[webdev] Web Design Update: November 23, 2011

Wed Nov 23 06:24:17 CST 2011

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 10, Issue 22, November 23, 2011.

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

++ISSUE 22 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: EVENTS.
04: JAVASCRIPT.
05: MISCELLANEOUS.
06: NAVIGATION.
07: PHP.
08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
09: USABILITY.

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

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Web Accessibility - The Big Picture
By Wayne Dick.
"Tired of lots of links to websites that only tell you part of the
accessibility story? Do you feel like you can't get your arms around
web accessibility? Well the Educational Outreach Working Group has a
set of slides that might answer your questions, and help you present a
great overview to others..."
http://blog.knowbility.org/2011/11/09/web-accessibility-the-big-picture/

Accessibility Barrier Scores
By Roger Hudson.
"Many governments and organisations now require websites to be
accessible, and when it comes to determining whether these
requirements have been met, they often rely on recognised checklists
of accessibility criteria such as WCAG 2.0 or Section 508. These
checklists are a useful way of indicating whether a site complies with
the required criteria. However, they don't usually provide much
additional information when a site does not comply – such as the
likely impact this may have for web users with disabilities..."
http://www.dingoaccess.com/accessibility/accessibility-barrier-scores-2/

Accessibility is a Global Mandate
By Suzanne Cohen.
December 3 is the International Day of Persons with Disabilities. On
this December 3, the global celebration has an appropriate theme,
'Together for a better world for all: Including persons with
disabilities in development'. Some people are unaware of a global
mandate to achieve accessibility, and may feel isolated when their
specific jurisdiction introduces new laws benefiting people with
disabilities. Understanding we are all moving in the same direction,
albeit using varying methods and timelines, is important when making
decisions in your organization.
http://blog.firstreference.com/2011/11/16/accessibility-is-a-global-mandate/

Disney Web Access Case Settles Before Trial
By Dan Jellinek.
"A US class action against the Walt Disney Company for the alleged
inaccessibility of its websites has reached an out of court settlement
ahead of a trial that had been planned for January 2012, E-Access
Bulletin has learned..."
http://www.headstar.com/eablive/?m=201111

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Screen Readers and CSS
By Roger Johansson.
"As I have noted in a couple of blog posts recently, there are some
cases when CSS has quite unexpected results in screen readers (or the
way web browsers create the accessibility information they hand over
to screen readers). If you haven't read them, the posts are Screen
readers, list items and list-style:none and Using display:table has
semantic effects in some screen readers..."
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201111/screen_readers_and_css/

Simple Styles for Horizontal Rules
By Chris Coyier.
"That is, the <hr> element. With the help of a few contributors, I put
together this page of very simple styles for them. You could get a lot
fancier with an element like a <div> that can hold content, but I like
the semantics of a horizontal rule. It's an emphatic break between two
sections of content..."
http://css-tricks.com/15135-simple-styles-for-horizontal-rules/

+03: EVENTS.

Web Accessibility Question and Answers
December 14, 2011 at 1:30pm EST
http://store.furtherahead.com/free-accessibility-call/

+04: JAVASCRIPT.

Evolving ECMAScript
By Shanku Niyogi, Amanda Silver, John Montgomery, Luke Hoban, Steve Lucco.
"For the Web and Web applications to keep making progress, the
programming language of the Web must continue to improve. Today's
JavaScript standard lacks a few basic objects and library helpers that
are vital for building rich, world-wide Web applications. Last week at
the Ecma TC39 meeting at Apple's campus in Cupertino, Microsoft shared
reference implementations of proposals to address gaps in Math,
String, and Number functionality as well as Globalization..."
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/11/22/evolving-ecmascript.aspx

Crockford on JavaScript - Section 8: Programming Style and Your Brain
By Ryan Grove.
67 minutes of Douglas Crockford on JavaScript in the YUI Theater.
http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2011/11/18/video-crockonjs-section8/

+05: MISCELLANEOUS.

 From Hypertext to Hyperdevices
By Dominique Hazaël-Massieux.
When the Web started some 20 years ago, it brought a platform for
distributing and accessing text, with an added dimension brought by
links: hypertext. Because it was free and could be deployed everywhere
easily, it was a revolution.
http://www.w3.org/QA/2011/11/from_hypertext_to_hyperdevices.html

MobiFast - Mobile Development Forums
By Roger Weiss.
"Our forums are open to anyone who wants to share ideas, concepts and
get help with mobile design..."
http://mobifast.net/

You Don't Need a Mobile Strategy
By Gerry McGovern.
"Mobile is a platform. It is a tactic, not a strategy. What you need
is a strategy for the connected customer..."
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2011/nt-2011-11-21-Mobile-strategy.htm

Practical Standards for Web Professionals W3Conf Presentations
The November 15 and 16 Video presentations of the 2011 W3C Conference
sessions are now online.
http://w3conf.org/#presentations

Interview with Chris Coyier
By Kevin Dees.
"In this interview I wanted speak with Chris Coyier about unicorns and
rainbows. However, he convinced me that CSS was a much better topic.
Chris is the coauthor of 'Digging into WordPress' and creator of CSS
Tricks. Chris is a world knowan CSS expert and HTML guru. He also
works at Wufoo making web forms fun, easy and modern..."
http://kevindees.cc/2011/11/interview-with-chris-coyier/

+06: NAVIGATION.

