+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 6, Issue 12, September 13, 2007. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 12 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: EVALUATION & TESTING. 04: EVENTS. 05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 06: JAVASCRIPT. 07: MISCELLANEOUS. 08: PHP. 09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 10: TYPOGRAPHY. 11: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 12: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Tips for Keeping Forms Accessible By Mike Cherim. "...This article's main objective will be to offer some tips for keeping your forms accessible, and in some cases, making them even more accessible than they are by default. So, here are the tips, in no particular order. Oh, and try not to mind my headingsÉ I was feeling creative..." http://green-beast.com/blog/?p=206 Can the alt Attribute Be Omitted Without Hurting Accessibility? By Roger Johansson. "In the current editor's draft of HTML 5, it is suggested that the alt attribute for img elements should no longer be required...Making the alt attribute optional won't help ? it will only lead to lazy and ignorant authors and tool vendors ignoring it completely." http://tinyurl.com/2hbwhv The Price of Omitting the alt By Mike Davies. "There's an ongoing, loud and sometimes fraught, argument going on in the HTML 5 arena about whether to allow the alt attribute of an img to be omitted. The alt attribute is one of the main ways of specifying a short text-equivalent for an image, and one of two ways of directly relating an image to its equivalent textual representation. A textual equivalent to an image is absolutely essential so that the content conveyed by the image is accessible to human senses that cannot process images. Where we have content in a non-textual form, we need to provide an equivalent representation of that content in a textual form. On that point there is no argument. Why have the parties in the WHATWG decided that making the alt attribute optional is the way forward? What problem or issue does it solve?" http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/access/ThePriceOfOmittingTheAlt Metadata, Meta Tags, Meta What? By Matthew Steven Smith. "There would appear to be a certain amount of confusion about the terms "metadata" and "meta tags" - I know that it has confused me in the past so I am hoping that this article may make things a little more clear for those who are struggling with these meta-things." http://www.smiffysplace.com/metadata-meta-tags-meta-what Don't Make Users Take Responsibility For Our Problems By James Edwards. "But I still hate them because CAPTCHA tests are an accessibility black spot. What are you supposed to do if you have a reading or cognitive disability and simply can't make them out? Man, I have perfect 20-20 vision, and more often than not I can't read the damn things; it's very common for me to have to make three or four different attempts before I get it right." http://tinyurl.com/yrosr3 How Do Blind Users Access Graphical Information as Charts (Flowcharts, Organization chart) WebAIM Thread. "Does anyone can guide me. I am new in this mailing list and have few questions and hope to find some answers with you..." http://www.webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread.php?thread=3413&id=10973 Web Accessibility for Screen Magnifier Users By Trenton Moss. "The needs of screen magnifier users are overlooked when implementing web accessibility on to a website. Screen magnifiers are used by partially sighted web users to increase the size of on-screen elements. Some users will magnify the screen so that only three to four words are able to appear on the screen at any one time...The good news is that some of the basic principles for improving accessibility and usability for screen magnifiers users, also increase usability for everyone. To help, we've listed six ways to improve accessibility and usability for screen magnifier users... http://www.yop2.com/web-accessibility-for-screen-magnifier-users/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Web Design 101: Floats By Virginia DeBolt. "Following on from our previous Web Design 101 articles, this week, web-design educator and writer Virginia DeBolt turns her attention to a subject guaranteed to trip up any beginner - the CSS float property." http://www.digital-web.com/articles/web_design_101_floats/ Working with Multiple Style Sheets By Alejandro Gervasio. "As the Web evolves steadily, more and more sites are providing their visitors with different mechanisms for customizing their surfing experience. Nowadays, it's quite common to visit a web site that allows users to change background and foreground colors of specific sections of that site, alter the size of the font, or even modify the position of certain elements by implementing 'draggable' user interfaces..." http://tinyurl.com/3djszd Borders and More with Style Sheets By Danny Goodman. "...This article, the third part of a series, covers borders, bottom edges, and