+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 5, Issue 47, May 11, 2007. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 47 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: FLASH. 06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 07: MISCELLANEOUS. 08: PHP. 09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 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. Help Keep Accessibility and Semantics in HTML By Roger Johansson. "This is a call to action directed at all standardistas and accessibilitistas. If you think accessibility and semantics are important and should be improved in the next version of HTML, you need to act. What is currently going on in the W3C HTML Working Group is very disappointing and something I never expected to see when I joined it. I was naive enough to think that everybody joining the HTML WG would be doing so out of a desire to improve the Web. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case...All in all, my impression so far is that unless things change, the next version of HTML will do nothing to improve the Web. All it will do is make things easier for browser vendors and ignorant web developers. The rest of us may be better off sticking to HTML 4.01 Strict...If you have an interest in improving the accessibility of HTML, want more semantic and less presentational markup, and are good at arguing your case, please consider applying for HTML Working Group membership by following the Instructions for joining the HTML Working Group. Do it now. The longer you wait, the harder it will be to change the unfortunate direction things are going in." http://tinyurl.com/2h6k96 Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design By Shawn Lawton Henry. "...a new book that helps developers include accessibility in designing websites, software, hardware, and consumer products. It focuses on including real people with disabilities throughout the design process, to develop effective accessibility solutions efficiently. What's really cool is that the entire book is available online..." http://www.uiaccess.com/accessucd/ Top 5 Roadblocks to Web Accessibility By Karl Groves. "...1. Dependence upon client side scripting to present navigation or important content. 2. Improper use of markup/Invalid markup 3. Device dependence. 4. Lack of/improper use of alternative text for graphic and multimedia elements. 5. Improper creation of forms..." http://www.ecauldron.com/web/design007.php Captioning Video Gets Easier By Paul Crichton. "Video is now everywhere on the web, so it is great to be able to report on a couple of closed captioning tools that could help to transform watching video online for the hearing impaired. Dotsub is a tool that allows people to add captioning to video...Project ReadOn has a different approach to closed captioning. Their website is like YouTube, and you access all the videos from that central location. But the biggest difference is that Project ReadOn provide the captioning..." http://tinyurl.com/ytqely Responsibilities in Accessibility By Alastair Campbell. "...The W3C has defined what to do for accessibility at each 'end' (i.e. client side or web site), but there is quite a lot of overlap, and scant advice on who should be responsible for what. I'm going to try and show who's responsible now, and where things should go..." http://alastairc.ac/2007/05/responsibilities-in-accessibility/ Interview with Judy Brewer and the WCAG WG By Jared Smith. "Following a conversation with Judy Brewer from the W3C back in February, Jared Smith had the chance to interview her and submit some probing questions to the WCAG Working Group about what's happening with WCAG 2.0. See the interview with Judy Brewer and the WCAG Working Group over at WaSP..." http://www.webstandards.org/learn/articles/askw3c/may2007/ Lawyer Warns that PDFs Fail on Accessibility By David Meyer. "PDF documents on Web sites and Intranets need to be accompanied by accessible HTML or text versions if they are to comply with disability legislation, a leading technology lawyer has claimed." http://tinyurl.com/yntste HTML Email: Accessibility By Stephanie Deschamps and Jean-Marc Bassin. "Considering that the HTML email WG will try to define new common grounds for HTML-based emails, we aim at providing a tentative state of the art and list of minimal requirements as seen from an accessibility point of view..." http://www.nota-bene.org/misc/w3c_html_email_accessibility/index.html The Barrier of Foreign Words By Mike Davies. "...One universalist in particular, Jack Pickard, would like you to believe that foreign words are easy to spot and do not need a change in language to be marked up for a given piece of text to be accessible. The real world usage of language provides sufficient