+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 7, Issue 38, March 20, 2009. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 38 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: EVENTS. 05: JAVASCRIPT. 06: MISCELLANEOUS. 07: NAVIGATION. 08: PHP. 09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 10: TOOLS. 11: TYPOGRAPHY. 13: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 14: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Accessibility Support (II) By Olga Revilla. "So, after you have read my last post, you will probably wonder which web technologies are accessibility supported and which not. And the answer is? nobody knows, not even the WAI! Now, the consultancy best phrase: 'it depends'. How is this possible after 5 years of WCAG 2 developing? Well, some reasons for this vagueness..." http://www.oneguidelineaday.com/vocabulary/accessibility-support-ii/ How Can I Determine If a Web Technology is 'Accessibility Supported'? By Olga Revilla. "Let's assume that nobody knows which technologies are and aren't accessibility supported. Now what? Well, the WAI has tried to bring a definition, not very clear, but a definition after all..." http://tinyurl.com/cgsuxk The Way We Use the Technology Determines its Accessibility Support By Olga Revilla. "Remember these categorical clauses? 'Don't do your web in Flash because it will not be accessible' or 'Avoid PDF, because a blind person won't be capable to read it'. Industries participant in the redaction of the new guidelines have adopted a tougher line protecting their products from legal barriers. So that's why there is no mention to which technology is accessible and which not, because it depends on the way that they are used..." http://tinyurl.com/d3ob52 Corporate Websites and the Case for Accessibility By Helen Baker. "As more and more companies provide and actively encourage their stakeholders to access corporate information online, accessibility is becoming an even greater issue. Accessible websites benefit everyone, both visitors and business. But research shows that many corporate websites are still failing to reach even minimum accessibility standards..." http://tinyurl.com/c63ewf Acronym/Abbreviation Best Practice WebAIM Thread. "I'm struggling a bit with how best to expand acronyms and abbreviations. Any insight you can provide would be valuable. Which of the following do you believe is the best approach" http://webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread.php?thread=3805 Untangling the Web By Janet Ingber. "A New Way to Find Old Friends: A Review of the Accessibility of Facebook..." http://www.afb.org/afbpress/pub.asp?DocID=aw100204 Happy Birthday, World Wide Web! By Marco Zehe. "...I consider access to information just like anyone else to be a right I have as a human being, and the web is the only independent means of doing so. If anyone would try to take that away from me, I promise that I'd prosecute them to the full lawful extent possible...rather than whining about Bespin not being accessible, and pushing the developers into the defensive by reflexively yelling before thinking things through, we should get our act together and find out a way to make it accessible soonish! Bespin is a chance, not an evil deliberate move to exclude people with disabilities." http://www.marcozehe.de/2009/03/13/happy-birthday-world-wide-web/ Error Correction By Joe Clark. "Every six months, somebody writes a new story about captioning that gets a dozen facts wrong. This time it's Sue Ellen Reager's turn. She makes so many mistakes she should go to work for Aberdeen Captioning, the scrappy little company that suppresses the comments I post correcting their umpteen error..." http://blog.fawny.org/2009/03/18/reager/ AccessForAll to eLearning By Martyn Cooper. "In the last ten years there has been a burgeoning of systems for web based delivery of educational content, activities and services..." http://martyncooper.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/accessforall-to-elearning/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Unique Pages, Unique CSS Files By Chris Coyier. "I received a question the other day from someone who was curious how I handle multiple different page styles and layouts across one site with CSS. It's a very common scenario I think. For example, you have a homepage that is different from your blog post pages that is different from your about page that is different from your contact page..." http://css-tricks.com/unique-pages-unique-css-files/ Performance Impact of CSS Selectors By Steve Souders. "A few months back there were some posts about the performance impact of inefficient CSS selectors. I was intrigued - this is the kind of browser idiosyncratic behavior that I live for. On further investigation, I'm not so sure that it's worth the time to make CSS selectors more efficient. I'll go even farther and say I