[webdev] Web Design Update: August 16, 2006

[Laura Carlson]

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 5, Issue 08,  August 16, 2006.

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

++ISSUE 08 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: FLASH.
06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
07: JAVASCRIPT.
08: MISCELLANEOUS.
09: PHP.
10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
11: TOOLS.
12: TYPOGRAPHY.
13: USABILITY.
14: XML.

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

[Contents ends.]


++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Accessibility: WCAG 2.0 and You
By Tim Dungan (aka ptvGuy).
"What do we do in the face of all this debate? Quite simply, those of 
us that actually make websites and care about making them useful and 
accessible to real people are just going to have to go on doing the 
best we can on our own-as, in fact, we've pretty much been doing. We 
will continue to use our own brains to think about what we're doing and 
how we can make it as useful as possible to all users. That's all there 
is to it. We're already going above and beyond the requirements of our 
sites. So, before we get too carried away, keep this in mind. Even the 
home page of the W3C itself only claims WCAG 1, level 1 compliance. 
Yes, we can and should go above that. Section 508 alone gets into 
levels 1 and 2. However, lets not lose track of our underlying budget 
and time limitations. We don't expect an accessible building to have a 
hospital built into it. We don't have to go that far with our websites 
either. WCAG 2.0, like WCAG 1.0 before it, is a set of guidelines. It's 
not a wall or a fence. If it leads you where you need to go, great. If 
not, then you gotta find your own way. After all, it's you that your 
clients and users depend on, not the W3C. "
http://www.ptvguy.com/2006/06/08/accessibility-wcag-20-and-you/

Lack of Access = Barrier to Access
By Joe Dolson.
"...An accessible web developer's job is to remove barriers to access, 
if working on an existing site, or to minimize the barriers they create 
when designing an original site..."
http://tinyurl.com/flywo

Misunderstanding Accessible Design
By Joe Dolson
"...CSS is just as susceptible to inaccessibility as the next design 
technology. This is because it is a design tool, not the content 
itself. The first step to creating accessible web content is to write 
accessible HTML. If you've organized your HTML semantically, using your 
block elements correctly, not littering the page with extra <span> or 
<div> tags and using your <table> tags for tabular data, then you've 
accomplished the greatest part to building an accessible website..."
http://tinyurl.com/m5q86

Accessibility Series - tbody
By Sandra Clark.
"This is an article in an occasional series on common mistakes in 
markup and accessibility. While its fine to always talk about what the 
guidelines are, sometimes its also good to talk about what not to do or 
how to do something properly."
http://www.shayna.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.display_entry&id=145

Useful Guides to Accessibility
By Mencap.
"Mencap has produced some useful guides on how to make your information 
and services more accessible for people with a learning disability."
http://www.mencap.org.uk/html/accessibility/accessibility_guides.asp#232

New Research for Socitm Insight Shows Even the Best Websites Can Cause 
Problems For Disabled Users
By egovmonitor.
According to Stefan Haselwimmer, MD of the Usability Exchange, the 
results of the testing highlight the importance of carrying out 
disabled user testing when evaluating website accessibility - something 
that is recommended by accessibility guidance such as the British 
Standards Institution's PAS 78. 'Such testing can also highlight many 
of the usability issues that affect non-disabled users' he says.
http://www.egovmonitor.com/node/6859/print


+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

CSS Showcase: Navigation Menus, Tabs and Techniques
By Vitaly Friedman.
http://www.alvit.de/css-showcase/

Turning Lists into Trees
By Michal Wojciechowski.
"In this article, I will present a technique to display a multi-level 
unordered list in the form of a tree with lines connecting nodes."
http://odyniec.net/articles/turning-lists-into-trees/

Displaying Percentages
By Dave Stone.
http://www.barenakedapp.com/the-design/displaying-percentages

Make Better Web Pages by Understanding the CSS Box Model
By Melonfire.
"...one of the most important concepts a developer can understand is 
the so-called CSS 'box model', which underpins most of CSS layout and 
positioning. This article provides a brief introduction to this box 
model, explaining what it is and how you can use it to make better 
decisions about positioning your HTML elements on a Web page..."
http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-6105783.html


+03: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Data Visualization of Web Stats: Logarithmic Charts and the Drooping 
Tail
By Jakob Nielsen.
"Using a linear diagram to plot data from website traffic logs can lead 
you to overlook important conclusions. Sometimes advanced 
visualizations are worth the effort."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/visualizing-traffic-analysis.html


+04: EVENTS.