evidence to demolish that argument. In short, he says WCAG Checkpoint 4.1 (clearly identifying the change of natural language in a document) isn't necessary to remove an impossible barrier to accessibility...." http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/access/TheBarrierOfForeignWords Accessibility In My Own (Foreign) Words By Jack Pickard. "I noted earlier today that Mike Davies from Isolani has picked up on a piece I wrote in October last year called Be Accessible, Don't Meet Guidelines, in which I tried to argue that WCAG was not infallible, and that it was more important to recognize the real-world accessibility needs of website users than it was to comply with every WCAG guideline..." http://tinyurl.com/2modcj Be Accessible, Don't Meet Guidelines By Mel Pedley. "Some time ago, Jack Pickard published a very interesting piece in which he questioned whether too much emphasis was being placed on sites failing 1 or 2 WAI checkpoints. Having had this article drawn to my attention only recently, I felt he had some very good points to make and that, overall, it is exactly this kind of web accessibility discussion we need. Lip service to any set of binary checkpoints is Bad and, far from undermining the accessibility arguments, playing Devil's Advocate from time to time can only strengthen - not weaken - the case for all sites to be as accessible as possible..." http://blackwidows.co.uk/blog/?p=123 +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. CSS Hover Effect By Veerle Pieters. "I would like to share some insight on a piece of CSS I've used for the homepage for a website a while ago that I've built together with Roger Johansson. I'm talking about the hover effect on the 4 tabbed boxes shown on this page..." http://veerle.duoh.com/blog/comments/css_hover_effect/ 70 Expert Ideas For Better CSS Coding By Vitaly Friedman and Sven Lennartz. "We've taken a close look at some of the most interesting and useful CSS tricks, tips, ideas, methods, techniques and coding solutions and listed them below. We also included some basic techniques you can probably use in every project you are developing, but which are hard to find once you need them. And what has come out of it is an overview of over 70 expert tips, which can improve your efficiency of CSS-coding. You might be willing to check out the list of references and related articles in the end of this post." http://tinyurl.com/28ohy8 +03: DREAMWEAVER. Dreamweaver CSS3 Help Resource Center By Adobe. http://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/Dreamweaver/9.0/index.html Features Fortify Dreamweaver CS3 Upgrade By David Sawyer McFarland. "With its combination of accurate visual design, excellent CSS tools, and strong site-management features, Dreamweaver continues to be the premier Web-design program. If you're not on an Intel Mac, don't need the fancy user-interface widgets offered by the Spry framework, and don't have trouble with your CSS layouts, you may not find the CS3 debut that enticing. However, if you're using an Intel Mac, are hoping to ease the frustration of building CSS-based Web layouts, or want to add responsive user-interface controls such as complex, multi-layered drop-down menus, Dreamweaver CS3 is quite a worthy upgrade." http://www.computerpartner.nl/article.php?news=int&id=5037 +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. When Observing Users is not Enough: 10 Guidelines for Getting More Out of Users' Verbal Comments By Isabelle Peyrichoux. "...Observational and verbal data are more reliable in combination than when used separately." http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article3867.asp +05: FLASH. Captioning Flash Video with Captionate and the Captioning-Supported FLVPlayback Component Skins By Michael Jordan. "The FLVPlayback component skins with captioning support make it easy to provide captions for Flash video without having to write a lot of ActionScript code. The skins were originally developed to display captions embedded in FLV (Flash video) files using Captionate, but they will also display captions embedded in specially formatted Flash Video Encoder or ActionScript cue points. This tutorial teaches you how to add captions to your Flash video files using Captionate or cue points, and how to display those captions in a Flash movie using the FLVPlayback component and the FLVPlayback component skins with captioning support." http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/video_captionate.html +06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. The No-Knead Approach to Information Architecture, 4 of 5 By Lou Rosenfeld. "...Now comes the fun part, Step #3: determine each audience's primary tasks and information needs. Duh. I realize that this sounds painfully obvious. But can you describe -- with even minimal confidence -- the major needs that each of your primary audiences wants from your site? It boggles the mind how few people responsible for web sites and Intranets -- Web masters, managers, product developers, information architects -- have a reasonable answer..." http://tinyurl.com/yw9tc9 +07: MISCELLANEOUS. Educate Your Stakeholders! By Shane Diffily. "Who decides what's best for a website? Highly skilled professionals who work with the site's users and serve as their advocates? Or schmucks with money? Most often, it's the latter. That's why a web designer's first job is to educate the people who hold the purse strings." