[webdev] Web Design Update: April 12, 2012

Laura Carlson lcarlson at d.umn.edu
Thu Apr 12 06:20:29 CDT 2012


+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 10, Issue 42, April 12, 2012.

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

++ISSUE 42 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: BOOKS.
03: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.
04: EVALUATION & TESTING.
05: EVENTS.
06: JAVASCRIPT.
07: MISCELLANEOUS.
08: PHP.
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.

CAPTCHA-less Security
By Karl Groves.
"...The level of effort expended at abusing a system is directly
proportional to the perceived benefit gained by the abuser. This
applies to the recommendations I make below as well. CAPTCHA is, in
many cases, very effective. Otherwise websites wouldn't use it. But it
does lock real people out of your site and it can be beaten. For those
reasons, I'd like to discuss some approaches of thwarting website
abuse without CAPTCHA..."
http://www.karlgroves.com/2012/04/03/captcha-less-security/

Building Accessible Charts (Video)
By Nick Pettit.
"In this 6 minute video, you'll learn how to create a simple bar graph
from scratch by using HTML and CSS. This bar graph is made with screen
readers in mind, and doesn't make use of images or browser plugins..."
http://thinkvitamin.com/uncategorized/free-video-building-accessible-charts/


02: BOOKS.

O Connor, Joshue. "Pro HTML5 Accessibility" Apress 2012.


+03: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Relative Pixels
By Alastair Campbell.
"Layout methods in web design have gone through a transition in the
last few years, unfortunately we're still using floats a lot, but
flexible layouts have made a comeback in the form of responsive design
- which is great..."
http://alastairc.ac/2012/04/relative-pixels/

On Responsive Images
By Chris Coyier.
"There is a real need for serving media that is appropriate for the
device and circumstance, since we know so little about any particular
web request. I recently posted a blog post with so many images on it
the page weighed in at 2.29 MB. I should have posted a warning when I
tweeted it: "Don't click this if on a 3G network, it probably take
forever, just check it out when you get home."
http://css-tricks.com/on-responsive-images/

Media Query and Asset Downloading Results
By Tim Kadlec.
"A little while back, I mentioned I was doing some research for the
book about how images are downloaded when media queries are involved.
To help with that, I wrote up some automated tests where Javascript
could determine whether or not the image was requested and the results
could be collected by Browserscope for review. I posted some initial
findings, but I think I've got enough data now to be able to go into a
bit more detail."
http://timkadlec.com/2012/04/media-query-asset-downloading-results/

Cross Browser Drop Caps with CSS
By Ian Devlin.
"The other day I read Laura Franz's excellent in-depth article on Drop
Caps: Historical Use And Current Best Practices With CSS over on
Smashing Magazine, and it prompted me to look into adding this to my
site as I was intending to do so anyway. Naturally there were some
issues. In Laura's article, all of..."
http://www.iandevlin.com/blog/2012/04/css/cross-browser-drop-caps-with-css

On :Target
By Chris Coyier.
"The :target pseudo selector in CSS matches when the hash in the URL
and the id of an element are the same..."
http://css-tricks.com/on-target/

What's the Deal With :Target in CSS?
By Joshua Johnson.
"...Read on to learn all about the basic functionality associated with
the :target pseudo class and how you can stretch that ability to
perform all kinds of crazy stuff with pure CSS. Along the way we'll
build some great navigation and slideshow examples for you to learn
from..."
http://designshack.net/articles/css/targetcss/

Announcing PrintShame.com
By Adrian Roselli.
"For many years I've pushed for print styles for sites. It's an easy
step to take in the course of developing a site, easy to test, and the
techniques to do it have been around for over a decade. Something as
rigid as a tabled layout could be relatively easily wrangled into a
print-friendly document - without breaking any budgets..."
http://blog.adrianroselli.com/2012/04/announcing-printshamecom.html


+04: EVALUATION & TESTING.