don't think anyone would notice if we woke up tomorrow and every web page's CSS selectors were magically optimized..." http://tinyurl.com/app4zw Performance of CSS Selectors is Irrelevant By Jens Meiert. "...if you like to have a 'black or white' interpretation of Steve Souders' recent research. Currently we've still got few yet a few more numbers than before backing up what we always suspected, that merely optimizing selectors is kind of micro-optimization, micro-optimization that might for example..." http://meiert.com/en/blog/20090312/performance-of-css-selectors/ Site Compatibility and IE8 By IE Blog. With the release of IE8 seemingly imminent, and with many developers still not testing their sites with IE8, the IE team has detailed of how IE8's compatibility mode is not necessarily identical to IE7 saying, "We strive to make Compatibility View behave as much like IE7 as possible, but we do make exceptions. Many of these exceptions enable improved security and accessibility features immediately, even for sites that have not yet migrated to IE8 Standards Mode." http://tinyurl.com/dxlcpb CSS3 Panel Slides from SXSWi By Molly E. Holzschlag. "These are the CSS3 panel slides from SXSW Interactive. A the moderator, I apologize to the 40+ people who could not get into the room. It was a really informative and fun panel, so we've made these slides available to the public at large to extend that information. David Baron, Mozilla (XHTML format). Sylvain Galinau, Microsoft (PDF format for download). Hakon Wium Lie, Opera (HTML format)." http://www.molly.com/2009/03/18/css3-panel-slides-from-sxswi/ +03: DREAMWEAVER. A Nice Chat with Adobe about Dreamweaver By Tom Arah. "Following my recent post, I'm Sorry but Dreamweaver is Dying and the ensuing online discussions/abuse, I was summoned for a chat with the headmaster - Devin Fernandez, senior product manager for the web products at Adobe..." http://tinyurl.com/dffhzs +04: EVENTS. MinneWebCon April 6, 2009. Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A. http://www.minnewebcon.umn.edu/ HighEdWeb Regional Conference April 23-24, 2009. Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, U.S.A. http://highedweb.cals.cornell.edu/ +05: JAVASCRIPT. WAI-ARIA: Accessible Rich Internet Applications Basics By Estelle Weyl. "ARIA stands for Accessible Rich Internet Applications. With the proliferation of internet applications, there has been an increase in the number of sites requiring javascript that update without page refreshes..." http://tinyurl.com/a9qd4c WAI-ARIA role support - How the browsers stack up By Steve Faulkner. "For the roles defined in WAI-ARIA it is expected that browsers expose the role values via an accessibility API, on the Windows platform the information is usually exposed using the Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) Application Programming Interface (API)..." http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/?p=114 WAI-ARIA Role Support, part 2: How the Mac browsers stack up By Steve Faulkner. "For the roles defined in WAI-ARIA it is expected that browsers expose the role values via an accessibility API, on the Apple OS X platform the information is exposed using the Mac OS X Accessibility Protocol. " http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/?p=123 +06: MISCELLANEOUS. Video of Tim Berners-Lee's TED Talk "In February, W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee spoke at TED 2009 about the Semantic Web and linked data (see slides). The video of his TED talk is now available..." http://www.w3.org/News/2009#item33 Obama's Groundbreaking use of the Semantic Web By David Peterson. "In a revolutionary move, Obama's administration is set to utilize next generation web technologies to bring an unprecedented level of transparency to government. In this case it will shed light on how the roughly US $800 billion dollar economic stimulus will be spent." http://tinyurl.com/c4krrw Remembering the Day the World Wide Web Was Born By Larry Greenemeier. "What drove Tim Berners-Lee to imagine this game-changing model for information sharing, and will its openness be its undoing?" http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=day-the-web-was-born The Death of Web Development and Design, and What to do Next. By Marco van Hylckama Vlieg. "...Old school web development is dead. Long live old school web development!" http://tinyurl.com/adg8tx What to Know, What to Learn By Robert Nyman. "Let's talk about what we should know and learn, shall we?..." http://www.robertnyman.com/2009/03/13/what-to-know-what-to-learn/ Social Networks 'Are New Email' By Darren Waters. "Status updates on sites such as Facebook are a new form of communication, the South by SouthWest Festival hears." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7942304.stm How to Deal with Jerk Programmers By Scott Berkun. "...there are four assets you have: charm, ability, roles and allies..." http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2009/how-to-deal-with-jerk-programmers/ +07: NAVIGATION. Sites Without Menus: Do You Really Need a Main Nav? By Dustin Boston. "Is Navigation Useful? Jakob Nielsen posed that question in an Alertbox article from 2000. He came to the conclusion that ̉users look straight at the content and ignore the navigation areas.' In essence, navigation is not as important as most designers make it out to be..." http://tinyurl.com/d29akk Breadcrumbs In Web Design: Examples And Best Practices By Jacob Gube. "On websites that have a lot of pages, breadcrumb navigation can greatly enhance the way users find their way around. In terms of usability, breadcrumbs reduce the number of actions a website visitor needs to take in order to get to a higher-level page, and they improve the findability of website sections and pages. They are also an effective visual aid that indicates the location of the user within the website's hierarchy, making it a great source of contextual information for landing pages..." http://tinyurl.com/9skxp8 +08: PHP. The ABC's of PHP II - What do I need to make it work? By Peter Shaw. "In this part of the series I'm going to show what you need in order to start developing using PHP..." http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/peter_shaw031301.php +09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. InterAct By WaSP. A living, open curriculum based on standards and best practices, designed to teach students the skills of a web pro. http://interact.webstandards.org/ HTML Evolution By Sam Ruby. "...No concrete action is asked for today, again, this is just a level set. Blocking Last Call until consensus is reached and supporting the publishing alternative documents as Working Drafts will be important down the line. Note: it is not important which spec 'wins', just that there is enough competition to keep everybody honest. ARIA is an exemplar." http://intertwingly.net/stories/2009/03/13/html5-evolution.html HTML5 Canvas Accessibility Issues By ESW Wiki. "The new canvas element is used for rendering dynamic bitmap graphics on the fly, such as graphs, games, et cetera. HTML5 currently lacks mechanisms to add accessibility hooks for content produced using this element. The vision impaired are currently shut out based upon their disability and/or use of a specific technology (screen readers). A fallback solution is essential for the vision impaired. If is really needed, then accessibility should be incorporated into the design and the specification should include an appropriate fallback strategy..." http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/AddedElementCanvas Sticks and Stones Can Break My Bones... By John Foliot. "...If HTML5 is to achieve the oft stated goal of 'accessibility just happening', then you must set the conditions for that to actually happen - and 'suggestion' alone falls very short in this regard. This is not about setting impossible conditions for authors to meet, it is about establishing systems that actually do ensure that accessibility happens. I've said it before and I will say it again: accessibility *MUST* be foundational, it cannot simply be a bolt-on solution applied at the 11th hour..." http://john.foliot.ca/?p=10 Thoughts Towards an Accessible Canvas By John Foliot. "a basic problem: there is no standard for applying and conveying this alternative, or 'fallback' content, and so authors are left trying to guess what to do...." http://john.foliot.ca/?p=11 If It Fails for Some, It Should Fail for All By Mark Pilgrim. "On the topic of accessibility..." http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/03/18/if-it-fails-for-some Thoughts Towards an Accessible Canvas - Comment By Martin Kliehm. "I would propose to make the child objects available in the DOM where they can receive any ARIA enhancements you can possibly bolt on by scripting. It is true that currently is just a flat bitmap that you can save as PNG or data URL, but when creating shapes and contents in a canvas, why shouldn't you be allowed to add semantics at the same time? But a prerequisite would be browsers mapping those child objects to the DOM, and perhaps using the RDF features of the XHTML role module to expand the available roles by textnodes or things to describe 3D image galleries or future progressive UIs I can't imagine at this time." http://john.foliot.ca/?p=11#comment-24 On Flash Killers By John Dowdell. "There is no 'HTML5 standard', only a process which might potentially lead to a Recommendation" http://blogs.adobe.com/jd/2009/03/on_flash_killers.html The Evolution and Future of HTML By Roger Johansson. "...Once I realized that it would not be about fixing the Web I pretty much lost interest..." http://tinyurl.com/c5tkuq
is not just a "semantic
" By James Graham. "HTML 5 introduces new elements like
,
and