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/educatingstakeholders Stand and Deliver By David Sleight. "You've got thirty seconds to sell your work to the well dressed nemesis who's paying you. Handle the next few moments gracefully, and the project will be one you can be proud of. Flub an answer, and you can kiss excellence goodbye. Are you prepared? Can you deliver?" http://www.alistapart.com/articles/standanddeliver 10 Steps to Create a High-Quality Website By Jens Meiert. "...This article outlines - without attempting to be comprehensive - the ten most important steps to create a good website. A checklist to be collected and shared..." http://tinyurl.com/ynmpun +08: PHP. Edit and Enhance Your Images By Paul Hudson. "Paul Hudson illustrates how to warp, stretch, rotate and improve your existing artwork using PHP, saving your artists hours of work in the process." http://www.netmag.co.uk/zine/home/edit-and-enhance-your-images Code Like A Girl By Kathy Sierra. "...I think 'girl code' is quite a compliment. Because caring about things like beauty makes us better programmers and engineers. We make better things. Things that aren't just functional, but easy to read, elegantly maintainable, easier--and more joyful--to use, and sometimes flat-out sexy. A passion for aesthetics can mean the difference between code that others enjoy working on vs. code that's stressful to look at. And whether we like it or not, most of the world associates an appreciation for beauty more with women than men (especially geek men). Women may have a genetic advantage here..." http://tinyurl.com/o8tpu Is PHP Insecure? By Alistair 'Woolie' Wooldrige. "Its quite a common occurrence to hear that PHP has been described as 'Insecure'. You will hear this among many developers that choose not to use PHP. However, this bad light has been created by it's users. Let me explain..." http://woolie.co.uk/archives/169 +09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Forward Towards the Past By Tommy Olsson. "I'm reading worrying things about the discussions about the next version of HTML, known as HTML5. It looks to me as if things are going in the wrong direction..." http://tinyurl.com/23xxxn Results of HTML 5 Text, Editor, Name Questions By Dan Connolly. "...while the survey results don't show consensus, it seems that we have a critical mass of support and a feasible means to address the remaining objections over time. We are resolved, then, that the W3C's next-generation HTML specification be named "HTML 5" and to start review of the text of the HTML 5 and WF2 specifications, and we welcome Ian Hickson and Dave Hyatt as editors..." http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007May/0909.html Future of the Web Page By Chris Lilley, Dave Raggett, Bert Bos, Michael Cooper, and Arun Ranganathan. Slides from sessions at the WWW 2007 conference. http://www.w3.org/2007/05/w3c-track.html#web-page Six Months Later: The New HTML Working Group By Kevin Yank. "Unlike most W3C working groups, the new HTML working group's charter welcomes the scrutiny and participation of the general public. Anyone can join the working group, post to the mailing list, chime in on teleconferences, and vote on what goes into the final spec." http://tinyurl.com/yuqed8 Browsers Will Treat All Versions of HTML as HTML 5 By Roger Johansson. "...as soon as a Web browser claims to support HTML 5, it is required to treat all content served as text/html (which means all HTML and nearly all XHTML) as HTML 5. I'm not sure if I think that is actually a good thing or not, but it does explain what 'Don't Break The Web' means..." http://tinyurl.com/27fvt8 An HTML5 Conformance Checker By Henri Sivonen. "Master's thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Technology..." http://hsivonen.iki.fi/thesis/html5-conformance-checker.html HTML 5 Shall Not Murder Web Standards By Sean Fraser. "...Web Standards philosophy and principles cease when advocacy ceases. The W3C HTML WG has to cater to authors, web developers, UAs and Everyone else who will use HTML5. Error handling will