[webdev] Web Design Update: May 23, 2008

Fri May 23 06:17:13 CDT 2008

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 6, Issue 48, May 23, 2008.

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: PHP.
10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
11: TOOLS.
12: TYPOGRAPHY.
13: USABILITY.
14: XML.

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

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Mozilla Accessibility - Collecting Stories and Dreams
By Aaron Leventhal.
"I am interested to hear what impact people think Mozilla's work in 
accessibility has had on users developers, organizations, or the 
industry as a whole..."
http://tinyurl.com/3o25kz

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Tip: Calculate the Specificity of CSS Selectors
By Virginia DeBolt.
"Have you ever added a new rule to your CSS stylesheet, but seen no 
change in the results on the page in the browser window? Maybe the new 
selector wasn't specific enough to overrule and existing rule in your 
stylesheet. Here's how to mathematically calculate the specific weight 
of your CSS selectors..."
http://tinyurl.com/4lljwn

CSS: Simple Rules for Better Organization and More Efficiency
By Jens Meiert.
"'Organization is not everything, but without organization, everything 
is nothing,' one of my teachers used to say, and right he is. Almost 
everything benefits from organization, and so does work with CSS - 
especially when working with many people..."
http://tinyurl.com/446s9l

CSS: Pseudo
By James Payne.
"We left off learning about the various positions in CSS. In this 
tutorial we will cover the pseudo classes and pseudo elements, which 
allow us to add special effects to our selectors. An example would be 
roll-over effects on hyperlinks, or making the first letter of a 
sentence larger and a different color than the rest of the text. We 
will begin our discussion by working with Pseudo-elements..."
http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/Web-Style-Sheets/CSS-Pseudo/

Understanding CSS Positioning, Part 3
By Kilian Valkhof.
"In part one and part two we've discussed the positioning, display and 
floats properties of CSS2. In the final part of this series, we'll 
discuss the new options CSS3 gives us: The advanced layout module and 
the grid positioning module."
http://tinyurl.com/6ow9o9

Perfect Pagination Style Using CSS
By Antonio Lupetti.
"This tutorial explains how to design a pagination for search results 
or more in general to split a long list of records in more pages. It's 
a question I often receive, so I decided to publish a very simple post 
which explains how to design a perfect pagination style using some 
lines of HTML and CSS code."
http://tinyurl.com/2ulcom

+03: DREAMWEAVER.

Taking a Fireworks Comp to a CSS-based Layout in Dreamweaver - Part 1, 
Initial Design
By Sheri German and Gordon Mackay.
"This three-part tutorial guides you through the complete process of 
using Fireworks and Dreamweaver to produce web standards pages. In Part 
1, you will work in Fireworks to create the design, organize the 
layers, make the slices, and export them to a defined site. In Parts 2 
and 3, you will work in Dreamweaver to build a CSS-based layout that 
entirely eschews the use of tables...."
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/dw_fw_css_pt1.html

Introduction to CSS3 - Part 5, Multiple Columns
By Design Shack.
"Multiple columns are a major facet of laying out text - newspapers 
have used them for decades. So important are they that it is amazing 
that the current way to achieve a multi column layout is one of the 
most complex techniques for a new designer to grasp. CSS3 introduces a 
new module known, appropriately, as multi-column layout. It allows you 
to specify how many columns text should be split down into and how they 
should appear. As usual, examples can be found below..."
http://tinyurl.com/5mtxyf

+04: EVALUATION & TESTING.

A Counter-Intuitive Approach to Evaluating Design Alternatives
By Jared M. Spool.
"...Teams have to make decisions. The most successful teams make 
informed decisions. While it may be counter-intuitive, focusing the 
study on the current design may be the best approach for this client. 
Asking each participant to somehow rank each design alternative will 
take more time and produce confusing results. We felt a study that 
looks primarily at the current design can give the team the most 
insight into what alternatives, if any, to choose."
http://www.uie.com/articles/design_alternatives/

+05: EVENTS.

eduWeb Conference
July 21-23, 2008.
Atlantic City New Jersey, U.S.A.
http://www.eduwebconference.com

+06: JAVASCRIPT.

How to Avoid Automatic Type Conversion in JavaScript
By Robert Nyman.
"A very common problem when people code JavaScript, is that they don't 
take automatic type conversion into account. As a result, there are 
numerous weird errors and JavaScript is getting a lot of blame for 
being loosely typed. Therefore, I'd like to show you an easy way to 
avoid that problem..."
http://tinyurl.com/6fdg2k

Javascript Scoping Makes My Head Hurt
By Piers Cawley.
"Who came up with the javascript scoping rules? What were they smoking. 
Here's some Noddy Perl that demonstrates what I'm on about..."
http://tinyurl.com/3jfdcq

+07: MISCELLANEOUS.

