[webdev] Web Design Update: January 30, 2009

Fri Jan 30 06:21:32 CST 2009

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 7, Issue 31, January 30, 2009.

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

++ISSUE 31 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: EVENTS.
04: FLASH.
05: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
06: TOOLS.
07: USABILITY.
08: XML.

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

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

The Stanford Captioning Project
By John Foliot and Sean Keegan.
"Having identified the three biggest obstacles in creating captioned 
media on campus, a pilot project has been proposed that seeks to remedy 
or lessen the impact of these impediments..."
http://captioning.stanford.edu/service.php

Why Captioning?
By John Foliot and Sean Keegan.
"While captioning audio/video presentations is a lifeline for the deaf 
and hard-of-hearing community, captioning can also be used to improve 
your media product and enhance its accessibility to a much larger 
community..."
http://captioning.stanford.edu/

WCAG 2.0 Checklist
By Jared Smith.
"The following is NOT WCAG 2.0. It is, however, a simple checklist that 
presents the principles and techniques of WCAG 2.0 in a more 
user-friendly, understandable format. The language has been significantly 
changed and simplified from the official WCAG 2.0 specification to make 
it more easily tested and verified for web pages. While this checklist 
may be very handy in pursuing accessibility and WCAG conformance, please 
reference WCAG 2.0 documentation to verify actual conformance."
http://webaim.org/standards/wcag/checklist

Requiring the alt Attribute in HTML5
By Gez Lemon.
"I'm putting together a list of pros and cons about making the alt 
attribute required in HTML 5. The following is a list of reasons for and 
against making the alt attribute required. What is your opinion?..."
http://juicystudio.com/article/requiring-alt-attribute-html5.php

Testing Times: Recession Busting Accessibility Tips
By Henny Swan.
"...If you get it right at the start of a redesign or new build by 
including user feedback, especially feedback from users with 
disabilities, you're more likely to have a slicker, faster and more 
effective website than if you don't user test. And we all know what that 
means: better ROI, easier maintenance and a substantially bigger user 
base - all the things the money men like to hear about..."
http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/testing-times

Captcha Cracking in JavaScript with Canvas and Neural Nets
By Ajaxian.
"Everybody's favourite glass shield to protect web apps are CAPTCHAS. 
These are the distorted characters displayed on a page that a user has to 
enter before gaining access or sending off a form. They annoy normal 
users, are largely inaccessible to blind users or dyslexic people and are 
not that safe as we think they are. PWNtcha continually reports 
successful cracks of various captchas on the web using OCR algos and 
backend systems. What is pretty amazing though is that now you can even 
crack the images using JavaScript and Canvas..."
http://tinyurl.com/d3y6s5

Bringing More Readers In
By Desiree Sturdevant.
"...With respect to social medias and my experiences so far, some are 
more accessible than others, but there are still barriers..."
http://universallydesigned.net/uncategorized/bringing-more-readers-in

Headings, Heading Hierarchy, and Document Outlines
By Roger Johansson.
"Recently my coworkers and I have been discussing HTML headings and 
heading hierarchy. This may not sound like something you need to spend a 
lot of time discussing, but there are some situations when it seems very 
difficult to find a solution without compromises..."
http://tinyurl.com/bexb5f

Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) Directory
By Even Grounds.
"The following directory contains a list of companies which provide a 
Voluntary Product Accessibility Template of their products..."
http://www.evengrounds.com/resources/vpat-directory

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Using HTTP Headers to Serve Styles
By Eric A. Meyer.
"How many times have you played out the following scenario?..."
http://tinyurl.com/cke9gh

z-index: Sandwich Filler
By Karl Dawson.
"Working with z-index can be a little counter-intuitive at times..."
http://tinyurl.com/d5ferq

+03: EVENTS.