continue to make Web Standards Life difficult. Nonconforming content on other sites has not harmed me; error handling precludes harmfulness for User Agents. That's that. Regardless. I'll continue pontificating and practicing Web Standards..." http://tinyurl.com/yu36jy Microformats: What They Are and How To Use Them By Vitaly Friedman and Sven Lennartz. "...One of the new terms on the horizon is Microformats...formats, which make it possible to create meta-content which can be not only read, but also understood by machines (which was the basic idea of Semantic Web, which is not Web 2.0). This post is supposed to give you an idea, what Microformats actually mean, which advantages they have and how you can use them to enrich your content and make it more visible and understandable for search engines..." http://tinyurl.com/2fjqjb +10: TOOLS. PHP Code Beautifier By tote-taste. "This tool is designed to beautify PHP code, applying most of the PEAR standard requirements to it. It can even process really scrambled scripts, e.g. all code in one line, and thus may help you to get scripts into a more readable form." http://www.tote-taste.de/X-Project/beautify/ +11: TYPOGRAPHY. The Technology of Text By Kevin Larson. "If you're reading this article on your computer, there's a good chance you won't get all the way to the end. Not because you won't find it utterly fascinating (trust me!), but because it will be hard on your eyes. It's not sentimentality that makes most people prefer reading books and magazines to squinting at their laptops. The quality of computer text is awful. It doesn't have to be. The chief problem is the low resolution of computer screens. The color LCD screens on most laptops and desktops today have a resolution of only about 100 pixels per inch. You need at least two or three times that many pixels to begin to approach the quality of the printed page. The output of even a cheap laser printer is six times as good. What's more, screen resolutions have hardly budged in the last several years..." http://spectrum.ieee.org/print/5049 +12: USABILITY. Hidden Functionality - Hints And Affordance By Jesper Ronn-Jensen. " Many of today have extremely advanced features and functionality. But the trend towards simpler, slicker user interfaces points towards hiding some of the functionality. Hiding functionality is - in my point of view - a very good thing for usability. A usable website (or application) is: easy to use, easy to learn, hard to make errors in..." http://tinyurl.com/2zhuwp When ROI Isn't Enough: Making Persuasive Cases for User-Centered Design By Colleen Jones. "Basic concepts from the fields of rhetoric and argumentation are useful tools for UX professionals who realize that the ROI argument does not fit all situations. These tools apply to a wide range of circumstances, whether arguing for organizational support of a UCD process or defending a specific UCD decision for a product user interface. Rhetoric offers a persuasive mind set, raising awareness of our audiences and the range of persuasive appeals. This awareness informs the strategy and language we use in our cases for UCD. Argumentation emphasizes structure, ensuring the content of the case-its reasoning-is thorough and rational. Equipped with these tools, UX professionals can become powerful influencers for UCD." http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000189.php Thin Slicing: Inside or Outside the World of User Experience? By Susan Weinschenk. "...Susan Weinschenk...looks at research showing that users make quick judgments on very little information and how this affects the design of the online experience." http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/apr07.asp +13: XML. Adobe to Discontinue Adobe SVG Viewer By Adobe. "Adobe has decided to discontinue support for Adobe SVG Viewer..." http://www.adobe.com/svg/eol.html SVG Please? By Dave Shea. "I recently stumbled over a little piece of information that, while quite stale, still seems widely underreported in the places I hang out. Adobe announced some time last fall that its SVG Viewer is dead and gone as of January 1, 2008. Is anyone really surprised? Given that SVG was Adobe's meager foothold in the web-based vector market, easily dwarfed by Flash, and given that Adobe now owns Flash, continuing to produce a competitor seems a little self-defeating from a business perspective. It's been more or less inevitable since the completed merger that this day would come. But it comes at an interesting time. Or, more like an inconvenient time. Recent versions of Firefox have natively supported SVG since version 1.5. Opera 8 added support as well..." http://mezzoblue.com/archives/2007/05/08/svg_please/ [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.]