+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 8, Issue 48, May 27, 2010. 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: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 10: TOOLS. 11: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 12: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. WCAG Rethink? By Roger Hudson. "...In the real world, most people now accept that the needs of people with disabilities should be accommodated in public transport and building design. When it comes to the web however, I am concerned that many still view accessibility through the lens of charity and not rights. Too often the needs of people with disabilities who use the web are dismissed and web site accessibility is considered an add-on, something to be done only when time and money permit. Rules alone are not enough. Attitudes and behavior both also need to change...I am fearful if we don't take a more active approach to accessibility and rely just on rules and regulations alone, the web will increasingly become a communication medium that only an able-bodied, tech-literate elite will be able to participate in." http://www.dingoaccess.com/accessibility/wcag-rethink/ Checklists Are Useless. Really? By UsabilityOne. "...This is why guidelines (like WCAG) and checklists have been written. They are very useful and effective at identifying many common and serious accessibility issues so that they can be resolved. Sure, complying with WCAG does not guarantee that a website is 100% accessible either, but it is a very good starting point to efficiently address many common accessibility issues..." http://blog.usabilityone.com/2010/05/checklists-are-useless-really/ Why Should My Website Be Accessible? By John Eric Brandt. "It occurred to me while I was posting a response to a potential client that I didn't have a resource I could point them to as an answer to the question in the subject line. Certainly, after doing this work for over 10 years, I know the answer to the question, but I had never written in down in exactly that form. Indeed, I have given innumerable workshops and talks over the years and always covered this in the first five minutes. But I guess I have always assumed that everyone already knew this. Silly me..." http://jebswebs.net/blog/2010/05/why-should-my-website-be-accessible/ The Evolution Towards a Personalized Web and the Impact on Education By Martyn Cooper. "A highlight for me of the IMS Learning Impact conference was the keynote talk by Rich Schwerdtfeger (IBM) entitled 'The Evolution towards a Personalized Web and the Impact on Education'. Rich co-chairs the IMS Accessibility group currently finalizing the AccessForAll 3.0 specification..." http://tinyurl.com/3xs9q24 Learning Not to See By Sarah Bourne. "...Fortunately, there are tools for desktop testing that can give a visual interpretation of what a non-visual user 'sees' on a web page. If you find using a screen reader too difficult, you may be more comfortable using some of these for day-to-day testing. You can think of them as assistive technologies, compensating for your visual bias..." http://technology.blog.state.ma.us/blog/2010/05/learning-not-to-see.html Do Your Flashing Ads Cause Seizures? By Glenda Watson Hyatt. "Flickering, flashing and strobing effects on webpages can cause some people to have photosensitive seizures..." http://www.doitmyselfblog.com/2010/do-your-flashing-ads-cause-seizures/ Access Keys Web Aim Thread. "I read the statement below on a website and wondered what the International recommendations for access keys are?..." http://webaim.org/discussion/mail_message.php?id=15335 +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Responsive Web Design By Ethan Marcotte. "Designers have coveted print for its precision layouts, lamenting the varying user contexts on the web that compromise their designs. Ethan Marcotte advocates we shift our design thinking to appropriate these constraints: using fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries, he shows us how to embrace the Òebb and flow of thingsÓ with responsive web design." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/ Basic Web Page Background Techniques with CSS By Chris Spooner. "The good old background property is one of the core elements we can play around with in our web designs. Here's an overview of the four most common approaches to styling your web page body, from the basic solid color through to large detailed background images. If you're just starting out in web design, you'll find some basic CSS techniques for you to put into practice into your future projects..." http://tinyurl.com/335anxs Efficiently Rendering CSS By Chris Coyier. "I admittedly don't think about this idea very often - how efficient is the CSS that we write, in terms of how quickly the browser can render it..." http://css-tricks.com/efficiently-rendering-css/ An Event Apart: Everything Old Is New Again By Luke Wroblewski. "In his Everything Old Is New Again talk at An Event Apart in Boston, MA Eric Meyer highlighted how new CSS3 capabilities can be used to tackle long-standing Web development issues with a lot less effort and code. Here's my notes from his presentation..." http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1109 An Event Apart: The CSS3 Experience By Luke Wroblewski. "At An Event Apart in Boston, MA Dan Cederholm illustrated the potential of CSS3 to enhance the user experience in modern Web browsers by walking through The