+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 7, Issue 26, December 23, 2008.

An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development.

++ISSUE 26 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: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
07: JAVASCRIPT.
08: MISCELLANEOUS.
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.

Live Radio Captioning for the Deaf
By Claude Almansi.
"Making radio accessible for deaf and hard of hearing persons is not commonly perceived as a priority..."
http://tinyurl.com/9ofg7p

New Guidelines Boost Web Access
By Geoff Adams-Spink.
"The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has announced a new standard to make sites more accessible to older and disabled people..."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7789622.stm

WCAG Theme Song Update
By David MacDonald.
The video is awesome.
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/2008OctDec/0064.html

Web 2.0 Accessibility Recap for 2008 and a look to 2009
By Rich Schwerdtfeger.
http://tinyurl.com/586a4u

State of the Accessible Web 2008
By Henny Swan.
"It feels like we have hit a critical time in web accessibility and for me 2008 has been a year that has clearly demonstrated a shift in focus away from advocacy towards action and with it brought a new generation of web accessibility developers. As we enter 2009 and the ten year anniversary of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) I thought it worth taking a look back before moving forward..."
http://www.iheni.com/state-of-the-accessible-web-2008/


+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Absolute Columns
By Dan Rubin.
"CSS layouts have come quite a long way since the dark ages of web publishing, with all sorts of creative applications of floats, negative margins, and even background images employed in order to give us that most basic building block, the column. As the title implies, we are indeed going to be discussing columns today???more to the point, a handy little application of absolute positioning that may be exactly what you've been looking for..."
http://24ways.org/2008/absolute-columns

Form Design, Layout, and Presentation with CSS
By Ben Henick.
"he HTML forms article introduced you to the basics of form creation and styling. This article carries on where that left off, providing more details about form elements and styles, and how forms are included in real-world Web application designs."
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/34-styling-forms/


+03: DREAMWEAVER.

Unobtrusive JavaScript in Dreamweaver CS4
By Andrew Tetlaw.
"A copy of the recently released Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 appeared at SitePoint HQ recently (check out Kevin's review in Issue #218), so I thought I'd take it for a test drive and see what it has to offer the modern JavaScripter..."
http://tinyurl.com/7ggq8n


+04: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Quick Turnaround Usability Testing, Part II
By Paul Nuschke.
"In Part I, I discussed how to make the first three steps of Quick Turnaround Usability Testing (QTUT)-Sales and Kickoff, Recruitment, and Preparation-as short and efficient as possible. In Part II, I discuss the final two steps: Testing and Analysis and Reporting..."
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/quick-turnaround12


+05: EVENTS.

OZeWAI (Australian Web Adability Initiative)
January 21-23 2009.
Bundoora, Victoria, Australia
http://www.ozewai.org/2009/index.html

MinneWebCon
April 6, 2009.
Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A.
http://www.minnewebcon.umn.edu/

UIE Web App Summit 2009
April 19-22, 2009.
Newport Beach, California, U.S.A.
http://www.uie.com/events/web_app_summit/2009/

Eighteenth International World Wide Web Conference
Madrid, Spain
April 20-24, 2009.
http://www.www2009.org/

2nd World Summit on the Knowledge Society
16-18 September, 2009.
Crete, Greece
http://www.open-knowledge-society.org/summit.htm


+06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

Web Analytics and Information Architecture 
By Hallie Wilfert.
"Information Architects always want to know how easy our site is to use and how often it is used by the audiences we target. For the most part, few people ask for our data on usability or user experience but we regularly receive this kind of request from other parts of the business, 'I need to know how many hits the website has received this year and how that compares to our competitors?'..."
http://web.fumsi.com/go/article/manage/3460


+07: JAVASCRIPT.

Ajax Performance (video)
By Douglas Crockford.
"Douglas Crockford returns to YUI Theater with another chapter in his evolving lecture series. This session, ÒAjax Performance,Ó debunks common misconceptions about the relationship between JavaScript and performance and gives engineers a core focus for improving the performance of web apps: Reduce the value of n. Because DOM interactions are generally slow, leveraging Ajax to reduce the number of DOM operations, Douglas argues, is often the most important optimization you can make. In fact, it usually dwarfs other techniques in terms of its impact on the actual experience of using a website."
http://yuiblog.com/blog/2008/12/23/video-crockford-performance/

Ajax and Accessibility, Part One
By Alastair Campbell.
"Developing a Rich Internet Application (RIA) that's accessible has historically been somewhere between difficult and a nightmare, even with seemingly common technologies such as HTML/CSS and JavaScript..."
http://www.netmag.co.uk/zine/home/ajax-and-accessibility-part-one


+08: MISCELLANEOUS.

