+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 7, Issue 07, August 14, 2008. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 07 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: NAVIGATION. 07: PHP. 08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 09: TYPOGRAPHY. 10: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 11: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Deafness and the User Experience By Lisa Herrod. Because of limited awareness around Deafness and accessibility in the web community, it seems plausible to many of us that good captioning will fix it all. It won't. Before we can enhance the user experience for all deaf people, we must understand that the needs of deaf, hard of hearing, and big-D Deaf users are often very different." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/deafnessandtheuserexperience Beijing 2008 Part One: accessibility gives a top level By Henny Swan. "...I'd say that while the site falls short of the basic level of compliance in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, with a little effort it could make some huge steps forward. With over a year to go, the Beijing 2008 website has plenty of time to start rectifying the accessibility issues listed here and anything else that may be lurking under the bonnet. It would be great, for example, to add an accessibility help section as well as visible 'skip' links. My suggested steps in the process of improving the accessibility of the Beijing 2008 Olympics website are..." http://tinyurl.com/26k8f7 +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Why Adding Variables to CSS is a Good Thing By Emil Stenstrom. "Via Simon Willison I find that Bert Bos, one of the creators of CSS, has written an article on why variables shouldn't be included in CSS3. I thought I'd try to explain why I think they should..." http://friendlybit.com/css/why-adding-variables-to-css-is-a-good-thing/ Supporting IE with Conditional Comments By Bruce Lawson. "IE conditional comments aren't exactly a new phenomenon, but we felt that now was high time to publish Bruce's 2008 remix of his classic conditional comments article. Even now, with browser support having advanced greatly in terms of standards support, there is still a great need to support older versions of IE, and conditional comments help greatly in allowing you to achieve this without resorting to hacks." http://tinyurl.com/6oe6d7 Setting Web type to a Baseline Grid By Craig Grannell. "Another article in Craig Grannell's fabulous series on design basics, in this article Craig gives us the lowdown on grid design basics - how to create a baseline grid in CSS, and how to position text on screen using it, with distances measured in both pixels and ems." http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/setting-web-type-to-a-baseline-grid/ Enhance Your Input Fields with Simple CSS Tricks By Janko Jovanovic. "We're all trying to build an effective and good looking web forms. But there are always a new challenges. With just a few simple CSS tricks you can make a usual, boring web forms more effective and exciting." http://tinyurl.com/5espld Specifics on CSS Specificity By: Chris Coyier. "The best way to explain it is to start with an example of where specificity gets confusing and perhaps doesn't behave like you would expect. Then we'll take a closer look at how to calculate the actual specificity value to determine which selector takes precedence..." http://css-tricks.com/specifics-on-css-specificity/ +03: EVENTS. South by Southwest March 13-17, 2009. Austin, Texas, U.S.A. http://www.sxsw.com/interactive Panel Picker is open: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ +04: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. The Information Architecture Behind Good Web Forms By Luke Wroblewski. "...While others may see things differently, for me information architecture challenges require extensive thinking about the structure and flow of information, which include information flow into and out of software applications. So it's not hard to see how forms fit into the mix and why I honed in on the relationship of information architecture to these tips..." http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Aug-08/AugSep08_Wroblewski.html +05: JAVASCRIPT. Primitive Data Types, Arrays, Loops, and Conditions: Part 2 By Stoyan Stefanov. "Any value that you use is of a certain type. In JavaScript, there are the following primitive data types: Number, String, Boolean, Undefined and Null. Any value that doesn't belong to one of the five primitive types listed above is an object..." http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/beginning-oojs2/ +06: NAVIGATION. Accessible Drop-Down Menus By Martin Kliehm. 'A few days ago a co-worker asked if DHTML drop-down menus pose a problem with accessibility. Since the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG) declared all JavaScript evil in 1999, assistive technologies (AT) have made significant progress. So we cannot condemn pull-down menus altogether, but there are various reasons to keep an eye on them buggers..." http://learningtheworld.eu/2008/accessible-drop-down-menus/ The Site Map: An Information Architecture Cop-Out By Jared Spool. "Why do you think your site map needs a redesign?" I asked the web manager of a mid-sized government agency..." http://www.uie.com/articles/Sitemap +07: PHP. End of Life for PHP 4 By Chris Shiflett. "Today is 8/8/8, which is interesting for a few reasons, one of which is that it marks the end of PHP 4. What does this mean? It means yesterday's release of 4.4.9 is the final release of PHP 4..." http://shiflett.org/blog/2008/aug/end-of-life-for-php-4 +08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. This Week in HTML 5 - Episode 1 By Mark Pilgrim. "Welcome to a new semi-regular column, 'This Week in HTML 5,' where I'll try to summarize the major activity in the ongoing standards process in the WHATWG and W3C HTML Working Group..." http://blog.whatwg.org/this-week-in-html5-episode-1 +09: TYPOGRAPHY. Wrangling Widgets By Mel Pedley. "Sooner or later, you're bound to come across an article, or blog entry, that talks about 'text size widgets'. What exactly are these widgets and are they of any real use?..." http://accessites.org/site/2008/08/wrangling-widgets/ +10: USABILITY. Putting Our Hot Heads Together By Carolyn Wood. "The web is a conversation, but not always a productive one. Web discussions too often degenerate into whines, jabs, sour grapes, and one-upmanship. How can we transform discussion forums and comment sections from shooting ranges into arenas of collaboration?..." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/puttingourhotheadstogether Button Placement on Forms and Popup Windows By Meryl Evans. "How many times did you complete a form only to push the 'Clear' button instead of 'Submit'? What about 'OK' vs. 'Cancel' on a popup window?..." http://tinyurl.com/6z9pdv [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +11: 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.]