10 Things to Know About Card Sorting
By Jeff Sauro.
"Here are at least 10 things to know about using this popular user
research method.."
http://www.measuringusability.com/blog/card-sorting.php

Caroline Jarrett - Designing Effective Surveys
By Sean Carmichael.
"...Caroline offers tips on how to entice people to take the survey
and keep them engaged to ensure you get accurate answers from them.
During the seminar, we ran short on time to answer all of the
audience's questions, so Caroline joins Adam Churchill to tackle the
remaining ones for this podcast."
http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2012/04/06/caroline-jarrett-designing-effective-surveys/



+05: EVENTS.

Front-End Design Conference
June 8-9, 2012.
Saint Petersburg, Florida, U.S.A.
http://frontenddesignconference.com/

Hypertext 2012
June 25-28, 2012.
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S.A.
http://www.ht2012.org/

OSCON 2012
July 16-20, 2012.
Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.
http://www.oscon.com/oscon2012/


+06: JAVASCRIPT.

JavaScript And Recursion
By Kim S. Teeple.
"Recursion is an age old concept used in mathematics when an object is
defined by other objects of the same type.  A real life example would
be the mirrors in a department store dressing room. If you look in the
right spot, you can see both reflections repeating themselves in each
other..."
http://www.developerdrive.com/2012/04/javascript-and-recursion/


+07: MISCELLANEOUS.

>From Built-to-Last to Built-to-Change
By Gerry McGovern.
"The Web facilitates continuous testing and improvement. Great web
designs are responsive and flexible. They allow for rapid innovation
based on feedback..."
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2012/nt-2012-04-09-Built-to-last.htm

Paying Attention to Content Hierarchy Across Screen Sizes
By Andy Clarke.
What are the lessons from all this? It's that we need to pay attention
to the hierarchy of our content across screen sizes, in particular
small screens. This definitely applies to images but it could just as
easily apply to typography too. Sometimes it's all too easy just to
squeeze elements to fit onto smaller screens, but unless we're
careful, we can significantly change the meaning of our page designs.
http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/blog/about/paying_attention_to_content_hierarchy_across_screen_sizes

Dive into Responsive Prototyping with Foundation
By Jonathan Smiley.
"There are hundreds of devices out there right now that can access the
full web, as Steve Jobs once put it. They come with different
capabilities and constraints, things like input style or screen size,
resolution, and form. With all these devices set to overtake
traditional desktop computers for web traffic next year, we need tools
to help us build responsively. Jonathan Smiley shows how to dive into
responsive design using Foundation, a light front-end framework that
helps you rapidly build prototypes and production sites..."
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/dive-into-responsive-prototyping-with-foundation/


+08: PHP.

Metatesting - Testing Constructors
By Chris Hartjes.
"If you have a PHP application that makes heavy use of objects (which
is probably 95% of you reading this) then you will have objects with
constructor methods in them. It is also very likely that there is some
stuff going on in those constructors. So how do you test things like
this?..."
http://www.littlehart.net/atthekeyboard/2012/04/05/metatesting-testing-constructors/

6 Skills Every PHP Freelancer Needs, Pragmatic Testing, MySQL, and More
By Daniela Baker.
"PHP development is hot right now, but there are also lots of people
in PHP development. If you want to make it as an independent PHP
developer you've got to know more than just PHP. Here are six other
essential skills you need to succeed as a PHP developer..."
http://phpmaster.com/6-extra-skills-every-php-developer-should-have/


+09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

HTML5 Accessibility Chops: Data for the Masses
By Steve Faulkner.
"One of the stumbling blocks for working out what the effects on the
accessibility of new (and old) HTML5 features is not having any
publicly accessible usage data. It is difficult without data to argue
for the inclusion of features in HTML5 or working out how features
should be accessibility supported. I have made an initial attempt to
rectify this by collecting the HTML content of the home pages of the
the top 10,000 web sites..."
http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2012/04/html5-accessibility-chops-data-for-the-masses/


[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.]


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