more..." http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/DHTML/Borders-and-More-with-Style-Sheets/ Cascading Style Sheets Bible - Part 1 By Daniel LaFluer. "10 General CSS Principals..." http://tinyurl.com/28fnex Cascading Style Sheets Bible - Part 2 By Daniel LaFluer. "Many Cascading Style Sheets properties need to have length measurements specified. So there are a lot of ways to use CSS to specify lengths..." http://tinyurl.com/yqemfg +03: EVALUATION & TESTING. But What Does It All Mean? Understanding eye-tracking results - Part 4 By Teresa Hernandez. "I believe I referred to 'scan paths' or 'fixation patterns' in earlier entries. Understanding scan paths are critical to interpreting eye movement results." http://blog.eyetools.net/eyetools_research/2007/09/but-what-does-2.html But What Does It All Mean? Understanding eye-tracking results - Part 5 By Teresa Hernandez. "In my previous post, I mentioned that heat maps do not have a time component. Several people have asked me to discuss this topic in a little more detail, so here we go..." http://blog.eyetools.net/eyetools_research/2007/09/but-what-does-1.html Making Personas Work for Your Web Site -- An Interview with Steve Mulder By Jared M. Spool. "Steve Mulder is Principal Consultant in the User Experience group at Molecular, an Internet consulting firm in Boston, and author of the book, The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web. UIE's Jared M. Spool recently had the chance to talk with Steve after his UIE Virtual Seminar, The User is Always Right: Making Personas Work for Your Web Site, to answer some additional questions about personas." http://www.uie.com/articles/mulder_interview/ Personas: Setting the Stage for Building Usable Information Sites By Alison J. Head. "Not long ago, I found myself at a newspaper with a Web team who wanted my usability services for a new entertainment site they were building. Our first meeting involved a spirited discussion about the site the team had long envisioned. As the talk of this feature, which functionality, and that content flew around the room, my stomach began to churn. Despite all the creative threads being spun, pulling together this site had the potential to be as awkward as needle pointing a three-piece suit. Something needed to be done very soon. Shortly thereafter, I introduced the Web team to Greg..." http://www.infotoday.com/Online/jul03/head.shtml +04: EVENTS. @media Ajax November 19-20, 2007. London, United Kingdom. http://www.vivabit.com/atmediaAjax/ HTML Beyond the Basics November 28, 2007. Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A. http://uttc.umn.edu/training/courses/description.jsp?secName=HTML201 OZCHI November 28-30, 2007. Adelaide, Australia. http://www.ozchi.org/mediawiki/index.php/OZCHI_2007 OZeWAI December 5-7, 2007. Melbourne, Australia http://www.ozewai.org/2007/index.html HotMobile 2008 February 25-26, 2008. Silverado Resort, California, U.S.A. http://prisms.cs.umass.edu/hotmobile2008/ EDUCAUSE Midwest Regional Conference March 17-19, 2008. Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?SECTION_ID=301&bhcp=1 +05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Card Sorting: Mistakes Made and Lessons Learned By Sam Ng. "Card sorting is a simple and effective method with which most of us are familiar. There are already some excellent resources on how to run a card sort and why you should do card sorting. This article, on the other hand, is a frank discussion of the lessons I've learned from running numerous card sorts over the years. By sharing these lessons learned along the way, I hope to enable others to dodge similar potholes when they venture down the card sorting path." http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000220.php +06: JAVASCRIPT. Five Quick JavaScript Tips By Andy Hume. "...This is a list of five things I often notice when looking at these little applications that could be improved. They may be obvious to some people, but certainly not to all. So, without more ado: five quick JavaScript tips to improve the quality of your code..." http://usabletype.com/weblog/five-quick-javascript-tips/ +07: MISCELLANEOUS. Feds OK Fee for Priority Web Traffic By Yahoo News. "The Justice Department on Thursday said Internet service providers should be allowed to charge a fee for priority Web traffic..." http://tinyurl.com/2752jb 13 Questions with Andy Budd By FocusMinded.com. "Andy Budd is a web designer, author, and speaker. People know him for his blog and most notably for his book CSS Mastery. He doesn't know this, but that happens to be the first book I ever purchased that had anything to do with CSS. I was not let down and you won't be either." http://tinyurl.com/35se6m Get Out from Behind the Curtain By Sarah B. Nelson. "Client input: positive process or creative noose? Many designers would probably say the latter. But it needn't be that way. Adaptive Path's Sarah Nelson shows how to create collaborative work sessions that take the clients' needs in hand while leaving creative control in yours." