+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 5, Issue 48, May 17, 2007. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 48 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: EVENTS. 04: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 05: JAVASCRIPT. 06: MISCELLANEOUS. 07: NAVIGATION. 08: PHP. 09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 10: TOOLS. 11: USABILITY. 12: XML. SECTION TWO: 13: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Too Much Accessibility - Title Attributes By Bim Egan. Time to vent some steam about the Title attribute. This, almost more than any other item in the web author's toolbox, seems to be misunderstood and overused..." http://tinyurl.com/25lf7a I'm Not Blind. Why Should I Tag? By Adobe. "The structure in tagged PDFs offers everyday functionality to any Acrobat user..." http://tinyurl.com/26v4d4 PDF/A: PDF for Archiving By Adobe. The PDF archiving standard requires tags. http://blogs.adobe.com/acrolaw/2007/01/pdfa_pdf_for_ar.html#more +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Formal Weirdness By Eric A. Meyer. "...the handling of form control styling is going to be a very unstable branch of our field for the foreseeable future. Herein, I scratch the surface of this entire mess. Fair warning up front: this is going to be a long one..." http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/05/15/formal-weirdness/ Breaking Out of the Box By Jina Bolton. "One of the most commonly used arguments regarding CSS that I hear from designers who don't like web standards is, 'CSS designs are so boring. They're too boxy.' I can't help but find this statement to be a bit silly. To me, that's like saying buildings built with wood are boxy. An architect can create a boring-looking building. But, using the same tools, an architect can create a stunning work of art. It all depends on creativity and experimentation..." http://www.sitepoint.com/print/breaking-out-of-the-box Make Your Site Mobile Friendly By Virginia DeBolt. "...Clean, semantic markup is crucial when you consider the variety found in mobile devices. Some phones may only understand WAP. More capable phones may understand WAP2, which opens them up to rendering websites with XHTML and CSS. Some devices may display only monochromatic screen colors, while others may have full color. Some devices support CSS, some do not. Some only understand HTML 3.2, while others understand XHTML. Some devices understand tables, floats, frames, JavaScript, and dynamic menus, but many do not. Most devices don't support cookies. Devices at the high end of the mobile market such as Black Berry, Palm, or the upcoming iPhone are highly capable and support nearly as much as a standard computer..." http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/css/make-your-site-mobile-friendly How CSS Benefits in SEO By Harry Smith. "...When a search engine, such as Google, sends a spider to crawl your website, it looks through the code of your webpage they actually read certain elements of your HTML code. Certain HTML code holds more weight than other tags. So it is necessary to have a clean and readable code which is easy to understand by spiders, if there are unnecessary text and tags in your HTML file, spiders will have to struggle to understand that page is related to a particular search keyword. Using CSS you will be able to change the code layout without destroying the actual visual layout and will get an clean html code which will result to better search engine rankings..." http://blog.webhosting.uk.com/2007/04/12/how-css-benefits-in-seo/ +03: EVENTS. Accessibility, Beyond the Basics June 28, July 28, August 30, and September 27, 2007. London, United Kingdom http://tinyurl.com/k65n3 Demystifying Accessibility July 19, September 13, and November 15, 2007. London, United Kingdom http://tinyurl.com/jqdeh BlogHer Conference '07 July 27-29, 2007. Chicago, Illinois U.S.A. http://www.acteva.com/booking.cfm?bevaID=132405 CHI 2008 April 5-10, 2008. Florence, Italy http://www.chi2008.org/ +04: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Anyone for a Game of Cards? By Ruth Stalker-Firth. "Although a computerized version of card sorting might help you to quickly analyze the results, it is much better from a user point of view to sort physical cards. Users enjoy the tangible aspect of sorting cards; they like to move the cards around, scribble on them, chew them, and throw them away. Don't deprive them of this feeling." http://www.digital-web.com/articles/game_of_cards/ +05: JAVASCRIPT. I Object By Douglas Crockford. "One of the two really clever ideas in JavaScript is that objects are dynamic collections with differential inheritance..." http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/05/10/i-object/ Sorting Javascript Arrays By Bas. "Well, it's been a while since my last post. I couldn't find any interesting subjects to write about. Anyway, today I'll write about sorting arrays. I'll start with sorting arrays numerically and alphabetically, to introduce you some basic techniques. After that I'll show you how to sort a multidimensional array..." http://solutoire.com/2007/05/02/sorting-javascript-arrays/ +06: MISCELLANEOUS. Five Pertinent Questions for John Allsopp By Carolyn Wood. "John Allsopp, well-known developer and web standards man, just came out with a new book, Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0. If you are a web designer, do you need this book? Is working with microformats the next essential step in your development as a web professional? What difference will microformats really make in the web world? We pressed John for the answers until he cried out for mercy in this, the first short and incisive interview in our Five Pertinent Questions column." http://www.digital-web.com/articles/5_questions_john_allsopp/ Giants Talk "Well known experts from all over the world, in a series of interviews about usability conducted by UPA Israel members." http://www.wudisrael.com/giants.htm Creating for the Web By Adriana de Barros and Nuno Martins. Lynda Weinman, Todd Purgason, Jakob Nielsen and others answer questions about "creating for the web." http://www.scene360.com/ARTdirect_webdesign_function_part01.html +07: NAVIGATION. Command Links By Jakob Nielsen. "Application commands can be presented as buttons or as links, which offer more room for explanation. For primary commands, however, buttons are still best." