+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 6, Issue 48, May 23, 2008. 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: DREAMWEAVER. 04: EVALUATION & TESTING. 05: EVENTS. 06: JAVASCRIPT. 07: MISCELLANEOUS. 08: NAVIGATION. 09: PHP. 10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 11: TOOLS. 12: TYPOGRAPHY. 13: USABILITY. 14: XML. SECTION TWO: 15: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Mozilla Accessibility - Collecting Stories and Dreams By Aaron Leventhal. "I am interested to hear what impact people think Mozilla's work in accessibility has had on users developers, organizations, or the industry as a whole..." http://tinyurl.com/3o25kz +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Tip: Calculate the Specificity of CSS Selectors By Virginia DeBolt. "Have you ever added a new rule to your CSS stylesheet, but seen no change in the results on the page in the browser window? Maybe the new selector wasn't specific enough to overrule and existing rule in your stylesheet. Here's how to mathematically calculate the specific weight of your CSS selectors..." http://tinyurl.com/4lljwn CSS: Simple Rules for Better Organization and More Efficiency By Jens Meiert. "'Organization is not everything, but without organization, everything is nothing,' one of my teachers used to say, and right he is. Almost everything benefits from organization, and so does work with CSS - especially when working with many people..." http://tinyurl.com/446s9l CSS: Pseudo By James Payne. "We left off learning about the various positions in CSS. In this tutorial we will cover the pseudo classes and pseudo elements, which allow us to add special effects to our selectors. An example would be roll-over effects on hyperlinks, or making the first letter of a sentence larger and a different color than the rest of the text. We will begin our discussion by working with Pseudo-elements..." http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/Web-Style-Sheets/CSS-Pseudo/ Understanding CSS Positioning, Part 3 By Kilian Valkhof. "In part one and part two we've discussed the positioning, display and floats properties of CSS2. In the final part of this series, we'll discuss the new options CSS3 gives us: The advanced layout module and the grid positioning module." http://tinyurl.com/6ow9o9 Perfect Pagination Style Using CSS By Antonio Lupetti. "This tutorial explains how to design a pagination for search results or more in general to split a long list of records in more pages. It's a question I often receive, so I decided to publish a very simple post which explains how to design a perfect pagination style using some lines of HTML and CSS code." http://tinyurl.com/2ulcom +03: DREAMWEAVER. Taking a Fireworks Comp to a CSS-based Layout in Dreamweaver - Part 1, Initial Design By Sheri German and Gordon Mackay. "This three-part tutorial guides you through the complete process of using Fireworks and Dreamweaver to produce web standards pages. In Part 1, you will work in Fireworks to create the design, organize the layers, make the slices, and export them to a defined site. In Parts 2 and 3, you will work in Dreamweaver to build a CSS-based layout that entirely eschews the use of tables...." http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/dw_fw_css_pt1.html Introduction to CSS3 - Part 5, Multiple Columns By Design Shack. "Multiple columns are a major facet of laying out text - newspapers have used them for decades. So important are they that it is amazing that the current way to achieve a multi column layout is one of the most complex techniques for a new designer to grasp. CSS3 introduces a new module known, appropriately, as multi-column layout. It allows you to specify how many columns text should be split down into and how they should appear. As usual, examples can be found below..." http://tinyurl.com/5mtxyf +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. A Counter-Intuitive Approach to Evaluating Design Alternatives By Jared M. Spool. "...Teams have to make decisions. The most successful teams make informed decisions. While it may be counter-intuitive, focusing the study on the current design may be the best approach for this client. Asking each participant to somehow rank each design alternative will take more time and produce confusing results. We felt a study that looks primarily at the current design can give the team the most insight into what alternatives, if any, to choose." http://www.uie.com/articles/design_alternatives/ +05: EVENTS. eduWeb Conference July 21-23, 2008. Atlantic City New Jersey, U.S.A. http://www.eduwebconference.com +06: JAVASCRIPT. How to Avoid Automatic Type Conversion in JavaScript By Robert Nyman. "A very common problem when people code JavaScript, is that they don't take automatic type conversion into account. As a result, there are numerous weird errors and JavaScript is getting a lot of blame for being loosely typed. Therefore, I'd like to show you an easy way to avoid that