+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 9, Issue 15, October 9, 2010. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 15 CONTENTS. SECTION ONE: New references. What's new at the Web Design Reference site? http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/ New links in these categories: 01: ACCESSIBILITY. 02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. 03: COLOR. 04: DREAMWEAVER. 05: EVALUATION & TESTING. 06: EVENTS. 07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 08: JAVASCRIPT. 09: MISCELLANEOUS. 10: PHP. 11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 12: TOOLS. 13: TYPOGRAPHY. 14: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 15: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. President Obama Signs Accessibility Act By Andrew Kirkpatrick. "Today I am thrilled to attend an event at the White House where President Obama signs into law the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010. This act includes a number of provisions intended to increase access to video programming on television and the internet..." http://blogs.adobe.com/accessibility/2010/10/president-obama-signs-accessibility-act.html Accessibility Video Tutorials By Think Vitamin. Think Vitamin's accessibility videos are now no cost to view. http://membership.thinkvitamin.com/library/accessibility +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Vendor Prefix Lists By Eric A. Meyer. "At the prompting of an inquiry from a respected software vendor, I asked The Twitters for pointers to 'canonical' lists of vendor-prefixed properties, values, and selectors. Here's what the crowd sourced at me..." http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2010/10/08/vendor-prefix-lists/ Make a 'View Source' Button By Chris Coyier. "Remy Sharp's cool site for HTML5 demos has a 'View Source' button on each of the individual demo pages. Click it, and you see the entire source code for the page you are looking at. It's not a popup or a new tab, it just shows the source right there on the page. I thought that was cool so I set out to recreate it my own way." http://css-tricks.com/make-a-view-source-button/ +03: COLOR. How is Colour Contrast Determined? By Glenda Watson Hyatt. "Today on Blog Accessibility, I revealed my favourite tool in my accessibility toolbox." http://blogaccessibility.com/?p=54 +04: DREAMWEAVER. Why Teaching Dreamweaver is Like Being President By Virginia DeBolt. "I mentioned a while back that I accepted a job teaching Dreamweaver at UNM Continuing Ed. I just completed my first session Ð a 12 hour class in beginning Dreamweaver. I've decided that teaching Dreamweaver is a lot like being the President of the United States." http://www.webteacher.ws/2010/10/05/why-teaching-dreamweaver-is-like-being-president/ +05: EVALUATION & TESTING. Heretical Ideas - Abandon Focus Groups By Gary Barber. "Too often we see focus groups being used as the core evaluation and research tool within a web design project. Why..." http://manwithnoblog.com/2010/10/07/heretical-ideas-abandon-focus-groups +06: EVENTS. Student Web Conference January 7, 2011. Colesville, Maryland, U.S.A. http://dabrook.org/conferences/2011 SXSW Interactive March 11-15, 2011. Austin, Texas, U.S.A. http://sxsw.com/interactive An Event Apart - Seattle March 28-30, 2011. Seattle, Washington, U.S.A. http://aneventapart.com/2011/seattle/ An Event Apart - Boston May 2-4, 2011. Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A. http://aneventapart.com/2011/boston/ An Event Apart - Atlanta June 13-15, 2011. Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A. http://aneventapart.com/2011/atlanta/ +07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Alphabetical Sorting Must (Mostly) Die By Jakob Nielsen. "Ordinal sequences, logical structuring, time lines, or prioritization by importance or frequency are usually better than A-Z listings for presenting options to users." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/alpha-sorting.html Index Pages: Unsuspected Project-Profitability Killers By Nicola Rovetta. "During an information architecture project, creating index pages for items within categories can result in a lot of unexpected work." http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2010/10/index-pages-unsuspected-project-profitability-killers.php Understanding How Prototyping Practices Affect Design Results By Stanford HCI Group. "This research examines aspects of the creative process such iteration and comparison, two key strategies for discovering contextual design variables and their interrelationships. We found that, even under tight time constraints when the common intuition is to stop iterating and start refining, iterative prototyping helps designers learn. Our experiments also indicate that creating and receiving feedback on multiple prototypes in parallelÑ as opposed to serially Ñ leads to more divergent ideation, more explicit comparison, less investment in a single concept, and better overall design performance. Most recently, we found that groups who produce and share multiple prototypes report a greater increase in rapport, exchange more verbal information, share more features, and overall, reach a better consensus." http://hci.stanford.edu/research/prototyping/ Match the Tool to the Problem By Daniel Ritzenthaler. "This piece is about bringing clarity to this discussion. It will help you decide which tool to use without worrying what other designers are arguing about." http://52weeksofux.com/post/1215277844/match-the-tool-to-the-problem +08: JAVASCRIPT. What is jQuery? By Matthew David. "When you work in jQuery you tend to forget some of the obvious questions such as: what is jQuery? The focus of this article is to explain what jQuery is and, when your boss asks, why it's important to your work..." http://insideria.com/2010/10/what-is-jquery.html JAWS Support for ARIA By Steve Faulkner. "Freedom scientific have provided documentaion on how the JAWS screen reader support WAI-ARIA. It is available as a microsoft word document. Below is the same information in HTML format..." http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/?p=692 +09: MISCELLANEOUS. Responsive Enhancement By Jeremy Keith. "...My point is that responsive web design isn't something that can be tacked on to the end of an existing workflow. It requires a different mindset, one that considers the medium from the outset. If you're currently thinking in proportions rather than pixels, the transition to responsive web design will be relatively painless. But if you're stuck in the world of converting PSDs into web pages, you're going to have a tough time..." http://adactio.com/journal/1700/ Improving Your Process: Work from the Inside Out By Jonathan Christopher. "For a long time I've had the opinion that it's more important to both design and develop websites from the inside out. That is to say, I prefer to begin with the most generic possible interior page and work my way to the home page. I've had this stance for a number of years and while I'm comfortable with it, I haven't met too many designers or developers that feel the same way. I thought I'd state my case in hopes of sparking a bit of conversation as well as an overall view of our landscape of colleagues." http://mondaybynoon.com/2010/10/04/improving-your-process-work-from-the-inside-out/ Findings from the Web Design Survey, 2009 By A List Apart. "The findings are in from the survey for people who make websites. Once again, we have crunched the data this way and that, figured out what the numbers were telling us, and assembled the sliced and diced data-bytes into nifty charts and graphs for your edification and pleasure..." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/findings-from-the-web-design-survey-2009/ +10: PHP. High-Performance String Concatenation in PHP By Craig Buckler. "We recently examined the complexities of fast string concatenation in JavaScript so I thought it would be useful to repeat the exercise for PHP. This could be a more important to your application: large string operations are often handled on the server when generating HTML pages..." http://blogs.sitepoint.com/2010/10/05/high-performance-string-concatenation-in-php/ +11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. W3C: Hold Off on Deploying HTML5 in Websites By Paul Krill. "HTML5, which updates the HTML specification to accommodate modern Web applications, has gained a lot of adherents in vendors like Microsoft, Google, and Apple. But the specification is plain not ready yet for deployment to websites, an official with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees HTML5, stressed this week. 'The problem we're facing right now is there is already a lot of excitement for HTML5, but it's a little too early to deploy it because we're running into interoperability issues,' including differences between video on devices, said the official, Philippe Le Hegaret, W3C interaction domain leader. He is responsible for specifications like HTML and SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics)." www.infoworld.com/d/.../w3c-hold-html5-in-websites-041 HTML5 Accessibility By Steve Faulkner. "This site is a resource to provide information about which HTML5 user interface features are usable by people who rely upon assistive technology (AT) to use the web..." http://www.html5accessibility.com/ HTML5 Simplequiz #2: By Bruce Lawson. "...It's easy to cite works in HTML and default browser stylesheets obey the typographic convention of showing the citation in italics..." html5doctor.com/html5-simplequiz-2-citing-people/ Correction to the HTML5 Review Procedure By Shelley Powers. "...all comments should be submitted to the Bugzilla database...Relying on Bugzilla to manage Last Call comments sucks. It's also demonstrative of a group that has not effectively dealt with conflict. Instead of dealing with the major issuesÑsuch as the continuing split of the document across W3C and WhatWG, or the disquieting trends reflected in accessibility bugsÑthe HTML WG has, instead, tried to get technology to take care of the problem. And you know something? Relying on technology in this way never works." http://realtech.burningbird.net/web/html5/correction-html5-review-procedure State of Media Accessibility in HTML5 By Silvia Pfeiffer. "...To be clear: at this exact moment, there is no actual specification text in the W3C version of HTML5 for media accessibility. There is, however, some text in the WHATWG version, providing a framework for text-based alternative content. Other alternative content still requires new specification text. Finally, there is no implementation in any browser yet for media accessibility, but we are getting closer..." http://blog.gingertech.net/2010/10/02/state-of-media-accessibility-in-html5/ +12: TOOLS. ProCSSor - Advanced CSS Prettifier By procssor.com. ProCSSor is a web-based service helps format CSS. It has unique formatting styles and several customizable options. http://procssor.com/ +13: TYPOGRAPHY. Does it Still Make Sense to Use em Rather Than px? By David B. Calhoun. "Alex Kessinger tweeted asking if there was a reason to still use EMs instead of PX measurements in mobile. This is an interesting question, but 140 characters isn't quite enough to explain my thoughts. So here's an old-fashioned blog post..." http://davidbcalhoun.com/2010/does-it-still-make-sense-to-use-em-rather-than-px +14: USABILITY. Seeing Before Reading: Messages Encoded in the Design of Information By Tom Johnson. "...Overall, the design of information provides cues about the meaning of the information. These cues, like punctuation, are often unconsciously interpreted by readers, but they do significantly influence the message." http://idratherbewriting.com/2010/10/05/seeing-before-reading-messages-encoded-in-the-design-of-information-visual-imagination-2/ [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +15: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? Accessibility Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/accessibility.html Association Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/associations.html Book Listings. http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/books.html Cascading Style Sheets Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/css.html Color Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/color.html Dreamweaver Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/dreamweaver.html Evaluation & Testing Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/testing.html Event Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/events.html Flash Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/flash.html Information Architecture Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/architecture.html JavaScript Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/javascript.html Miscellaneous Web Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/misc.html Navigation Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/navigation.html PHP Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/php.html Sites & Blogs Listing. http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/sites.html Standards, Guidelines & Pattern Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/standards.html Tool Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/tools.html Typography Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/type.html Usability Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/usability.html XML Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/xml.html [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/itss/training/online/webdesign/webdev_listserv.html 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.]