+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 6, Issue 16, October 12, 2007. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 16 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: COLOR. 04: EVENTS. 05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 06: JAVASCRIPT. 07: MISCELLANEOUS. 08: PHP. 09: TOOLS. 10: TYPOGRAPHY. 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. Is This the Test Case We've All Been Waiting For? By Ian Lloyd. "Summary: Target case now open for class action and every blind person in the U.S. who has tried to access Target.com can become a plaintiff..." http://accessify.com/news/2007/10/court-approves-target-class-action/ Is the Target Lawsuit Frivolous? By Mike Cherim. "Last week all hell broke loose. For web accessibility there was a triumph of sorts. And in the world of web-is-money-first a small blow that is feared to mushroom into a costly problem. Some Internet merchants may feel they have better things to do than to acknowledge and cater to the needs of a 'small' user group like the disabled ? specifically the blind in the Target case (to learn more, links are provided later in this entry). Some people feel this lawsuit is frivolous and that private businesses should be left to decide on their own whether or not they accommodate these small user groups. Others, meanwhile, think the lawsuit is a good move and quite necessary." http://accessites.org/site/2007/10/is-the-target-lawsuit-frivolous/ Update on the Target Accessibility Lawsuit By Roger Johansson. "...requiring websites to be accessible does not make building them too expensive or create an artificial barrier to entry. Neither does it mean websites have to be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator or that you cannot use images, Flash, JavaScript, or Ajax. What it does mean is that people who design and program websites need to be aware of modern best practices in web design and development. Which we all should anyway, since it's part of our job." http://tinyurl.com/2gzbf3 Support And Educate By Mel Pedley. "Grant Broome has recently expressed some reservations over the suggestion that site developers abandon text-sizing widgets in favor of educating users instead. He's worried that this approach is overly biased. Personally, I don't see this discussion as a particularly biased view. More of a natural maturing within the web accessibility development sector..." http://blackwidows.co.uk/blog/?p=156 Breaking CAPTCHAs By Mel Pedley. "One of the myths surrounding CAPTCHAs is that they offer 100% protection against the abuse of web site facilities by automated systems. That's a reassuring idea but is it really true in practice?" http://blackwidows.co.uk/blog/?p=147 Why I Hate Online Captioning By Joe Clark. Speaking notes from An Event Apart available http://joeclark.org/appearances/AEA/2007/ Alternative Text for Complex Graphics By Zoe Gillenwater. "Providing alternative text for images, a web accessibility cornerstone, is usually accomplished using the alt attribute. However, sometimes the amount of information that an image conveys is huge, much more than is useful in an alt attribute. For instance, charts, graphs, maps and diagrams can contain great amounts of information that would take several hundred words to adequately convey. While there's no limit on the amount of characters you can place in an alt attribute, they are meant to be kept very short and cannot contain additional (X)HTML markup within the attribute value itself. This can really limit your ability to adequately describe complex images. In this article, you'll learn a few ways to get around these limitations of the alt attribute to provide appropriate text equivalents for complex graphics in alternative ways..." http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=4CB93 Mexico Signs First Manifesto on Usability and Accessibility for Mexican Government Websites By Luis Carlos Aceves. "...first Manifesto on Usability and Accessibility for Mexican Government Websites was created and signed. It collected ideas from participants and experts of UA web 2007, and was signed by 23 Mexican states and 3 municipalities..." http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article4105.asp +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Bottom Margins of Paragraphs and Lists By Marko Dugonjic. "Creating the perfect vertical space on the screen is easy. With a few lines of CSS, you'll have a great typography foundation for your web site. Let's begin..." http://tinyurl.com/2gh8jx Text-Shadow, Photoshop Like Effects Using CSS By css3.info. "CSS3 finally eliminates the need for Photoshop when all you want to do is a simple shadow..." http://www.css3.info/preview/text-shadow/ +03: COLOR. Using Color in Information Display Graphics By