CSS3 Experience. Dan used a showcase site he created to illustrate CSS3 in action at: Things We Left on the Moon..." http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1105 +03: DREAMWEAVER. Creating Your First Website - Part 3: Adding Content To Pages By David Powers. "Welcome to the third part of this tutorial series on creating your first website. This tutorial shows you how to add content to web pages in Adobe Dreamweaver CS5. You can add many different kinds of content to web pages, including graphics, text, links, and Spry widgets-to name just a few. After you've added content to your pages, you can preview your work in Dreamweaver so that you can see what it will look like on the web." http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/first_website_pt3.html +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug: Usability Demo By Steve Krug. "Steve Krug's video demonstrates how simple usability testing can and should be. The test conducted on this demo is an abbreviated version of the one Krug recommends you perform on your own site." http://www.peachpit.com/promotions/promotion.aspx?promo=137602 Encouraging Negative Feedback During User Testing By Michael Wilson. "Have you ever sat in a user testing session, watching a user really struggle with the task at hand only to have them tell you at the end everything was easy and straight forward? How do you encourage these participants to be negative? I've discovered a few techniques that might be able to help." http://tinyurl.com/2wafebk Involving Stakeholders in User Testing By Jakob Nielsen. "Besides usability specialists, all design team members should observe usability. It's also good to invite executives. Although biased conclusions are possible, they're far outweighed by the benefits of increased buy-in and empathy." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/utest-observers.html Quick and Dirty Remote User Testing By Nate Bolt. "User research doesn't have to be expensive and time-consuming. With online applications, you can test your designs, wireframes, and prototypes over the phone and your computer with ease and aplomb. Nate Bolt shows the way." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/quick-and-dirty-remote-user-testing/ +05: EVENTS. The InterACT Summit: Virtual Book Launch and Conference June 10, 2010. Online Conference. http://interactsummit.eventbrite.com/ +06: JAVASCRIPT. Javascript Shorthand for Cleaner Code By Emma Sax. "A few ways to save on some bytes in your Javascript code, as well as making it more readable and quicker to write..." http://www.punkchip.com/2010/05/javascript-shorthand/ +07: MISCELLANEOUS. The Digital Divide of Disability (Sharron Rush and Desiree Sturdevant Interview) By Bob Garfield. Knowbility is an organization that advocates for technology that allows blind, deaf and otherwise disabled people to use the net. Knowbility's Sharron Rush and Desiree Sturdevant talk about the challenges they face in raising awareness and changing the laws surrounding online usability. http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2010/05/21/04 Don Norman at IIT Design Research Conference 2010 Video of Don Norman's presentation. "There is a great gulf between the research community and practice. Moreover, there is often a great gull between what designers do and what industry needs. We believe we know how to do design, but this belief is based more on faith than on data, and this belief reinforces the gulf between the research community and practice. I find that the things we take most for granted are seldom examined or questioned. As a result, it is often our most fundamental beliefs that are apt to be wrong. In this talk, deliberately intended to be controversial, I examine some of our most cherished beliefs. Examples: design research helps create breakthrough products; complexity is bad and simplicity good; there is a natural chain from research to product." http://vimeo.com/12022651 John Foliot Interview on HTML5 By Dennis E. Lembree. Dennis interviews John Foliot on the topic of HTML5. http://webaxe.blogspot.com/2010/05/podcast-81-html5-and-john-foliot.html +08: NAVIGATION. Understanding the Cost of We Can't Find Anything By Thomas Vander Wal. "One problem I often hear when talking with any organization about new solutions is understanding the cost and inefficiency of their existing way solutions, processes, or general way of doing things. In the past year or two I have used various general measurements around search to help focus the need for improvement not only on search, but the needed information and metadata needed to improve search." http://tinyurl.com/27ea4ap Imposing Order Versus Observing Order By Tom Johnson. "It's easy to postpone organization. We begin writing discrete help topics, hundreds of them, and then try to group them together in a logical way. But here's where the problem starts. What does it mean for a system of organization to be ÒlogicalÓ? And how does the user navigate this logic we create?..." http://tinyurl.com/3538hoc Topic-Based, Hierarchical Navigation By Tom Johnson. "Just because topic-based navigation is often frustrating, as I hope I demonstrated in the examples above, it doesn't mean we should abandon this system of organization entirely. From a help-authoring perspective, you usually have to group your topics into some containers simply to work with the topics. But whatever containers we ultimately choose, in the end, if these containers do