[webdev] Web Design Update: April 30, 2010

[Laura Carlson]

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 8, Issue 44, April 30, 2010.

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

++ISSUE 44 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: FLASH.
07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
08: JAVASCRIPT.
09: MISCELLANEOUS.
10: NAVIGATION.
11: PHP.
12: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
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.

Draft Database of Results from Cognitive Web Accessibility Assessments
By John Rochford.
"I now have a database of results from my assessments of cognitive Web 
accessibility.  It is a work in progress. I am displaying the database 
data on The Clear Helper Web site..."
http://tinyurl.com/245bsmo

Adding ARIA Landmark Roles
By Dennis E. Lembree.
"ARIA  Landmark Roles were recently added to the Web Axe web site. It's 
a great and easy way to add better accessibility to your site, start 
learning ARIA, and future-proof your site. And it only takes a few 
minutes, so why not add it into your site? (If you haven't already!)"
http://webaxe.blogspot.com/2010/04/adding-aria-landmark-roles.html

A Few Problems with the Concept of Accessible PDFs
By Gian Wild.
"...It's only when one reads the Appendices  that it becomes apparent 
that all is not as it seems. Adobe PDF does fail in some serious ways, 
it just seems to have escaped the author of the Accessibility Support 
document. But firstly, lets look at the actual testing undertaken...."
http://tinyurl.com/2wxddlf

Web Accessibility - A Good Personal Development Strategy
By Tom Babinszki.
Your web site is not the only one that will benefit from web 
accessibility..."
http://www.evengrounds.com/blog/web-accessibility-personal-development-strategy

Civil Rights Division Pushes for Internet Accessibility
By Leah Nylen.
"A Justice Department official told a House Judiciary panel Thursday 
that the Civil Rights Division will continue to push for accessibility 
on the internet for Americans with disabilities."
http://www.accessibilitynewsinternational.com/?p=1413

...And Access for All
By Penny Reeder.
"...The Department of Justice, in this instance, spelled out for society 
exactly what functional accessibility means. Their clear definition of 
accessibility makes such civil rights agreements concrete and 
meaningful. Whether it’s access to a place of commerce, or a college 
textbook, or an interpreter, or a descriptive tag for a website, 
specific statements, along with regulations, will go a long way toward 
making accessibility a reality and a civil right..."
http://tinyurl.com/2b82jxm

A Letter to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary
By John Foliot.
"...I took some time today...and I took those PDF documents that are 
inaccessible to so many, and I converted them to actual HTML (web) 
documents..."
http://tinyurl.com/25ykgum

Do We Need a New Game Plan to Make the Web Accessible?
By Vlad Alexander.
"Are we, the stakeholders in Web technology, doing the right things to 
move Web accessibility forward? Shouldn't we perhaps re-evaluate our 
strategy, to confirm what we are doing is right, or to find out if we 
need to develop new strategies?"
http://www.rebuildingtheweb.com/en/need-new-plan-to-make-web-accessible/


+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

The CSS 3 Flexible Box Model
By Paul Rouge.
"CSS 3 introduces a brand new box model in addition of the traditional 
box model from CSS 1 and 2. The flexible box model determines the way 
boxes are distributed inside other boxes and the way they share the 
available space."
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/04/the-css-3-flexible-box-model/

CSS Reset - A Simpler Option
By Russ Weakley.
"A quick presentation on CSS Reset including a basic explanation, an 
outline of some of the advantages and disadvantages, as well as a 
simpler reset option."
http://www.maxdesign.com.au/articles/css-reset/

Beautiful UI Styling With CSS3 text-shadow, box-shadow, and border-radius
By Jan Henrik Helmers.
"Previous articles have covered the basics of CSS3 transitions and 2D 
transforms and CSS3 borders, backgrounds and box-shadows; refer to those 
articles if you need to read up on the basics of using these properties..."
http://tinyurl.com/2368yxc

Why CSS3 Is Worse Than IE6 Debugging - Headaches (Again)
By Niels Matthijs.
"I remember them. The days when css2.1 was pretty much all there was to 
css. css3 was a faraway dream, a promised land full of easy coding and 
free afternoons and IE6 was the devil, making our job a living hell with 
all its buggy quirks and lack of standards. How naive we all were back 
then huh..."
http://tinyurl.com/2d5so9f


+03: DREAMWEAVER.