Understanding Web Design, Live on Video
By Jeffrey Zeldman.
"Now available on streaming video, Jeffrey Zeldman: Understanding Web Design - is a good quality 42:40 capture of my October 25, 2008 presentation at Gain: AIGA Business and Design Conference..."
http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/video-gain-2008-zeldman

5 Inspiring Web Design Conference Speeches you Shouldn't Have Missed in 2008
By Chris Spooner.
"Web design conferences are fantastic for keeping up to date with the industry changes and for gaining useful advice from big name contributors. Unfortunately with there being conferences held around the world from Brighton to New York and beyond visiting just one (never mind all of them!) can be a challenge. Thankfully, some of the design conference organizers embrace the social aspect of the modern web and provide videos of the conference sets online, here are my top five web design conference speeches for 2008..."
http://tinyurl.com/6jlcrq


+09: PHP.

Less Whining, More Coding
By Elizabeth Smith.
"How many times have you heard or seen someone griping about PHP? Maybe the documentation was wrong, or they couldn't figure out how to install it, or maybe they just didn't like the way something worked. You see whining everywhere: forums, blog posts, mailing lists, even on Twitter! Well let me tell you what to do about the problem.,,"
http://phpadvent.org/2008/less-whining-more-coding-by-elizabeth-smith

PHP Is Not Java
By Luke Welling.
"Java has its place. Maybe it has many places. I'm OK with it being on your phone, in your refrigerator, and on my bank's web site. I'm even OK with it making another play to be in browser applets. However, I'd really prefer if you kept it out of my PHP. I am seeing more and more PHP written as though it was Java with dollar signs. I think this is misguided..."
http://phpadvent.org/2008/php-is-not-java-by-luke-welling

Practice Safe Idempotent Methods
By Ben Ramsey.
"All web developers should be familiar with the GET and POST methods. These are the primary methods used in everyday development on the Web. Even if you know nothing about HTTP, you've at least seen form examples using either get or post as the value of the method attribute. All too often, though, I find that those who build web applications know far too little about the protocol that powers the Web: HTTP. I think all web developers should have at least a rudimentary understanding of the technology that earns their bacon..."
http://phpadvent.org/2008/practice-safe-idempotent-methods-by-ben-ramsey

What Time Is It?
By Derick Rethans.
"As of PHP 5.1, PHP has advanced date/time support, so you can finally write code that doesn't have to deal with timestamps and time zone abbreviations such as PST and CEST. Before I explain how to avoid these annoyances, let me explain why timestamps and time zone abbreviations suck..."
http://phpadvent.org/2008/what-time-is-it-by-derick-rethans


+10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

Web Standards Pragmatism Presentation
By Patrick H. Lauke.
"Check out the slides, audio and transcript of my talk on web standards pragmatism: from validation to the real world, presented at the web developers conference, Bristol, 12 November 2008."
http://www.splintered.co.uk/news/109

5 Exciting Things to Look Forward to in HTML 5
By Jacob Gube.
"HTML 5 is the upcoming major revision of the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the main method of marking up content for sharing on the World Wide Web. HTML's development stopped at HTML 4.01 in 1999, and since then web content has evolved so much that current HTML specifications are inadequate for today's requirements. HTML 5 aims to improve HTML's interoperability and address the growing demand for more diverse and complex web content. It also addresses HTML 4's lacking features for web applications. In this post, we'll look at 5 exciting new features in HTML 5..."
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/5_exciting_things_in_html_5.php


+11: TOOLS.

WAT Q/A Extension
By Cedric Trevisan.
Free extension for web accessibility testing.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9846


+12: TYPOGRAPHY.

The 100 Percent Easy-2-Read Standard
By Oliver Reichenstein.
"Most websites are crammed with small text that's a pain to read. Why? There is no reason for squeezing so much information onto the screen. It's just a stupid collective mistake that dates back to a time when screens were really, really small..."
http://informationarchitects.jp/100e2r/


+13: USABILITY.

Nicole Sullivan Video: Design Fast Websites (Don't Blame the Rounded Corners)
By Eric Miraglia.
"...Nicole visited Yahoo last week to do an encore of her 'Design Fast Websites' talk in which she outlines a set of practical guidelines for building websites that are supremely fast and visually rich. Her advice is to know your craft, to engage your designers, and to make sure that your collaboration with designers works intelligently in the service of users..."
http://yuiblog.com/blog/2008/12/23/video-sullivan/

Top Task Performance Heavily Influences Branding
By Gerry McGovern.
"If a customer cannot complete their top tasks quickly and easily on your website, why would they trust you to help them with  other tasks?"
http://tinyurl.com/8l9keo


+14: XML.

HTML 5 vs. XHTML 2: An Article Roundup and Poll
By Chris Coyier.
"...HTML5 will be the future of the web, so my advice would be to pay close attention to it."
http://css-tricks.com/html-5-vs-xhtml-2-an-article-roundup-and-poll/

HTML vs. XHTML: Why HTML Wins
By Jens Meiert.
"...The only decisive factor seems to be performance. And that means an easy choice: Just use HTML 4 or, at least 'formally', HTML 5..."
http://meiert.com/en/blog/20081219/html-vs-xhtml/


[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.]