Latest ARIA Landmark Support Data
By Steve Faulkner.
"Noting that the landmark support test results I conducted back in
July 2011 were being tweeted recently, I though it would be good to
update the results..."
http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2011/11/latest-aria-landmark-support-data/

+07: PHP.

Role of PHP in Web Applications
By PHP Know How.
"PHP is a server side scripting language. That means its processing
happens in the server by consuming server's resources and sends only
the output to the client. In a client side scripting language like
JavaScript, processing happens in the client's computer consuming its
resources..."
http://www.phpknowhow.com/basics/role-of-php-in-web-applications/

Arrays
By PHP Know How.
"Arrays are variables which can hold more than one value at a time.
Arrays are useful when you want to store a group of data..."
http://www.phpknowhow.com/basics/arrays/

Data Types
By PHP Know How.
"Consider an employee in a company called Robbin Jackman with a basic
monthly salary of 5000 dollars. We can represent this employee in a
PHP script using following variables..."
http://www.phpknowhow.com/basics/data-types/

Comments
By PHP Know How.
"Comments are code segments that PHP interpreter avoids executing.
They are valuable to make notes inside your code so your program would
be more understandable to you and anyone else. PHP supports two types
of comments..."
http://www.phpknowhow.com/basics/comments/

PHP Sessions
By Callum Hopkins.
"$_SESSION is a special array used to store information across the
page requests a user makes during his visit to your website or web
application. The most fundamental way to explain what a sessions is
like is to imagine the following scenario..."
http://phpmaster.com/php-sessions/

+08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

Diving Deeper into HTML5 Offline Browsing
By Malcolm Sheridan.
"Let's dive into what resources you and should not add to the ApplicationCache."
http://www.sitepoint.com/diving-deeper-into-html5-offline-browsing/

HTML5 Semantics
By Bruce Lawson.
"Much of the excitement we've seen so far about HTML5 has been for the
new APIs: local storage, application cache, Web workers, 2-D drawing
and the like. But let's not overlook that HTML5 brings us 30 new
elements to mark up documents and applications, boosting the total
number of elements available to us to over 100..."
http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2011/11/18/html5-semantics/

Semantics is a Tool with Future Potential
By Paul Boag.
"Smashing magazine has kicked off an interesting discussion about
semantics in HTML. It started with a post entitled 'Our Pointless
Pursuit of Semantic Value'. In a rather confrontation tone this post
ripped apart many of the commonly held 'arguments' for creating
semantic code..."
http://boagworld.com/tumblog/semantics-is-a-tool-with-future-potential/

+09: USABILITY.

Accuracy vs. Insights in Quantitative Usability
By Jakob Nielsen.
"Better to accept a wider margin of error in usability metrics than to
spend the entire budget learning too few things with extreme
precision."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/study-accuracy-confidence.html

The Design and Display of Simple Interactions on Mobile Devices
By Shanshan Ma.
Are we re-inventing everything now it's mobile? "Users visit mobile
sites not only to consume content, but to get things done. Let's take
air travel as an example: tasks that users often find themselves
performing on an airline company's mobile site include checking flight
status, checking in for a particular flight, and searching for and
booking a flight. How does mobile user interface design support task
completion? What are the optimal ways of communicating and displaying
interactions on mobile sites? With the aim of discovering optimal ways
of designing simple interactions on mobile devices, I examined the
task of checking flight status. I'm hoping that my analysis sheds some
light on this topic."
http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2011/11/the-design-and-display-of-simple-interactions-on-mobile-devices.php

A Look Inside Mobile Design Patterns
By Theresa Neil.
"Design patterns for mobile are emerging as the platform matures.
Theresa Neil's new book Mobile Design Pattern Gallery provides
solutions to common design challenges. Read a sample chapter on
Invitations and learn how to immediately engage your customers with
your application..."
http://www.uxbooth.com/blog/mobile-design-patters/

[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.

+ SUBSCRIPTION INFO.

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+ TEXT EMAIL NEWSLETTER (TEN).

As a navigation aid for screen readers we do our best to conform to
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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.]