problem..." http://tinyurl.com/6fdg2k Javascript Scoping Makes My Head Hurt By Piers Cawley. "Who came up with the javascript scoping rules? What were they smoking. Here's some Noddy Perl that demonstrates what I'm on about..." http://tinyurl.com/3jfdcq +07: MISCELLANEOUS. The Cure for Content-Delay Syndrome By Pepi Ronalds. "Clients love to write copy. Well, they love to plan to write it, anyhow. On most web design projects, content is the last thing to be considered (and almost always the last thing to be delivered). We'll spend hours, weeks, even months, doing user scenarios, site maps, wireframes, designs, schemas, and specificationsÑbut content? It's a disrespected line item in a schedule: 'final content delivered.' Pepi Ronalds proposes a solution to this constant cause of project delays." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/thecureforcontent-delaysyndrome Andy Budd on Usability, Design, and the Death of CSS By Matthew Magain. "In this interview, veteran user experience designer, author and web standards advocate Andy Budd speaks to SitePoint about blogging, usability testing, the design process, and why he thinks that CSS is a dead technology..." http://www.sitepoint.com/article/andy-budd-design-usability-css Handoff By Dave Shea. "A few months back at SXSW I sat on a panel that discussed how designers and developers play nice together on web projects. One of the things I never got around to mentioning was the system I use for handing off my static design work to clients and their developers for integration into their dynamic systems. Since I've been thinking about it a bit more in the past few weeks, I figured I ought to put this out there..." http://mezzoblue.com/archives/2008/05/21/handoff/ +08: NAVIGATION. Fixing Appalling Intranet Search By Gerry McGovern. "Intranet search is appalling because people don't want their content to get found, and the organization does not value the importance of finding." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2008/nt-2008-05-19-intranet-search.htm +09: PHP. Multiple Select Fields By Michal Wojciechowski. "We humans are greedy creatures. When we're placed in front of a choice to select one of many options, we start complaining - Hey, why can't I pick two? Why not five? Can't I have both pineapple AND pepperoni on my pizza? This is why multiple selection form fields had to be invented. Let's examine a few examples of how multiple select fields can be implemented in HTML and PHP (as well as some JavaScript)..." http://odyniec.net/articles/multiple-select-fields/ phpwiki - The Wiki for PHP Developers By Ian Gilfillan. "This month it's time to look at another of those PHP applications I find useful on a daily basis. I like to use 'wikis' for documentation for many of the projects I work on. [...] In this article we will look at PhpWiki, and we'll show you how to configure and use it with your own projects!..." http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/ian_gilfillan20060309.php3 PHP Sucks, But It Doesn't Matter Jeff Atwood. "Here's a list of every function beginning with the letter "A" in the PHP function index..." http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001119.html +10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. EduTF Report Highlights Curriculum Project By Holly Marie Koltz. "In the past year, the EduTF has been quieter than previous years. We have gone through a few changes, though our mission remains the same. 'The WaSP Education Task Force was created in 2005 to work directly with institutions of higher education to help raise awareness of Web standards and accessibility among instructors, administrators, and Web development teams.' Our mission is not a small one. Our work and message needs to reach beyond our reading audience and the Web standards community in order to get information, help, and resources to more people. EduTF is discussing and looking at a variety of ways in which we can help." http://tinyurl.com/6y35ur .net/may2008 Article Browser Version Targeting By Patrick H. Lauke. "here's the full original text (call it the 'director's cut', if you will) of my little rant / opinion piece in this month's .net magazine..." http://www.splintered.co.uk/news/103 Use Formats Instead of Microformats By Emil Stenstrom. "The Semantic Web continues to break new ground, and Web 3.0 seems to be a term that people associate with it. In the backwaters of semantics, microformats aims to develop standards to embed semantic information into XHTML. I can't help to think that's strange..." http://friendlybit.com/html/use-formats-instead-of-microformats/ HTML5 Conformance Checking in Vim By Mike Smith. "Kai Hendry has written an HTML file type plugin for Vim that allows you to use Henri Sivonen's Validator.nu conformance checking (validation) service remotely to check the contents of any HTML document you edit in Vim and determine if the document is HTML5-conformant (valid)..." http://blog.whatwg.org/vim-checker W3C 'clarifies' HTML 5 v