not exactly match the organizing logic in the user's mind, the user will take one glance at the help, maybe expand a few folders to peer inside, and then give up. This is why topic-based navigation shouldn't be the main system of navigation for help content..." http://tinyurl.com/2v7xolj Faceted Classification, Faceted Search By Tom Johnson. "In the last post, I argued that topic-based navigation systems generally fail for users. Topic-based navigation has some merits, such as allowing users to see topics in context, to discover other topics through browsing, and to provide one perspective on the organization of the material, but topic-based navigation shouldn't be the only means of navigating the content. Another way to allow users to find your content is through faceted classification and faceted search..." http://tinyurl.com/2vyco9p Implementing Faceted Classification/Search with a Help Authoring Tool By Tom Johnson. "While faceted navigation systems are common on the web, implementing a faceted navigation system to describe help content using one of the common help authoring tools, such as Flare, RoboHelp, Author-It, Doc-to-Help, is more challenging..." http://tinyurl.com/36ej32p Second-Level Faceted Navigation By Tom Johnson. "In contrast to topic-based hierarchies, faceted navigation provides multiple paths into the same content. These multiple paths increase the likelihood that users find the right content..." http://tinyurl.com/387ryxq +09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. HTML5 Video: Not Quite There Yet By Jeroen Wijering. "Video is an important part of today's internet. It deserves to become a first-class citizen and the video tag provides the opportunity to make that happen. Browser vendors should be stringent when building solutions that are both practical and compatible. If not, crossbrowser HTML5 video will be too difficult, not to mention expensive, to implement. This presents the risk of web development regression. In favor of its advancement, we cannot allow this to happen. Online video will go mobile and big screen. It also needs to become accessible and searchable. HTML5 video will advance the progress in these areas, if developed carefully and intelligently. However, without compatible solutions, online video is in definite jeopardy of a setback." http://tinyurl.com/35vtn76 When Can You Use HTML5 and CSS3? By Stefan Mischook. "I wrote an article about this recently but I figured that since a picture is worth a thousand words, a video must be worth 30 million words. When can web designers use HTML 5 and CSS3 in your average web site?..." http://www.killersites.com/blog/2010/when-can-you-use-html5-and-css3/ Chasing the Shiny - HTML5, CSS3, Transitions - Oh My! By Christian Heilmann. "...I am not saying that Paul and Divya did something bad - I am big fans of their work - I am just saying that we keep doing the same mistakes. If you would not write some HTML by hand and only need it for an effect - you are doing things wrong." http://tinyurl.com/29puxrb The Web Stack By Eric Meyer. "Following on my 'HTML5 vs. Flash' talk of a couple of weeks ago, I'm hoping to do a bit of blogging about HTML5, Flash, mobile apps, and more. But first I need to get some terminology straight..." http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2010/05/19/the-web-stack/ Google Announces New WebM Video Standard, Open-Sources VP8 By Louis Simoneau. "Yesterday Google announced WebM, a new web media project that combines the VP8 codec (which Google acquired in its purchase of On2) with the Vorbis audio codec and parts of the Matroska multimedia container. As part of this project Google has open-sourced the VP8 codec, which could have far-reaching consequences for the future of video in HTML5. http://tinyurl.com/233a2b9 +10: TOOLS. CSS Generator By Westciv. This tool provides a GUI that generates code for CSS gradients, shadows and transforms. http://www.westciv.com/tools/gradients/ +11: USABILITY. The Need for Speed on the Web By Gerry McGovern. "Customers crave speed on the Web, and they reward organizations that make things fast and simple." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2010/nt-2010-05-24-Speed-matters.htm Too Much Stress Results In Poor Performance By Susan Weinschenk. "...If you might have people using your site when they are under stress, keep in mind that too much stress will change the way they see and use the web site..." http://tinyurl.com/27r7w2r 4 Easy Steps to Make Your Site More Usable to Older People By Tom Babinszki. "When you find a huge population of Internet users, you definitely want to target them and make them want to visit your site. And one of the major groups that many web developers are aiming to target is that of the aging population..." http://tinyurl.com/2wquswz Usability Ain't Everything - A Response to Jakob Nielsen's iPad Usability Study By Fred Beecher. "The conclusion of the Nielsen Norman GroupÕs April 2010 study of iPad usability is that it has problems and more standards are the solution. Yes, the iPad is imperfect, but resorting to standards as the solution is an antiquated reaction that fails to consider how interactive systems have evolved. WeÕre not Usability Engineers anymore (not most of us, anyway); weÕre User Experience Designers. Experience is more than just usability..." http://tinyurl.com/28a3ovq [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +12: 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.]