+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 8, Issue 26, December 23, 2009.

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: EVALUATION & TESTING.
04: EVENTS.
05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
06: JAVASCRIPT.
07: MISCELLANEOUS.
08: NAVIGATION.
09: PHP.
10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
11: TYPOGRAPHY.
12: USABILITY.
13: XML.

SECTION TWO: 
14: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site?

[Contents ends.]


++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Efforts Under Way to Make Web More Accessible
By Brooke Donald.
"Imagine not being able to use a mouse to open a Web browser or a keyboard to type an e-mail. What if you couldn't distinguish colors on a computer screen or type the distorted letters in order to buy concert tickets or enroll in a class?..."
http://tinyurl.com/yztes6z

Keeping an Aging Population Online - DIADEM (Delivering Inclusive Access to Disabled and Elderly Members)
By Nick Higgs.
"Despite all the revitalized hype surrounding HTML5, web accessibility is not such a hot topic at the moment. This is disappointing to those of us who see an open and accessible web as (at the risk of over egging it a bit) crucial to the future of mankind...The DIADEM project focuses on the accessibility of online forms for people suffering with cognitive decline due to old age. The justification is compelling..."
http://tinyurl.com/y99kmev


+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Testing Object-Oriented CSS (OOCSS) for Easier CSS Development
By Robert Nyman.
"Let's face it: developing CSS that should work across various web browsers and platforms is hard, and could prove to be quite a challenge. This is where Object-Oriented CSS (OOCSS) steps in..."
http://tinyurl.com/ybgbyfr

A Full-Width Centered Navigation Bar
By Rob Glazebrook.
"Right around the time I was developing the code for the Super Simple Navigation Bar I wrote about a while back, a friend came to me with an interesting problem. He needed a horizontal navigation bar like the one I was creating, with the following changes..."
http://www.cssnewbie.com/full-width-centered-navigation-bar/

Cleaner Code with CSS3 Selectors
By Rachel Andrew.
"...In this article I'm going to take a look at some of the ways our front and back-end code will be simplified by CSS3, by looking at the ways we achieve certain visual effects now in comparison to how we will achieve them in a glorious, CSS3-supported future. I'm also going to demonstrate how we can use these selectors now with a little help from JavaScript Ð which can work out very useful if you find yourself in a situation where you can't change markup that is being output by some server-side code..."
http://24ways.org/2009/cleaner-code-with-css3-selectors

What You Need To Know About Behavioral CSS
By Tim Wright.
"As we move forward with the Web and browsers become capable of rendering more advanced code, we gradually get closer to the goal of universal standards across all platforms and computers. Not only will we have to spend less time making sure our box model looks right in IE6, but we create an atmosphere ripe for innovation and free of hacks and heavy front-end scripting..."
http://tinyurl.com/yclurk3


+03: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Testing Content Concepts
By Colleen Jones.
"As UX professionals, we're all familiar with the need to test user experience designs. Testing content, however, might be a different story. Most companies haven't given testing content the attention it deserves-partly because it's challenging. One challenge is that time and budget usually do not allow us to test every single piece of content. Another challenge is that gathering too much unfocused feedback can freeze our projects in analysis paralysis. To meet these challenges, try testing your content concepts-and start testing them early in your projects."
http://tinyurl.com/ybutra6

Testing Your Own Designs Redux
By Paul J. Sherman.
"This column is an attempt to synthesize a new set of guidelines for testing your own designs that I've based on the best of my own and UXmatters readers' ideas."
http://tinyurl.com/y9kqmfl


+04: EVENTS.