XHTML By Phil Manchester. "Potential conflicts and overlap between the first update to HTML in a decade by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and XHTML has been addressed by the standards body. The group, meanwhile, has also acknowledged vendors are - once again - pushing their own platform-specific technologies..." http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2008/05/16/html5_xhtml_vendors_lockin/ +11: TOOLS. Firefox Extensions Updated To Version 3 By Gez Lemon. "The Colour Contrast Analyser, Table Inspector, and Glossary of Terms Firefox extensions have all been updated to be compatible with Firefox version 3..." http://tinyurl.com/3vxs28 XForms Builder By Orbeon. "Orbeon Forms is an open source forms solution designed to handle complex forms typical of the enterprise or government. It includes: A robust forms platform which implements W3C XForms..." http://www.orbeon.com/forms/builder +12: TYPOGRAPHY. The Showcase Of BIG Typography - Second Edition By Vitaly Friedman and Sven Lennartz. "In Web typography doesn't have to support the overall design. It can dominate. It can be loud. It can be bold. And it can be everywhere on a web-site. In many situations it's reasonable to give the typography the prominent position it deserves, leaving visual cues in the background or removing them at all. Doing that, you have to risk large font sizes surrounded by a generous amount of white space. What comes out of it? Elegant web sites with a unique form, style and sense of precision..." http://tinyurl.com/5wtd45 +13: USABILITY. User Assistance: Writing for a High-Context Culture By Mike Hughes. "While technical communicators tend to write in a low-context style, user assistance occurs in high-context situations." http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000292.php Design Decisions vs. Audience Considerations By Robin Ragle-Davis. "This week, we take a look at how to handle the conflict between what your users want, and what you want them to want. Robin Ragle-Davis considers how upfront audience profiling can reap customer relationship benefits down the line. http://tinyurl.com/6omoft UX Design-Planning Not One-Man Show By Holger Maassen. "A lot of confusion and misunderstanding surrounds the term 'user experience.' The multitude of activities that can be labeled with these two words span a vast spectrum of people, skills and situations. If you ask for UX design (UXD), what exactly are you asking for? Similarly, if someone tells you they are going to provide you with UXD for an application, website or intranet or extranet, what exactly are you going to get?..." http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/ux-design-planning Less Is Still More By Jens Meiert. "How much time and money gets spent on making things worse is something I find absolutely fascinating. Allow me to elaborate, starting with HTML newsletters: People (let) spend hours on writing supposed content, create and decorate mockups, work around ridiculous email client implementations..." http://meiert.com/en/blog/20080521/less-is-still-more/ +14: XML. Serving XHTML As XML By Belus Technology. "XHTML was created by the HTML Working Group at W3C, whose mission is to 'fulfill the promise of XML by applying XHTML to a wide variety of platforms.' It is therefore XML that is driving the development of XHTML, and developers need to understand the connection between these two technologies... When a browser opens a Web page and the media type for the page is set to application/xhtml+xml, the browser will process the page as XML and will enforce the rules of XML. If there are markup errors on a Web page, the browser will not render the Web page. Instead, most Web browsers will display an XML parsing error message such as the one seen in the screen shot below..." http://xhtml.com/en/xhtml/serving-xhtml-as-xml/ If You Don't Need XML, Then Don't Use It! By Kurt Cagle. "...XML is a powerful metalanguage, capable of an astonishingly large number of uses and now become such an ubiquitous part of the environment that it is probably permanently entrenched. However, there are alternatives that, individually, are better optimized for specific tasks. If you are more comfortable using them, use them..." http://tinyurl.com/3w6ev2 Bad XML By Jeni Tennison. "...Not all XML is created equal, and I think the biggest distinction between a good markup language and a bad one comes down to whether the XML was designed as a markup language or whether it's a serialization of a completely different model. Practically all the XML serializations that I've seen of object-oriented models, or relational models, or graph models, have been dreadful as markup languages. So what are the characteristics of XML that a good markup language should take advantage of? Here's my list..." http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2008/05/bad_xml.html [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +15: 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.]