The Cure for Content-Delay Syndrome
By Pepi Ronalds.
"Clients love to write copy. Well, they love to plan to write it, 
anyhow. On most web design projects, content is the last thing to be 
considered (and almost always the last thing to be delivered). We'll 
spend hours, weeks, even months, doing user scenarios, site maps, 
wireframes, designs, schemas, and specifications?but content? It's a 
disrespected line item in a schedule: 'final content delivered.' Pepi 
Ronalds proposes a solution to this constant cause of project delays."
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/thecureforcontent-delaysyndrome

Andy Budd on Usability, Design, and the Death of CSS
By Matthew Magain.
"In this interview, veteran user experience designer, author and web 
standards advocate Andy Budd speaks to SitePoint about blogging, 
usability testing, the design process, and why he thinks that CSS is a 
dead technology..."
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/andy-budd-design-usability-css

Handoff
By Dave Shea.
"A few months back at SXSW I sat on a panel that discussed how 
designers and developers play nice together on web projects. One of the 
things I never got around to mentioning was the system I use for 
handing off my static design work to clients and their developers for 
integration into their dynamic systems. Since I've been thinking about 
it a bit more in the past few weeks, I figured I ought to put this out 
there..."
http://mezzoblue.com/archives/2008/05/21/handoff/

+08: NAVIGATION.

Fixing Appalling Intranet Search
By Gerry McGovern.
"Intranet search is appalling because people don't want their  content 
to get found, and the organization does not value the importance of 
finding."
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2008/nt-2008-05-19-intranet-search.htm

+09: PHP.

Multiple Select Fields
By Michal Wojciechowski.
"We humans are greedy creatures. When we're placed in front of a choice 
to select one of many options, we start complaining - Hey, why can't I 
pick two? Why not five? Can't I have both pineapple AND pepperoni on my 
pizza? This is why multiple selection form fields had to be invented. 
Let's examine a few examples of how multiple select fields can be 
implemented in HTML and PHP (as well as some JavaScript)..."
http://odyniec.net/articles/multiple-select-fields/

phpwiki - The Wiki for PHP Developers
By Ian Gilfillan.
"This month it's time to look at another of those PHP applications I 
find useful on a daily basis. I like to use 'wikis' for documentation 
for many of the projects I work on. [...] In this article we will look 
at PhpWiki, and we'll show you how to configure and use it with your 
own projects!..."
http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/ian_gilfillan20060309.php3

PHP Sucks, But It Doesn't Matter
Jeff Atwood.
"Here's a list of every function beginning with the letter "A" in the 
PHP function index..."
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001119.html

+10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

EduTF Report Highlights Curriculum Project
By Holly Marie Koltz.
"In the past year, the EduTF has been quieter than previous years. We 
have gone through a few changes, though our mission remains the same. 
'The WaSP Education Task Force was created in 2005 to work directly 
with institutions of higher education to help raise awareness of Web 
standards and accessibility among instructors, administrators, and Web 
development teams.' Our mission is not a small one. Our work and 
message needs to reach beyond our reading audience and the Web 
standards community in order to get information, help, and resources to 
more people. EduTF is discussing and looking at a variety of ways in 
which we can help."
http://tinyurl.com/6y35ur

.net/may2008 Article Browser Version Targeting
By Patrick H. Lauke.
"here's the full original text (call it the 'director's cut', if you 
will) of my little rant / opinion piece in this month's .net 
magazine..."
http://www.splintered.co.uk/news/103

Use Formats Instead of Microformats
By Emil Stenstrom.
"The Semantic Web continues to break new ground, and Web 3.0 seems to 
be a term that people associate with it. In the backwaters of 
semantics, microformats aims to develop standards to embed semantic 
information into XHTML. I can't help to think that's strange..."
http://friendlybit.com/html/use-formats-instead-of-microformats/

HTML5 Conformance Checking in Vim
By Mike Smith.
"Kai Hendry has written an HTML file type plugin for Vim that allows 
you to use Henri Sivonen's Validator.nu conformance checking 
(validation) service remotely to check the contents of any HTML 
document you edit in Vim and determine if the document is 
HTML5-conformant (valid)..."
http://blog.whatwg.org/vim-checker

W3C 'clarifies' HTML 5 v XHTML
By Phil Manchester.
"Potential conflicts and overlap between the first update to HTML in a 
decade by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and XHTML has been 
addressed by the standards body. The group, meanwhile, has also 
acknowledged vendors are - once again - pushing their own 
platform-specific technologies..."
http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2008/05/16/html5_xhtml_vendors_lockin/

+11: TOOLS.