Usability Week 2010 Conference, Miami
January 25-29, 2010. 
Miami, Florida, U.S.A.
http://www.nngroup.com/events/miami/agenda.html

CSS3 Wizardry Workshop 
January 29, 2010. 
Brighton, United Kingdom.
http://clearleft.com/does/teach/css3/

Usability Week 2010 Conference, Atlanta
February 22-26, 2010.
Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A.
http://www.nngroup.com/events/atlanta/agenda.html

Usability Week 2010 Conference, New York
March 22-26, 2010.
New York, New York, U.S.A.
http://www.nngroup.com/events/new_york/agenda.html


+05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

Information Architecture: The Backbone of SEO and Usability
By Kim Krause Berg.
"...One of the clearest mistakes we make in web site development is not understanding the people who use them. Despite the help of personas, user testing, scenarios and marketing data in advance, even the big brand sites struggle to be user friendly. Why is this? One reason is the context in which pages and links are delivered. For findability to work properly, we need to know the words people use to communicate with their surroundings. This may be different online, especially in situations where we can 'be anyone' and change who we are..."
http://tinyurl.com/ygktj2b


+06: JAVASCRIPT.

JavaScript Testing Taxonomy
By Jack Moffitt.
"Everyone talks a lot about testing, but it seems few people actually do much of it. I certainly am guilty of not doing as much automated testing as I should, but I am working hard to improve. I write a lot of JavaScript, so I've been spending a lot of time experimenting with a range of JavaScript testing tools. There are a lot of different options, and I've come to the conclusion that you need several of them."
http://metajack.im/2009/12/17/javascript-testing-taxonomy

The Web Is Your CMS
By Christian Heilmann.
"What we need is a way to abstract the pains of different data formats and authentication formats away from the developer - and this is the purpose of the Yahoo Query Language, or YQL for short. Libraries like jQuery and YUI make it easy and reliable to use JavaScript in browsers (yes, even IE6) and YQL allows us to access web services and even the data embedded in web documents in a simple fashion Ð SQL style..."
http://24ways.org/2009/the-web-is-your-cms


+07: MISCELLANEOUS.

YouTube Captioning
By Deaf News Today.
"Here's an interview with Ken Harrenstien of Google who's deaf and helped create the captioning system that will make captioning automatic for videos. The reporter in this story does not sign but Harrenstien does."
http://deafnewstoday.blogspot.com/2009/12/youtube-captioning.html


+08: NAVIGATION.

The Last Word on Site Map Usability
By Nielsen-Norman.
PDF download:"Users go to site maps if they are lost, frustrated, or looking for specific details on a crowded site. A site map's main benefit is to give users an overview of the site's areas in a single glance by dedicating an entire page to a visualization of the information architecture. If designed well, this overview can include several levels of hierarchy, and yet not get so big that users lose their ability to grasp the map as a whole..."
http://www.nngroup.com/reports/sitemaps/

If You Must Use a Dropdown Menu, Make Sure It's Keyboard Friendly
By Roger Johansson.
"Dropdown menus (a.k.a. flyout or DHTML menus) are not on my personal list of favourite features to use on a website. Many others seem to like them though, and thatÕs fine as long as such menus are implemented in an accessible way, which to a large extent means making them keyboard friendly..."
http://tinyurl.com/yc252z2

The Three Clicks Myth
By James Robertson.
"...The reality is that users have no problem with clicking, as long as they are confident they're heading in the right direction...The real goal, therefore, is to design navigation that works well for users..."
http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/cb_threeclicks/index.html

'Where's My Googlebox' - Adventures in Search for Silver Surfers
By Henny Swan.
"I forget that at its core the web is all about  ÓsearchÓ so it was humbling and eye opening to spend two days in the company of 8 silver surfers aged 60 to 80 testing  Opera desktop and observing, amongst other things, how they went about carrying out searches..."
http://tinyurl.com/yzh3zru


+09: PHP.

Unmaintainable PHP
By Stoyan Stefanov.
"With the recent unemployment rates, everybody realizes that job security is important. The best way to keep a job is to be irreplaceable. If no one can maintain the code you write, you have a job for life. Writing unmaintainable code is a special skill that seems to come quite naturally to certain developers. For the rest of you, here are some tips and tricks to get you started..."
http://phpadvent.org/2009/unmaintainable-php-by-stoyan-stefanov

You Don't Need All That
By Marcel Esser.
"I've been writing PHP for a long time. I am not one of its dinosaurs, but I've been making it do my bidding since PHP 3. I have also seen a lot of trends come and go. As an example, PHP 4 was all the rage for optimizing with references. PHP 3 still had some parts that were so poorly written, it was possible to get 20% performance increases just by changing the way you did something. PHP 5 is obviously trending with object-oriented programming..."
http://phpadvent.org/2009/you-dont-need-all-that-by-marcel-esser 


