer that as a technical person I had a strong dislike of HTML/CSS emails as I feel they were against the spirit of the medium. I really like the simplicity of text as a communication medium, so hate email messages that pretend to be web pages. If I want to read a web page, I'd much prefer to be sent a link. To me, most HTML/CSS emails are the online equivalent of junk mail, so I have styling turned off by default..." http://tinyurl.com/25ug3k Debugging CSS: My Best Productivity Tip Ever By Jesper Ronn-Jensen. "Firebug keeps surprising me. I've recently been working on code for several web designs and this little trick helped me to understand existing HTML and CSS much faster..." http://tinyurl.com/ytjcql CSS Float Theory: Things You Should Know By Vitaly Friedman and Sven Lennartz. "...Let's try to tackle the issue and clarify some usual misunderstandings, which always appear once floats are being used. We've browsed through dozens of related articles and selected the most important things you should keep in mind developing css-based layouts with floats..." http://tinyurl.com/yr65w5 +03: DREAMWEAVER. Review: Dreamweaver CS3 By Paul Boag. "I finally got my hands on a copy of Dreamweaver CS3 this week and although I am still taking it all in I thought I would share some of initial thoughts...If you are new to CSS this feature might be useful. It basically allows you to select from a series of CSS layout templates to get you started. Now, this never replaces hand coding it from scratch, however if you are anything like me you find it easier to learn from example and this certainly helps with that...If you have tried and failed to get your head around DOM Scripting and AJAX then I would suggest you start off by buying 'DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model' (J. Keith) or 'Bulletproof Ajax (Voices That Matter)' (Jeremy Keith). However, if even that fails then you might want to take a look at the Javascript framework now built into Dreamweaver CS3. As with CSS layout I should stress this isn't as good as hand coding because: 1) You are stuffed if you want to add or amend functionality not offered from within the framework. 1) The code is bloated in places meaning it will make the page take longer to download...The code isn't great but at least from what I have seen it degrades reasonably and isn't too intrusive..." http://www.boagworld.com/archives/2007/05/show_77_a_dream.html +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Location is Irrelevant for Usability Studies By Jakob Nielsen. "You get the same insights regardless of where you conduct user testing, so there's no reason to test in multiple cities. When a city is dominated by your own industry, however, you should definitely test elsewhere." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/user-test-locations.html Split A/B Testing By Lisa Halabi. "There can often be debate within any organization as to the best solution for a usability problem, with no one really knowing the optimal solution. Rather than letting the person that shouts the loudest get his or her own way, a better solution can be to test two solutions in a live environment. Whichever performs the best is clearly the superior solution. Welcome to split A/B testing!" http://tinyurl.com/2ybrpq +05: EVENTS. PHP Architect Live Online Training Courses http://hades.phparch.com/socrates/ +06: FLASH. MTV Drops Flash Site in Favor of (Boring) HTML By Christian Watson. "After only 9 months, MTV has replaced its extremely flashy Flash site with plain old HTML. Why? Because their users complained..." http://www.smileycat.com/miaow/archives/000644.php +07: JAVASCRIPT. JavaScript and Screen Readers By Kevin Yank. "Try to use one of the poster-child Ajax web applications like GMail with a screen reader and you'll never want to touch a screen reader again. To support those users who don't have that luxury, then, do you have to do without JavaScript?..." Try to use one of the poster-child Ajax web applications like GMail with a screen reader and you'll never want to touch a screen reader again. To support those users who don't have that luxury, then, do you have to do without JavaScript?" http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2007/04/30/javascript-and-screen-readers/ I'd Rather Switch Than Fight! By Douglas Crockford. "JavaScript's switch statement was inspired by Java's switch statement, which was inspired by C++'s switch statement, which was inspired by C's switch statement, which combined aspects of C. A. R. Hoare's case statement and Fortran's computed goto statement. Dijkstra considered the goto statement to be harmful, which it in fact is, which is why the goto has been omitted from most modern programming languages. But some of the goto's problematic nature survives in the switch, so some extra care must be employed when using it..." http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/04/25/id-rather-switch-than-fight/ The Prevalence of Slick JavaScript and Flash Effects By Christopher Schmitt. "With the prevalence of slick JavaScript and Flash effects available at a designer's fingertips, it can be tempting to inundate a web page with trendy 'coolness' at the expense of usability. Many of you are probably familiar with the case for minimalism in both coding and design: simpler code is easier to write and maintain, and, when done right, minimalist design is aesthetically pleasing while putting the focus where it belongs: the content..." http://blog.sessions.edu/?p=134 JavaScript and HTML: Forgiveness by Default By Jeff Atwood. "...They may not have realized it at the time, but the Draconians inadvertently destroyed the future of XHTML with this single, irrevocable decision. The lesson here, it seems to me, is that forgiveness by default is absolutely required for the kind of large-scale, worldwide adoption that the web enjoys..." http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000848.html Draconian? Or Precise? By Shelly Powers. "Forgiveness for script really isn't forgiveness. Script is treated in its proper way - as an ancillary technology. Even being an ancillary technology, though, JavaScript errors left unfixed once discovered say, 'This page was coded by my 11 year old nephew?can you tell?'