National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). "This site provides a guide to color design for information visualization..." http://colorusage.arc.nasa.gov/ +04: EVENTS. Yggdrasil 2007 October 15-16, 2007. Lillehammer, Norway http://dataforeningen.no/yggdrasil/-mglHK3R.ips +05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. The Information Architect as Change Agent By Matthew C. Clarke. "...In this article I argue, with a bit of logic and a bit of experience, that IAs can do their jobs better if they understand organizational change management, even if they don't need to be change management specialists. I'll also suggest a variety of concepts and practices that can (hopefully) help IAs in their change agent role, and I promise to throw in something entertaining as well..." http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/the-information +06: JAVASCRIPT. jQuery Crash Course By Nathan Smith. "When it comes to the thorny subject of JavaScript libraries, picking the right one for you can be a difficult decision. File size or features, animations or AJAX, global namespace pollution or... whatever the opposite of that is. Digital Web columnist Nathan Smith thinks he's found his ideal partner in jQuery, and takes to the sky to prove it." http://www.digital-web.com/articles/jquery_crash_course/ Roll Out Your Own JavaScript Interfaces By Dustin Diaz. There are times when using a JavaScript library is called for. Building large web applications that use a wide array of utility functions that help aid in developing multi-tiered class systems, advanced UI components, complex event models, and heavy use of DOM scripting helpers. Yep. Those are all great. However, there are other times when you don't need all that. And often what we end up doing is just importing a few of our favorite functions as globals, and work off those. But what ends up happening in this case is that we lose the particular style that these libraries offer. For instance, I'd still like to be able to do something like this without a library." http://www.dustindiaz.com/roll-out-your-own-interface/ +07: MISCELLANEOUS. Today's Web 3.0 Nonsense Blogstorm By Tim O'Reilly. "If Web 2.0 was so hot, how about Web 3.0?..." http://tinyurl.com/38cl6f Thinking Outside the Web, PodCast and Transcript By Christy Dena. "The following is a presentation recorded at the Australian Museum on 2 August 2007 for the Web Standards Group. The presenter was Christy Dena speaking on "Thinking Outside the Web: How the Entertainment Industry is Integrating All Media and Why". Christy is a Universe Creator & Transmodiologist. She is an industry strategist, mentor, designer and PhD researcher of cross-media entertainment. Currently Christy runs www.Cross-MediaEntertainment.com." http://webstandardsgroup.org/audio/transcript.cfm?cast_id=21 Ambient Personalization, PodCast and Transcript By Scott Parsons. "The following is a presentation recorded at the Australian Museum on 2 August 2007 for the Web Standards Group. The presenter was Scott Parsons speaking on Ambient Personalization: Applying what we can learn about a user's (and groups of users) behavior, to improve their experience of a site. Scott Parsons is an experienced - user experience and web design professional who has worked in NZ, UK and Australia for many media and advertising companies. He specializes in usability and user centered design, while keeping up with future trends and web design techniques." http://webstandardsgroup.org/audio/transcript.cfm?cast_id=22 +08: PHP. PHP 4 End of Life Draws Near By Paul Davis. "PHP.net announced (a while back) that PHP 4 is at end of life and will end all support by the end of the year (2007). If you are still using PHP v4 and haven't considered an upgrade, now would be a good time to do so..." http://www.communitymx.com/blog/index.cfm?newsid=879 Improved Error Messages in PHP By Jeff Moore. "...One more reason to ditch PHP 4 and go php 5." http://tinyurl.com/2h9vt9 +09: TOOLS. Font Tester By fonttester.com. "Font Tester is a free online font comparison tool. It allows you to easily preview and compare different fonts side by side with various CSS font styles applied to them..." http://www.fonttester.com/ Designer Plaything By Matthew O'Donoghue. "A tool designers and clients to experiment with different typography and colour combinations on a web page as well as check for colour accessibility level." http://www.designerplaything.co.uk/ PHPform - Create HTML Form in Seconds By appnitro. "Create a HTML form in seconds." http://www.phpform.org/ +10: TYPOGRAPHY. Downloadable Fonts - Safari now supports CSS @font-face rules By Dave Hyatt. "WebKit now supports CSS @font-face rules. With font face rules you can specify downloadable custom fonts on your Web pages or alias one