+10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

It's All About the Browser, Baby! (Four Parts)
By Molly Holzschlag.
"Molly Holzschlag speaks to MIT students at the Terry Executive Education Center in Atlanta about web standards and industry trends."
Part 1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23ZZGrnGedc
Part 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7xwWKEoX7Q
Part 3:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlwidVpI6Vk
Part 4:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhXq0JUMRgE

Canvas Accessibility
By Breton Slivka.
"There has been some discussion going on about Accessibility in the html5 Canvas Api..."
http://bustingseams.blogspot.com/2009/12/canvas-accessibility.html

Why the HTML5 'Video' Element Is Effectively Unusable, Even in the Browsers Which Support It
By John Gruber.
"I think the HTML5 spec should be changed such that the value of the autobuffer attribute may not be ignored. And even if the spec is not changed, web browsers should not choose to ignore it. Web browsers should only buffer HTML5 media content when the autobuffer or autoplay attribute has been explicitly turned on in the markup."
http://daringfireball.net/2009/12/html5_video_unusable


+11: TYPOGRAPHY.

Designing For The Switch
By Mark Boulton.
"...Only fairly recently, @font-face is supported in most browsers. The floodgates are opening. It really is the dawn of a new typographic era on the web. And we must tread carefully..."
http://24ways.org/2009/designing-for-the-switch

Spruce It Up
By Jonathan Snook.
"The landscape of web typography is changing quickly these days. We've gone from the wild west days of sIFR to Cufon to finally seeing font embedding seeing wide spread adoption by browser developers (and soon web designers) with @font-face. For those who've felt limited by the typographic possibilities before, this has been a good year. As Mark Boulton has so eloquently elucidated, @font-face embedding doesn't come without its drawbacks. Font files can be quite large and FOUT-that nasty flash of unstyled text-can be a distraction for users..."
http://24ways.org/2009/spruce-it-up


+12: USABILITY.

Please Scroll
By thereisnopagefold.
"Welcome to the world wide web, an interactive medium in which screen resolution statistics are trivial, browser viewports are variable, and scrolling behaviour is a standard."
http://www.thereisnopagefold.com/

Where is the Fold? Google Browser Size vs. Actual Heatmap
By Nick DeNardis.
"Google released a tool yesterday called Google Browser Size in effort to show how users with various screen sizes see your site. They also wrote up a blog post about it..."
http://tinyurl.com/yahsbv8

Web Forms for People
By Luke Wroblewski.
"As the Web has grown, so has the number of ways people use it. Today, it's not uncommon for Web users to shop, chat with friends or strangers, manage their bank accounts and exercise routines, share photos or videos, and more. In fact, if it can be done online, it probably already is..."
http://visitmix.com/Articles/Web-Forms-for-People

No Such Thing as a Free Toilet    
By Gerry McGovern.
"...When you say things on your website like 'we care' or 'it's simple', the rational consumer thinks: "If you have to say you care, it's obvious you don't, and if you have to say it's simple, it's obvious it's not..."
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2009/nt-2009-12-21-Free-toilet.htm

Anybody Can Do Usability
By Jakob Nielsen.
"Usability is like cooking: everybody needs the results, anybody can do it reasonably well with a bit of training, and yet it takes a master to produce a gourmet outcome." 
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/anybody-usability.html


+13: XML.

XML Bad Practices
By Robin Berjon.
"At the XML Prague 2009 conference I presented a paper on 'Designing XML/Web Languages: A Review of Common Mistakes'. Since much of the subject matter presented there is still the topic of heated discussion amongst specialists I thought it a good idea to make a pass through that paper, updating it based on feedback I have received and newer examples, and post it in blog form. I will post each section here as I go through this process. Today, we start simply with the introduction. "
http://berjon.com/blog/2009/12/xmlbp-intro.html 


[Section one ends.]


++ SECTION TWO:

+14: 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.

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+ 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.]