The Exciting Future of CSS and XHTML with Eric Meyer
March 9, 2009.
London, United Kingdom.
http://carsonworkshops.com/2009/ericmeyer/

E-Access '09
April 23 2009.
London, United Kingdom.
http://www.headstar-events.com/eaccess09/

@media
June 25-26, 2009.
London, United Kingdom
http://www.vivabit.com/atmedia2009/

eduWeb Conference
July 20-22, 2009.
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.
http://www.eduwebconference.com/

OSCON 2009
July 20-24, 2009.
San Jose, California, U.S.A.
http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2009

AHEAD
July 20-25, 2009.
Louisville, Kentucky, U.S.A.
http://www.ahead.org/conferences/2009

HighEdWeb 2009
October 4-7, 2009.
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S.A.
http://www.highedweb.org/

Writing for the Web 1
April 8, 2009 in Washington D.C., U.S.A.
May 20, 2009 in London United Kingdom.
June 25, 2009 in San Francisco, California, U.S.A.
July 30, 2009 in Sydney Australia.
http://www.nngroup.com/events/tutorials/writing_for_web.html

Writing for the Web 2
April 9, 2009 in Washington D.C., U.S.A.
May 21, 2009 in London United Kingdom.
June 26, 2009 in San Francisco, California, U.S.A.
July 31, 2009 in Sydney Australia.
http://www.nngroup.com/events/tutorials/content_2.html

+04: FLASH.

HTML 5 Flash Embedding and Other Validation Errors
By Bruce Lawson.
"When I completed the first round of my HTML 5 redesign, some validation 
errors remained..."
http://tinyurl.com/btegrn

+05: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

Validator Donation Program: The First Numbers Are In!
By Olivier Thereaux.
"...With the donation program entering its 7th week, and more big things 
to come, it felt like a good time to start analyzing some of the data and 
sharing them with you..."
http://tinyurl.com/d6nxc2

Microformats, Accessibility, HTML 5 (again)
By Bruce Lawson.
"Microformats are a good idea, but some have accessibility problems 
because they expose machine data to humans by misusing the abbr element. 
These problems led to the BBC removing those microformats from their 
sites..."
http://tinyurl.com/clbszu

12 Standard Screen Patterns
Luke Wroblewski.
"As part of the release of their upcoming book, Designing Web Interfaces: 
Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions, Bill Scott and Theresa 
Neil have published a full set of principles and patterns for rich 
interaction design. The first set consists of 12 Standard Screen Patterns 
and 100 examples of them in action. Get your hands on this great resource 
at the book's site."
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?762

Pattern Languages for Interaction Design
By Will Evans.
"An Interview with Erin Malone, Christian Crumlish, and Lucas 
Pettinati..."
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/pattern-languages

+06: TOOLS.

Normalisation tool
By  Richard Ishida.
"This tool allows you to normalize short pieces of text to Unicode forms 
NFC or NFD..."
http://rishida.net/tools/normalizer/

+07: USABILITY.

Occam's Razor in Web Design, Simplicity Wins
By Ross Johnson
"...All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best...'
http://tinyurl.com/ado9pj

User Experience Deliverables
By Peter Morville.
"...I'm rethinking my role, redefining my deliverables, and embracing new 
forms of interdisciplinary collaboration..."
http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000228.php

What the Web is Really Good For
By Gerry McGovern,
"The Web helps us make better decisions based on us doing often  very 
detailed research. But certain decisions don't require any  research at 
all."
http://tinyurl.com/bh6a93

President Obama: Vision for Usability?
By Frank Spillers.
"...What should Obama do to ensure that the people getting the technology 
can use it?..."
http://tinyurl.com/cafxt2

+08: XML.

RDFa vs. RDF/XML
By ESW Wiki.
"This is a note comparing RDFa and RDF/XML in terms of features, usage, 
etc..."
http://esw.w3.org/topic/RDFa_vs_RDFXML

XHTML Users: Grow Up!
Interview with Tommy Olsson.
"The ongoing work with HTML5 seems to ignore semantics to a large degree. 
Yes, it proposes to add a handful of semantic element types, but it also 
adds purely presentational stuff that - in my opinion - doesn't belong in 
a markup language. Even worse is that it redefines long-established 
semantics of existing element types. For instance, the P element type no 
longer denotes a paragraph; it becomes a generic block-level container - 
nothing more than a synonym for DIV. The contempt for accessibility is 
even more worrying. The drafts propose to eliminate several important 
attributes (or at least make them non-required). The reason appears to be 
a lack of support in contemporary assistive technology..."
http://www.webscienceman.com/2009/01/24/html-xhtml-html5-future-html/

[Section one ends.]

++ SECTION TWO:

+09: 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.

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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.]