..." http://burningbird.net/learning-javascript/draconian-or-precise/ +08: MISCELLANEOUS. The Profession That Dare not Speak Its Name By Jeffery Zeldman. "No one has tried to measure web design because web design has been a hidden profession." http://tinyurl.com/2fghus +09: NAVIGATION. Keyboard-Friendly Link Focus By Mike Cherim. "After more than a year of judging web sites, we have a good idea of what developers tend to overlook. There are a few things we see over and over again, but the one oversight we see most often is a lack of link focus. It's a small thing, really, but to anyone navigating a site by keyboard, a lack of link focus can seriously affect the usability. Correcting this oversight can be addressed in a matter of minutes, and there's really no excuse for not doing it. It all boils down to thinking about it, then doing it. We can't make you think about it, but we can tell you how to do it..." http://accessites.org/site/2007/05/keyboard-friendly-link-focus/ +10: PHP. Code As Data: Reflection in PHP By Zachary Kessin. "As programmers, many of us instinctively draw a distinction between the programs we write and work with, and the data that they are meant to process. While this is often a useful thing to do, it does tend to hide one key fact: programs are themselves nothing but well-defined data. In order to run a program, some other program must parse it and turn it into an executable. This may be a compiler or an interpreter or some other tool, but it is still a program. However, for many people, the only parser that they use besides the one to actually compile or run their code is a highlighter that color-codes things in their text editor..." http://tinyurl.com/yu5ej7 +11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Will HTML 5 Be a Purely Presentational Language? By Ian Hickson. The following may be of interest to people concerned with web standards who haven't been keeping up with the HTML Working Group and where HTML 5 is headed. Ian said in a post on the W3C www-html mailing list, "...There are people strongly arguing that HTML should be a purely presentational language, much, much more presentational than the proposed WHATWG draft. In fact, unless someone argues against it, it's likely that the W3C spec will be even less semantic and more presentational than the WHATWG draft. So if you think the WHATWG draft is already too presentational, I really encourage you to make your opinion known in the HTML working group..." http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/2007Apr/0171.html Official Instructions For Joining the HTML Working Group By W3C. http://www.w3.org/2004/01/pp-impl/40318/instructions How You Can Join the W3C HTML5 Working Group in Six Easy Steps By Ian Hickson. Ian has posted clearer instructions for joining the HTML working group. He says, "Taking part in the group is not a big commitment. You can spend as much or as little time contributing; you don't need to read every e-mail on subjects you don't care about, you don't need to call in or attend face-to-face meetings. In fact, the W3C has stated in the group's charter that no binding decisions will be made at meetings; you are guaranteed equal say whether you are present or not..." http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1173385976&count=1 'IE8 Compatible' - The Cure for Web Standards Headache? By Gavin Clarke. Chris Wilson, IE group program manager, told MIX07 that Microsoft may "need authors to opt into standards", suggesting a "compatible with IE 8.0" scheme. "By asking authors to say 'I want standards behaviors' means we don't have to worry about standards compatibility. That means we can break our compatibility with layout and CSS. We can change DOM APIs without breaking any current pages," Wilson said. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/01/internet_explorer_standards/ Comments on 'IE8 Compatible': http://tinyurl.com/2ejy2m Rethinking HTML 5 By Tina Holmboe. "...If the HTML working group is truly ignoring a mailing-list set up by the W3C with the specific topic 'those interested ... enhancing ...HTML', then I suggest the HTML WG may need to review its policies - in particular in light of the fact, as has been pointed out by several other participants, that not everyone /can/ join the WG. The www-html mailing-list is clearly a point-of-call for people with an interest in the principal language used on the WWW, but who cannot, for one reason or another, get more deeply involved. /Why/ would it be ignored? The answer is that it shouldn't. /All/ views should be taken aboard, considered, and discussed. And then a draft should be produced; an /incremental/ revision of what exist today. Through more work, and more discussion, it should be refined before a specification is produced; a specification that all parties should /respect/ and adhere to. No more willy-nillying by authors, browser vendors, or writers of 'WYSIWYG' tools. Resurrect the WIP, if anyone believe that'll help...." http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/2007May/0008.html Re: (was Support Existing Content) By Denis Boudreau. "...Accessibility experts, among others are flipping out. Taking out headers and summary? I mean come on... If this is just a natural process and we enjoy the confrontation of ideas, fine that's great - these discussions ARE interesting. But if 'improving html' somehow means bringing back in stuff we pulled out before for very valid reasons or reconsidering the very foundation of the language, then I'm seriously starting to worry... Will we have to wait until the draft falls on Karl Dubost's lap to realize we're jeopardizing another standard by going our route?..." http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007May/0034.html The Future of HTML By Lachlan Hunt. "This was originally presented by Lachlan Hunt at the Web Standards Group meeting in Sydney on 2007-01-25..." http://lachy.id.au/dev/presentation/future-of-html/ Error Handling in Browsers Make Web Standards Difficult By Sean Fraser. "...The W3C states XHTML is better; all XHTML documents must be well-formed; and, user agents must parse and evaluate for document well-formedness. That's all well and good but no beneficial results will be seen for those efforts when ill-formed (X)HTML documents are rendered by browsers (or, User Agents) (of which the previous article illustrated). All of the magical and miraculous things implied by the W3C are naught: user agents need only parse and evaluate." http://tinyurl.com/yt8bk7 HTML and Version Mechanisms By Karl Dubost. "There has a been a lot of debate in April on the HTML WG mailing list about versioning. Should the new HTML language bear a version mechanism. It is a difficult topic with interesting arguments. The debate will have certainly influences on discussions on the Technical Architecture Group. Versioning is one of the topics addressed in Web Architecture..." http://www.w3.org/QA/2007/05/html_and_version_mechanisms.html +12: TOOLS. CSS Specificity Calculator By Stephen Ball. "Paste your CSS into the field below, the specificity of your selectors will be calculated for you..." http://www.rebelinblue.com/specificity.php +13: USABILITY. Usability 2.0 Questions By Luke Wroblewski. "I recently spoke at a Silicon Valley Web Guild event with Sean Kane (Netflix) and Jon Wiley (Google) about Usability 2.0. Here are my responses to some of the questions asked at the session..." http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?521 Comic: Content or Design? By Joshua Porter. "Question: Which is more important: content or design?..." http://bokardo.com/archives/comic-content-or-design/ [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.]