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/command-links.html Search Engine Friendly vs. Search Engine Optimized By Joe Dolson. "The links between accessibility and search marketing are frequently explored: creating a universally accessible website has a number of significant benefits for search marketing. After all, many of the features which make a website accessible (using text instead of images, ensuring the ability of non-visual tools to fully access content, etc.) are also characteristics of a website which has been optimized for search. However, there's a huge difference between search engine optimization and search engine friendly. What most accessible developers create are search engine friendly sites, not optimized sites..." http://tinyurl.com/3c9oa2 Should All Links be Underlined? By Beth A. Martin "...Links should be organized and presented in such a way that users should be able to intuit 'clickability.' The specific solution, underlined or not, is less important than consistently using one or the other. For example, if no underlining is preferred, this can be accomplished with (unlinked) bulleted text below a title with blue text." http://www.usability.gov/pubs/052007news.html Improve Usability With Friendly URLs By Tony Patton. "Web addresses that are lengthy are harder for users to remember and can be difficult to type. Tony Patton discusses mapping URLs, dealing with dynamic content, and using a third-party service to shorten the URL for you." http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-6183568.html How to Professionally Manage Search By Gerry McGovern. "To manage search on your website, don't manage the technology or the content. Manage the task. Success is about finding, not searching." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2007/nt-2007-05-14-search.htm +08: PHP. Security Techniques By Larry Ullman. "With more and more personal information being stored on the Web, such as credit card data, social security numbers, etc. - today's PHP developer cannot afford to be ignorant when it comes to security, but many programmers fail to understand it's importance. This week you'll learn how to make your applications more secure." http://www.webreference.com/programming/php/php5-advanced/index.html +09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Is HTML 5 a Slippery Slope? By Roger Johansson. "... realize that standardized error handling in HTML is a good thing for browser vendors. But I doubt it will do anything to encourage web developers to produce better (as in cleaner, more accessible, easier to maintain) markup. In fact, it may have the opposite effect..." http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200705/is_html_5_a_slippery_slope/ Another Look at HTML 5 By Roger Johansson. "...a potentially dangerous principle is 'Pave the cowpaths', which says: 'When a practice is already widespread among authors, consider adopting it rather than forbidding it or inventing something new.' Depending on how you interpret that, it can lead to insanity...Some of my previous worries and complaints are no doubt caused by me misreading the HTML 5 specification. My only excuse is that I find it very, very difficult to read since information that is only intended for browser developers is mixed with information that is important to authors (designers, developers, writers, CMS developers, etc.)...Specifications and design principles aside, I think a more disturbing issue is the really poor attitude some members of the HTML Working Group have. I'm not going to quote anyone or name any names, but it is something I felt from the moment I joined the working group mailing list..." http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200705/another_look_at_html_5/ +10: TOOLS. 'Quick' and dirty JSON Editor "Click one of the sample buttons to load a JSON sample into the textarea, next..." http://braincast.nl/samples/jsoneditor/ +11: USABILITY. Web 2.0 'Neglecting Good Design' By BBC News. "Hype about Web 2.0 is making web firms neglect the basics of good design, web usability guru Jakob Nielsen has said." http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6653119.stm Visual-Syntactic Text Formatting: A New Method to Enhance Online Reading By Stan Walker, Phil Schloss, Charles R. Fletcher, Charles A. Vogel, and Randall C. Walker. "A new process, visual-syntactic text formatting (VSTF), transforms block-shaped text into cascading patterns that help readers identify grammatical structure. The new method integrates converging evidence from educational, visual, and cognitive research, and is made feasible through computer-executed algorithms and electronic displays. Among college readers, the VSTF method instantly increased reading comprehension and efficiency of reading online text, while reducing eyestrain. Among high school students, who read with the format over an entire academic year, the VSTF method increased both academic achievement and long-term reading proficiency by more than a full standard deviation over randomized controls." http://www.readingonline.org/articles/r_walker/ +12: XML. Why Microsoft Might Not Embrace XHTML (and then again they might) By Mark Birbeck. "As usual I've had my thoughts provoked by Kurt Cagle. I missed the post originally, but T. V. Raman pointed out to me that a month or so ago Kurt wrote about why Microsoft should embrace XHTML. Actually, the post is entitled Why XHTML Can Save Internet Explorer, but since I'm not really sure what IE is being saved from, I'm sticking to Kurt's main point which is that IE developers have an opportunity to move their browser on, but only if they embrace XHTML..." http://tinyurl.com/224str [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +13: 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.]