DealBITS Training Library Contest from lynda.com
August 14-20, 2006.
Enter to win a one-year Online Training Library premium subscription 
from lynda.com.
http://www.tidbits.com/dealbits/lynda/?14@@!dbc=16050609514

User Interface Engineering (UIE) Virtual Seminars
http://www.uie.com/events/virtual_seminars/

AJAX Seminar
October 2-4, 2006.
Santa Clara, California U.S.A.
http://ajaxseminar.com/

 Fundamentos Web
October 3-5, 2006.
Oviedo, Asturias, Spain
http://www.fundamentosweb.org/2006/programa/

Behaviour and Information Technology Conference
October 10, 2006.
London, United Kingdom
http://www.event-solutions.info/pages/event.asp?ecode=CD1040

User Focus
October 13, 2006.
Washington, DC, U.S.A.
http://www.upa-dc-metro.org/conference/

XTech WebDev: Essential Web Developer Training
October 31, 2006.
London, United Kingdom
http://webdev.xtech.org/

User Friendly 2006
November 3-5, 2006.
Hangzhou, China.
http://www.upachina.org/userfriendly2006/default_en.htm


+05: FLASH.

Using Flash Player 8 Filters for Good
By Tinic Uro.
"...We've had many discussion internally of how we could make the Flash 
Player more accessible for disabled users and I can already tell you 
that there are plenty of ideas which will eventually make their way 
into the player. The list of things to do is really long. But for the 
time being let me show you a little example of how a filter can make 
something which used to be difficult very easy now. If you ever had to 
deal with accessibility for the visually impaired you might know that 
Flash does not follow the high contrast settings of Windows. This is a 
real problem and prevents the deployment of Flash applications in many 
cases. While native integration is still missing in Flash Player 8 you 
can offer clients a way of enabling this, using the 
ColorMatrixFilter..."
http://tinyurl.com/ouyue


+06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

The Bulletin of Information Architecture
The August/September 2006 issue of the ASIS&T Bulletin includes a 
special section on information architecture with a nice mix of 
philosophical and practical articles.
http://www.asis.org/bulletin.html


+07: JAVASCRIPT.

JSON
By Wikipedia.
"JSON (pronounced...like the English given name 'Jason'), which stands 
for 'JavaScript Object Notation', is a lightweight computer data 
interchange format. JSON is a subset of the object literal notation of 
JavaScript but its use does not require JavaScript..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON

JSON All The Way
By Drew McLellan.
"I'm increasingly coming around to the realization that JSON is pretty 
much the best way to consume external data within JavaScript. If you're 
providing a web service or API that's returning data in XML format, you 
really need to start offering a JSON output option if you want to 
encourage use of your service. It's becoming essential."
http://allinthehead.com/retro/298/json-all-the-way


+08: MISCELLANEOUS.

Dan Cederholm Interview
By Ryan Carson.
"In this interview, Ryan Carson from Carson Workshops talks to Dan 
Cederholm, web designer, author and one half of the duo behind 
Corkd.com."
http://www.thinkvitamin.com/interviews/webapps/dan-cederholm/

Gel (Good Experience Live) 2006 Video Clips
http://gelconference.com/whatis.php


+09: PHP.