Introducing Dreamweaver CS5
By Scott Fegette.
"Get an overview of key new features such as CSS Inspect mode, CMS 
support, the new Site Setup dialog box, and more.
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/logged_in/sfegette_dwcs5.html


+04: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Average Task Times in Usability Tests: What to Report?
By Jeff Sauro.
"...The mean works quite well to provide the center value or most 
"typical" value in a set of data that is roughly symmetrical. When the 
data become skewed by really large values, the mean is pulled upward. 
This happens when summarizing financial data like average home prices or 
average salaries. One really expensive home or the chief executive will 
pull the average way up. In these cases, the median is used to provide a 
more accurate picture of the middle or most typical value..."
http://www.measuringusability.com/average-times.php

User Experience Metrics
By Joshua Porter.
"Remember when hit counters were all the rage?..."
http://52weeksofux.com/post/548149897/user-experience-metrics


+05: EVENTS.

Accessibility is Not a Feature: Integrating Accessibility Into Your Projects
May 18, 2010.
Washington, DC, U.S.A.
http://accessibilitydcmay10.eventbrite.com/

The 12th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and 
Accessibility (ASSETS 2010)
October 25-27, 2010.
Orlando, Florida, U.S.A.
http://www.sigaccess.org/assets10/

edUi 2010
November 8-9, 2010.
Charlottesville, Virginia, U.S.A.
http://eduiconf.org/


+06: FLASH.

Flash is as Open as HTML5
By Serge Jespers.
"How's that for a controversial title? But… It's true… Hear me out"
http://www.webkitchen.be/2010/04/22/flash-is-as-open-as-html5/


+07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

Classification Schemes (and when to use them)
By Donna Maurer.
"When you do information architecture work you'll realize that most sets 
of content can be organized in more than one way. One of the challenges 
for an IA project is figuring out what way works best for your audience, 
your content and your project's goals."
http://tinyurl.com/363ptq4


+08: JAVASCRIPT.

5 Common Myths About JavaScript
By Craig Buckler.
"Despite being the world's most widely-used programming language, 
JavaScript is the most misunderstood and undervalued. The situation has 
improved during the past few years, but these myths still permeate the 
IT world..."
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2010/04/27/5-common-javascript-myths/


+09: MISCELLANEOUS.

The State of Web Development 2010
By Web Directions.
"Welcome to this detailed report from our second 'State of Web 
Development' survey of professional web designers and developers. It 
includes details and analysis of all the responses to over 50 questions 
covering technologies, techniques, philosophies and practices that 
today's web professionals employ."
http://www.webdirections.org/sotw10/


+10: NAVIGATION.

Navigation is More Important Than Search
By Gerry McGovern.
"...In many, many situations we have found that there is significantly 
more navigational activity on websites than searching. As it dawns on us 
how important search has become, what does this say about the vital 
importance of good navigation? Clear menus and links are the foundations 
upon which all great websites are built."
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2010/nt-2010-04-26-Navigation-search.htm


+11: PHP.

Six Cool PHP Tricks You May Not Know
By Chris Roane.
"Over the years I've come across some useful PHP development tricks in 
that are not obvious, but are..."
http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/chrisroane042210.php3


+12: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

Future Web Accessibility: HTML5 <video>
By Aaron Andersen.
"This is the first in a multipost series about the immediate and likely 
future of web accessibility. Each week or so I’ll discuss a different 
upcoming technology, tag, platform, or system from an accessibility 
perspective. Additions, corrections, or further thoughts are welcome in 
the comments."
http://webaim.org/blog/future-web-accessibility-html5-video/

Removing the Details and Summary Elements
By Shelley Powers.
"One of my HTML5 change proposals is to remove the details element..."
http://tinyurl.com/2g38f6e