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/getoutfrombehindthecurtain +08: PHP. Class Inheritance with PHP By Kris Hadlock. "There are many benefits of inheritance with PHP, the most common is simplifying and reducing instances of redundant code. Class inheritance may sound complicated, but think of it this way. Consider a tree. A tree is made up of many parts, such as the roots that reside in the ground, the trunk, bark, branches, leaves, etc. Essentially inheritance is a connection between a child and its parent..." http://www.webreference.com/programming/php/class_inherit/index.html +09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Why We Need Standards Support in HTML email By David Greiner. "This is a post I've been meaning to write for a long time now. I've been delaying it purely because I wanted it to be perfect. I wanted to write with Zeldman-like virtue on why email, just like the web, needs to pay attention to web standards. Sadly, in the time between the idea for this post and actually getting it published, web standards support in email has gone seriously downhill. I can't delay it any longer..." http://tinyurl.com/23fy3m Help Improve Support for Web Standards in HTML email By Roger Johansson. "...ow can we make the situation improve? Probably not by arguing about how much better plain text is. What we need is to somehow make email client vendors improve support for Web Standards (most notably CSS) in their applications. There are different ways of doing that. One is to keep complaining, which probably won't work. Another way, which I think has at least some chance of actually working, is to help email client vendors..." http://tinyurl.com/28cyv8 Working for Standards By Lauren Wood. "...In the end, technical committees need members who can talk to other people; who listen to a different point of view and can respectfully disagree; who can admit when someone has a better idea; and who can check their ego at the door. Most organizations I've worked with want the specifications to reflect the consensus of the participants. Getting to that consensus is hard work, but it is also satisfying. I've always been surprised that more women aren't involved in standards work; it's a great way to contribute to the community and to benefit your company, regardless of its size." http://tinyurl.com/294kvc The Solution is a HTML 5 Apathetic Doctype By Steven Clark. "...For one, it seems slightly out of focus to be making alt attributes on images optional on the case study that Flickr can't possibly provide that - hey let's just dumb it down to the lowest common denominator! Then I started thinking - hey why not just dumb it down a few notches more because most pages out there are invalid crap anyway we can just let anything by. How? Well I am suggesting the HTML 5 Apathetic Doctype which particularly aims to give the tick of approval to anyone who cares enough to have a meeting to object to having to care about web standards. Yes its a free pass..." http://tinyurl.com/2g6odh iPhone-Specific Web Development Misguided By Christopher Schmitt. "...This is perceived overkill especially when you know the dirty little secret about optimizing a Web site for an iPhone: If a Web site is built on Web standards like XHTML+CSS, your Web site will be viewed on the iPhone without too much worry. The point is that I believe that there are more important issues at hand for making sure our Web sites can be seen by an Internet-enabled device other than a Web browser rather than forcing every other electronic doodad to have a Web browser on it. Don't get me wrong. I don't think you can over-sell the importance of Web standards, but reselling them is another thing altogether. If your Web site is geared to run on assistive technologies like screen readers, hand wands, eye tracking, voice recognition, or Braille displays, the odds are that you've opened your site up to more of an audience than the iPhone crowd. There's no reason we can't have both a great surfing experience on an iPhone as well as one on assistive technologies. I'm just asking for more balance." http://tinyurl.com/2ottzo +10: TYPOGRAPHY. Decline and Fall of the Ligature By John Boardley. "...A ligature is not simply two letters arbitrarily glued together. The two letters are crafted into a single letter (technically speaking a single glyph)..." http://ilovetypography.com/2007/09/09/decline-and-fall-of-the-ligature/ +11: USABILITY. Primary and Secondary Actions in Web Forms By Luke Wroblewski. "In recent months, I've been working on refining the design recommendations in my upcoming book, Web Form Design Best Practices, through actual usage data. To that end, I've had the pleasure of working with London-based usability firm Etre on several eye-tracking and usability studies focused on specific aspects of Web form design. One of these tests focused on the distinction between primary and secondary actions." http://www.lukew.com/resources/articles/PSactions.asp [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +12: 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.]