PHP Video: Processing Forms with PHP - part 1
By  Stefan Mischook.
"In this video, I review a few key aspects about forms that relate 
directly to form processing with PHP...."
http://www.killerphp.com/articles/php-video-php-forms/


+10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

Angry Indeed
By Eric A. Meyer.
"...It's the most concise indictment possible that the first part of 
the W3C's mission statement, the fragment they put right on their home 
page, 'Leading the Web to Its Full Potential...', has been betrayed..."
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/08/14/angry-indeed/

Angry, Not: Zeldman, Meyer, and Fair Concerns About the W3C
By Molly E. Holzschlag.
"Eric Meyer has written a great post, 'Angry Indeed 'and one that's 
going to be read and linked to. A lot. I agree with many of Eric's 
perspectives on this issue and therein lies the great irony of the 
entire conversation as to the relevance and strength of the W3C..."
http://tinyurl.com/fow7l

Just What Has Microsoft Been Doing for IE 7?
Slashdot thread.
"Jeff Reifman writes 'Last week, Windows columnist Paul Thurrott ripped 
into Microsoft for ignoring CSS standards with its upcoming Internet 
Explorer 7.0. 'Microsoft has set back Web development by an 
immeasurable amount of time. My advice is simple: Boycott IE. It's a 
cancer on the Web that must be stopped. IE isn't secure and isn't 
standards-compliant, which makes it unworkable both for end users and 
Web content creators.' With the redesign of my own site last month, I 
discovered just how non-compliant IE is with basic CSS: IE 52% vs. 
Firefox 93%. Is Microsoft purely incompetent and tone-deaf to customers 
- or simply counting on IE's non-compliance remaining a de-facto 
standard?"
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/07/1824250

IE7 Not CSS Compliant - Argh, Here We Go Again!
By Richard MacManus.
"It's disappointing that IE7 will perform so poorly in regards to CSS 
and web standards, particularly as I came away from that Webstock 
conference optimistic that IE7 would finally put an end to IE's poor 
record with CSS."
http://blogs.zdnet.com/web2explorer/index.php?p=254

IE and CSS 'Compliance'
By Chris Wilson.
"...The one thing that really burns my personal toast is that we've 
been working hard to improve our standards support in IE7, and I 
believe it is simply wrong to think that we've only moved the needle 
2%.  In fact, we prioritized IE7 around 3 things - security, end user 
experience, and standards improvements in the platform.  When I look 
back at the work my team has done in the platform, we have done only 
these things.  No proprietary features added, just standards 
improvements.  (Look forward to an upcoming IEBlog post from Markus 
Mielke listing out the CSS changes we've done in IE7.)  I feel that 
we've addressed the biggest problems and shortcomings from IE6 for web 
developers and designers, and we're hard at work shipping IE7 and 
getting ready to doing it again in the next release.  As I previously 
stated, our goal is to make the lives of web developers better by 
improving standards support in IE.  I think we've done a lot in IE7 to 
do just that, and I'm looking forward to doing even more..."
http://blogs.msdn.com/cwilso/archive/2006/08/10/694584.aspx

Google Valid and Strict
By Roger Johansson.
"...The myth that Google is using invalid markup to save bandwidth is 
clearly just a myth. Whether the reason is backwards compatibility, 
fear of change, developer ignorance, the server platform inflexibility, 
that they just don't care, or something else, I can only guess. But it 
sure isn't saving them any bandwidth."
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200608/google_valid_and_strict/


+11: TOOLS.

Tails (Firefox Extension)
By Calvin Yu.
"Tails is a Firefox extension that will display the presence of 
microformats on a webpage."
http://blog.codeeg.com/tails-firefox-extension-03/

HexColorPicker
By LuckySoftware.
HexColorPicker is a html plugin for Mac OS X's builtin colorpicker.
http://www.luckysoftware.dk/hexcolorpicker.php


+12: TYPOGRAPHY.

Designing With Code: Creating a Resizable Interface
By Kris Hadlock.
"In this article, I'll explain how to use CSS to create resizable 
interfaces with very little code. I'll also take a look at some 
limitations of this approach and how to surpass them using JavaScript. 
A live example can be seen here and the source code that is used in the 
article can be downloaded here."
http://www.informit.com/guides/content.asp?g=webdesign&seqNum=279&rl=1


+13: USABILITY.