Bulletproof HTML5 <details> Fallback Using jQuery
By Mathias Bynens.
"The HTML5 <details>  element is currently not natively supported in any 
browser. This makes it a little hard to guess how exactly this new 
element will behave, but reading the spec gives us a pretty good idea. 
What's clear is the following..."
http://mathiasbynens.be/notes/html5-details-jquery

Built-in or bolt-on accessibility in HTML5? How about a bit of both?
By Roger Johansson.
"While following the development of HTML5 I've seen a fair bit of talk 
about 'built-in' vs. 'bolt-on' accessibility. Perhaps I'm missing 
something vital, but I don't really see what the problem is or why it 
has to be one or the other..."
http://tinyurl.com/2fdb7pn

The HTML5 <ruby> Element in Words of One Syllable or Less
By Daniel Davis.
"Opera colleague Bruce Lawson thought it might be spiffing if the 
description of the <ruby> element that appears in the HTML5 spec was 
clarified a bit, so here's my attempt. I'm using Japanese as an example 
although it applies to Chinese and possibly other languages as well. 
Please note my definition of one syllable may differ from yours..."
http://tinyurl.com/29ybrht

Using the HTML 5 Section Element
By Alejandro Gervasio.
"In this second part of a series I discuss the use of the section tag 
included with HTML 5. It can be used for semantically defining different 
sections of a web page. Working with this element is a fairly 
straightforward process so you shouldn't have major problems using it 
within the markup of your own HTML 5 documents..."
http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/HTML/Using-the-HTML-5-Section-Element/

Working With HTML 5`s Footer Element
By Alejandro Gervasio.
"In this third part of a series on HTML 5 I provide you with a quick and 
simple introduction to creating semantic footers in HTML 5 with the 
footer tag..."
http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/HTML/Working-with-HTML-5s-Footer-Element/

Building Sidebars with HTML 5`s Aside Element
By Alejandro Gervasio.
"In this fourth part of the series I introduce you to the aside element. 
It comes in handy for quickly defining a sidebar within an HTML 5 
document while preserving its precious and valuable semantic meaning..."
http://tinyurl.com/366oefs


+13: TYPOGRAPHY.

Font Stacks
By Russ Weakley.
"A quick presentation on Font stacks including a basic explanation and a 
step-by-step example..."
http://www.maxdesign.com.au/articles/font-stacks/


+14: USABILITY.

The Homepage is Dead
By John Eric Brandt.
"...It means every page of your website could be the 'front door.' 
...So, one of the changes is that designers/owners/marketing folks need 
to realize that websites will be used by people other than for whom you 
expect. This means you need to broaden your thinking about the purpose 
of your site and to whom you think you are marketing to..."
http://jebswebs.net/blog/2010/04/the-homepage-is-dead/

Simplicity Isn't that Simple
By Joshua Brewer.
"...the ultimate level of sophistication happens when the refining 
process is so complete that there is truly nothing else to add and 
nothing else to take away; when the nature of a thing is perfectly 
represented and understood by its state and appearance. To behold it is 
to know and understand it..."
http://52weeksofux.com/post/548149787/simplicity-isnt-that-simple

Designing For A Hierarchy Of Needs
By Steven Bradley.
"Based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the idea of a design hierarchy of 
needs rests on the assumption that in order to be successful, a design 
must meet basic needs before it can satisfy higher-level needs. Before a 
design can 'Wow' us, it must work as intended. It must meet some minimal 
need or nothing else will really matter. Is this true? Or could a design 
that's hard to use still succeed because it makes users more proficient 
or meets certain creative needs? Do you have to get all of the low-level 
needs exactly right before considering higher-level needs? To answer 
these questions, let's start by looking at Maslow's hierarchy."
http://tinyurl.com/35jr99o

Usability Do's And Don'ts For Interactive Design
By Ben MacGowan.
"...Below, we'll briefly discuss ways to look at the code and the result 
of our interactive designs and, thus, improve their usability..."
http://tinyurl.com/33eunad

[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.


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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.]