Firefox Extensions Updated To Version 3
By Gez Lemon.
"The Colour Contrast Analyser, Table Inspector, and Glossary of Terms 
Firefox extensions have all been updated to be compatible with Firefox 
version 3..."
http://tinyurl.com/3vxs28

XForms Builder
By Orbeon.
"Orbeon Forms is an open source forms solution designed to handle 
complex forms typical of the enterprise or government. It includes: A 
robust forms platform which implements W3C XForms..."
http://www.orbeon.com/forms/builder

+12: TYPOGRAPHY.

The Showcase Of BIG Typography - Second Edition
By Vitaly Friedman and Sven Lennartz.
"In Web typography doesn't have to support the overall design. It can 
dominate. It can be loud. It can be bold. And it can be everywhere on a 
web-site. In many situations it's reasonable to give the typography the 
prominent position it deserves, leaving visual cues in the background 
or removing them at all. Doing that, you have to risk large font sizes 
surrounded by a generous amount of white space. What comes out of it? 
Elegant web sites with a unique form, style and sense of precision..."
http://tinyurl.com/5wtd45

+13: USABILITY.

User Assistance: Writing for a High-Context Culture
By Mike Hughes.
"While technical communicators tend to write in a low-context style, 
user assistance occurs in high-context situations."
http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000292.php

Design Decisions vs. Audience Considerations
By Robin Ragle-Davis.
"This week, we take a look at how to handle the conflict between what 
your users want, and what you want them to want. Robin Ragle-Davis 
considers how upfront audience profiling can reap customer relationship 
benefits down the line.
http://tinyurl.com/6omoft

UX Design-Planning Not One-Man Show
By Holger Maassen.
"A lot of confusion and misunderstanding surrounds the term 'user 
experience.' The multitude of activities that can be labeled with these 
two words span a vast spectrum of people, skills and situations. If you 
ask for UX design (UXD), what exactly are you asking for? Similarly, if 
someone tells you they are going to provide you with UXD for an 
application, website or intranet or extranet, what exactly are you 
going to get?..."
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/ux-design-planning

Less Is Still More
By Jens Meiert.
"How much time and money gets spent on making things worse is something 
I find absolutely fascinating. Allow me to elaborate, starting with 
HTML newsletters: People (let) spend hours on writing supposed content, 
create and decorate mockups, work around ridiculous email client 
implementations..."
http://meiert.com/en/blog/20080521/less-is-still-more/

+14: XML.

Serving XHTML As XML
By Belus Technology.
"XHTML was created by the HTML Working Group at W3C, whose mission is 
to 'fulfill the promise of XML by applying XHTML to a wide variety of 
platforms.' It is therefore XML that is driving the development of 
XHTML, and developers need to understand the connection between these 
two technologies... When a browser opens a Web page and the media type 
for the page is set to application/xhtml+xml, the browser will process 
the page as XML and will enforce the rules of XML. If there are markup 
errors on a Web page, the browser will not render the Web page. 
Instead, most Web browsers will display an XML parsing error message 
such as the one seen in the screen shot below..."
http://xhtml.com/en/xhtml/serving-xhtml-as-xml/

If You Don't Need XML, Then Don't Use It!
By Kurt Cagle.
"...XML is a powerful metalanguage, capable of an astonishingly large 
number of uses and now become such an ubiquitous part of the 
environment that it is probably permanently entrenched. However, there 
are alternatives that, individually, are better optimized for specific 
tasks. If you are more comfortable using them, use them..."
http://tinyurl.com/3w6ev2

Bad XML
By Jeni Tennison.
"...Not all XML is created equal, and I think the biggest distinction 
between a good markup language and a bad one comes down to whether the 
XML was designed as a markup language or whether it's a serialization 
of a completely different model. Practically all the XML serializations 
that I've seen of object-oriented models, or relational models, or 
graph models, have been dreadful as markup languages. So what are the 
characteristics of XML that a good markup language should take 
advantage of? Here's my list..."
http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2008/05/bad_xml.html

[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:
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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 at d.umn.edu

[Issue ends.]