[webdev] Web Design Update: June 24, 2011

Fri Jun 24 06:51:17 CDT 2011

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 9, Issue 52, June 24, 2011.

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

++ISSUE 52 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: EVALUATION & TESTING.
04: EVENTS.
05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
06: JAVASCRIPT.
07: MISCELLANEOUS.
08: NAVIGATION.
09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

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

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

California State U. Report Warns of Accessibility Issues in Google Services
By Jie Jenny Zou.
"California State University's Accessible Technology Initiative
suggests in a report released this week that universities limit their
campuswide use of Google's free Web services based on what it calls a
variety of inaccessibility issues for the blind and those with other
disabilities..."
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/california-state-u-report-warns-of-accessibility-issues-in-google-services/31935

Say What? Google Works to Improve YouTube Auto-Captions for the Deaf
By Larry Greenemeier.
"Google continues to develop speech-recognition software that can
automatically generate captions for all videos posted to YouTube, but
challenges remain"
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=google-youtube-auto-caption

Captions and Subtitles
By YouTube.
"The Caption feature allows you to give viewers a deeper understanding
of your video. Adding captions and subtitles makes your videos more
accessible to people who can't follow along with the audio-either
because they speak a different language, or because they are deaf or
hard of hearing..."
http://www.youtube.com/t/captions_about

Call for Review: WCAG 2.0 Techniques Draft Updates
By Shawn Henry.
"The W3C WAI announces a Call for Review of updates to two supporting
documents for Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) 2.0..."
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/2011AprJun/0041.html

Getting to Grips with a Mobile Accessibility Strategy
By Shawn Henry.
"Establishing a mobile accessibility strategy can be a bit daunting.
It's tough to know where to start and even tougher to know where to
stop: what devices should be supported, browsers, apps, access
technology, who is it for and how teams can incorporate best practices
into their working practices?..."
http://www.iheni.com/getting-to-grips-with-a-mobile-accessibility-strategy/

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Using Classname (class) and ID in HTML
By Ben Hunt.
"Any HTML element can have an ID (identifier) and can also have one or
more Classnames..."
http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/html-css/using-classname-class-and-id-in-html/

+03: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Where to Get Your Task List From
By Gerry McGovern.
"The first step in top task management is carrying out a task
situation analysis in order to understand the whole range of customer
tasks that exist. I call this list of customer tasks the 'Longlist.'"
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2011/nt-2011-06-20-Where-task.htm

Reliability and Dependability in Usability Testing
By Mike Hughes.
"Usability testing is a form of user research, in so far as it allows
you to make conclusions about a large population based on observations
of a small sample of that population."
http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2011/06/reliability-and-dependability-in-usability-testing.php

+04: EVENTS.

Usability Week 2011 Toronto
July 11-15, 2011.
Toronto, Canada.
http://www.nngroup.com/events/toronto/agenda.html

Usability Week 2011 New York
August 1-6, 2011.
New York, New York, U.S.A.
http://www.nngroup.com/events/new_york/agenda.html

Adobe MAX
October 1-5, 2011.
Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.
http://max.adobe.com/

+05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

Mini-IA: Structuring the Information About a Concept
By Jakob Nielsen.
"In a miniature information architecture, coverage of a single topic is
chunked into units that are connected through simple navigation."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mini-ia.html

+06: JAVASCRIPT.

JavaScript Memory Management
By Van Miranda.
"...In order to successfully apply these new technologies, Front-End
Engineers will need to understand and deliberately manage the
individual lifecycles and memory footprints of the components (DOM
Elements, JavaScript Objects, client-side cache) that make up their
applications..."
http://engineering.socialcast.com/2011/06/javascript-memory-management/

+07: MISCELLANEOUS.

A Website Can't be Measured in Pages
By Jonathan Nicol.
"For a long time page count has been used as a unit of measurement in
web design and development. Clients will often phrase a pricing
enquiry by asking “how much would it cost for a (x) page website?”,
and when quoting on a project it can be tempting to measure the
required effort in these terms. Some web developers go a step further
by assigning a fixed value to a page, and sell page-based website
packages to their clients: a 5 page website for $800, a 10 page site
for $1,500 and so forth. This approach is shortsighted for several
reasons..."
http://f6design.com/journal/2011/06/23/a-website-cant-be-measured-in-pages/

Remy Sharp Interview, How is HTML 5 Changing Web Development?
By Audrey Watters.
"...I recently asked Sharp about how HTML5 is changing development, in
terms of what's developed and how. Our interview follows..."
http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/06/html5-production-development-web-apps.html

Design Festival Podcast #8: Web Standards with Derek Featherstone
By Simon Pascal Klein.
"...Derek is a teacher, speaker, writer, developer, designer, and
strong proponent of accessibility and web standards."
http://designfestival.com/design-festival-podcast-8-web-standards-with-derek-featherstone/

+08: NAVIGATION.

HTML5 Accessibility Chops: Block Links
By Steve Faulkner.
"It is conforming in HTML5 for links to include block level elements
such as headings and paragraphs, this was forbidden in previous
versions of HTML. A recent article by @feather concludes that the
inclusion of block level elements inside a link causes some Assistive
Technology (AT) to misbehave..."
http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2011/06/html5-accessibility-chops-block-links/

+09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

The Current State of HTML5 Form
By Wufoo.
"...Since HTML5 is fairly new and not all the details have been worked
out yet, not all web browsers support HTML5 features the same way.
This page is intended to explore those new new features and help you
understand which browsers are supporting which features and to what
degree. As a whole, this represents the current state of HTML5 forms."
http://wufoo.com/html5/

Stop Obsessing Over HTML5 and CSS3
By Paul Boag.
"I'll share with you five areas that I believe are much neglected and
that we need to learn more about...Herein lies the problem. We are so
busy reading HTML5 tutorials and looking at CSS3 demos that we miss
these other areas. We are scared by what we do not know, and so we
tether ourselves to subjects that we have a handle on. But as the web
becomes more complex, we will need to broaden our horizons..."
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2011/06/stop-obsessing-over-html5-and-css3/

Microformats 2 and RDFa Collaboration
By Manu Sporny.
"During the recent schema.org kerfuffle, Tantek Çelik and I found
ourselves agreeing with each other on the fundamentals of how a Web
vocabulary should be developed. Like any technology standard meant for
the world to use, we hoped that it would be developed transparently
and scientifically. Tantek asked me to review the new Microformats 2
work and I thought it would be interesting to see what they've been up
to recently..."
http://manu.sporny.org/2011/microformats-2

[Section one ends.]

++ SECTION TWO:

+10: 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.

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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.]