font to another..." http://webkit.org/blog/124/downloadable-fonts/ Fonts in Your Face By Jon Hicks. "...First problem, yes this will mean some people will specify unreadable/unsuitable type for body copy, but what's new? It simply means that there will be a wider variety of unreadable fonts to choose from. Secondly, and this is the real sticking point, font licensing..." http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/fonts-in-your-face A Type In the Right Direction? Dan Cederholm. "...While this certainly could be true for many, it doesn't mean that web designers can't become good typographers ? especially when given the chance with more of a variety of typefaces to work with. The worry that all web pages will be suddenly ruined with crappy free fonts everywhere overshadows the fact that some good can come out of the ability to at least have a choice to use those crappy (and/or potential useful) fonts. Give us all a chance, eh?..." http://www.simplebits.com/notebook/2007/10/05/fonts.html The Resurrection of Downloadable Web Fonts By Roger Johansson. "...I can see how useful this can be, though I do worry that many will not be able to use this tool responsibly. Then again, that applies to most tools." http://tinyurl.com/yug6cx Arial Versus Helvetica By John Boardley. "...Today we're going to de-robe two popular typefaces, namely Arial and Helvetica - faces that are often confused, and often the subjects of mistaken identity. But first let me re-introduce you to these two popular faces..." http://ilovetypography.com/2007/10/06/arial-versus-helvetica/ +11: USABILITY. Visualizing Fitts's Law By Kevin Hale. "In preparation for the redesigns and overhauls we implemented in Wufoo, I took some time to revisit a few HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) fundamentals with the hopes of gleaning something new out of the decades of research dedicated to making interfaces easier to use. One thing that surprised me was how most of the material was pretty dense, heavily geared towards mathematicians it seemed and written in the impenetrable language of the academic elite. You'd think that if they'd really wanted to make an impact (especially on designers), they'd create documents that were a bit easier to digest." http://particletree.com/features/visualizing-fittss-law/ Landing Page Confusion By Adam Lapp and Bob Kemper. "...So, how does having more than one objective to a page affect its performance? The experiments in this brief are consistent with a large body of research conducted over a long period of time in concluding that pages that are focused on one primary objective significantly outperform those that do not." http://tinyurl.com/3x7x22 30 Usability Issues To Be Aware Of By Vitaly Friedman and Sven Lennartz. "...In this article we present 30 important usability issues, terms, rules and principles which are usually forgotten, ignored or misunderstood. What is the difference between readability and legibility? What exactly does 80/20 or Pareto principle mean? What is meant with minesweeping and satisficing? And what is Progressive Enhancement and Graceful Degradation? OK, it's time to dive in..." http://tinyurl.com/27kzzw Intranet Usability Shows Huge Advances By Jakob Nielsen. Measured usability improved by 44% compared to our last large-scale intranet study. The new research identified 5 times the previous number of intranet design guidelines." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/intranet-usability.html Splash Pages: Do We Really Need Them? By Vitaly Friedman and Sven Lennartz. "Yes, sometimes we do. Should we use them? No, we probably shouldn't...users literally can't stand them, because splash pages usually take a long time to load and provide (almost) no navigation options..." http://tinyurl.com/2zgzvs +12: XML. Shorttags - the odd side of HTML 4.01 By Olivier Thereaux. "HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0? The choice between the two popular ways of authoring for the web seldom yields a clear answer: after all, the two languages share the same semantics, and the differences are mostly about the writing style. Advocates of the XHTML style will hail the potential of XML for transformation and processing. Advocates of HTML 4.01 will generally reply that Internet Explorer, as of today, does not recognize the preferred media type for XHTML. As a result, most people serve XHTML in a way tantamount to serving tag soup to browsers: in that logic, using HTML 4.01 is the actually 'strict' choice. Both are quite correct, but for anyone authoring (X)HTML by hand, there is one very good reason, often overlooked, to prefer the XHTML syntax to the 'classic' HTML one: shorttags..." http://www.w3.org/QA/2007/10/shorttags.html [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.]