'Dumbing Down' vs 'Writing More Intelligently'
By Russ Weakley.
"...When asked to write content for websites, scientists often ignore 
many of their target audiences and write specifically for their peers - 
other scientists in the same field...I have always had problems with 
the phrase 'dumbing down'. Scientists sometimes assume that they are 
more intelligent than their audiences and that attempting to 
communicate clearly with anyone outside their profession is beneath 
them...The answer I have always wanted to give to these people is: 'No, 
I don't want you to dumb it down. I would like you to write more 
intelligently. I'd like you to understand who you are communicating to, 
develop some empathy with these audiences and attempt to communicate 
clearly with these people'..."
http://www.maxdesign.com.au/2006/08/11/dumbing-down/

The Long Neck
By Gerry McGovern.
"All websites have a very small set of killer tasks that really matter 
to the customer. Web management is about perfecting the completion of 
these tasks..."
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2006/nt-2006-08-14-long-neck.htm

Participatory Design - and Why It's More Than UCD
By Ann Light.
"The buzz at the Participatory Design Conference (PDC2006) this month 
in Trento, Italy, was all about dissemination of methods. In the last 
few years, this community has watched a number of its more radical 
ideas for working with users go mainstream. ...Ask people what they do? 
Involve them in discussions about how things are going to work? Listen 
to them and use their ideas? Participatory methods have lost their 
value to shock..."
http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article3334.asp

Vision Quest: How Low-Resolution Displays Have Changed the Way We Read, 
Write, and Interact
By Jonathan Follett.
"Communication happens when behaviour changes--when the message you've 
carefully designed is not only received, but understood and acted upon. 
Join Jon Follett as he explores how we can best communicate on the web 
where low resolution monitors and tiny  mobile screens are the delivery 
methods for our missives."
http://www.digital-web.com/articles/vision_quest/

Display 2.0: A Look Forward to the High-Definition Web and Its Effect 
on Our Digital Experience
By Jonathan Follett.
"In the next few years, the adoption of high-resolution displays-with 
150 or more pixels per inch-will significantly alter our conception of 
what the Web and networked applications can potentially be..."
http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000114.php


+14: XML.

Frequently Asked Questions About XHTML vs HTML
By SitePoint.
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=393445

Microformats Cheat Sheet
By Brian Suda.
"This is a very early iteration of a microformats cheat sheet..."
http://suda.co.uk/projects/microformats/cheatsheet/

Beginning to Style Your RSS Feed
By Jonathan Christopher.
"...Given the wide range of exposure surrounding RSS, I think it's 
really important to handle your feed in a way that will be usable by as 
many people as possible. One way to accomplish that is to apply a bit 
of structure and style to your feed in case an inexperienced user were 
to somehow find their way to your RSS via their browser..."
http://mondaybynoon.com/2006/08/14/beginning-to-style-your-rss-feed/

SVG12: Brief Clarification on Formal Objections
By Bjoern Hoehrmann.
"Dear Scalable Vector Graphics Working Group, Thank you for informing 
me...about a possible misunderstanding on part of the SVG Working Group 
about what constitutes a formal objection in terms of the W3C 
Process..."
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2006Aug/0009

SVG Tiny 1.2 in Candidate Wreckommendation Stage
By Ian Hickson.
Today the W3C announced that SVG Tiny 1.2 entered the Candidate 
Recommendation stage. To do this they had to violate the W3C process..."
http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1155235213&count=1

What's Wrong With The SVG Working Group
By Robert O'Callahan.
"The current draft of SVG 1.2 Tiny defines <svg:a target="_self"> to 
work in a way that's incompatible with the de-facto standard 
implemented by all major browsers for the HTML <a> element. It is, 
apparently, compatible with the W3C's WebCGM Recommendation...Wake up, 
W3C. We need you and this kind of nonsense isn't doing anyone any good."
http://tinyurl.com/pshxt


[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 at d.umn.edu


[Issue ends.]