* WEB DESIGN UPDATE. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. NOTE: As a navigation aid for screen readers, all headings begin with an asterisk and end with a full stop. All items are also numbered in the contents and throughout the issue, with numbers appearing immediately after the asterisks. Please let me know if there is anything else we can do to make navigation easier. [Issue starts.] * March 21, 2003. * Volume 1, Issue 39. * What's new at the Web Design Reference site? <http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/webdesign/> New Links In These Categories: 1: ACCESSIBILITY. 2: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. 3: COLOR. 4: EVALUATION & TESTING. 5: EVENTS. 6: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 7: JAVASCRIPT. 8: MISCELLANEOUS. 9: NAVIGATION. 10: PHP. 11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 12: TOOLS. 13: TYPOGRAPHY. 14: USABILITY. 15: XML. SECTION ONE: New references. * 1: ACCESSIBILITY. Beyond HTML: Web Accessibility For The 21st Century By Kynn Bartlett <http://www.csun.edu/cod/conf/2003/proceedings/76.htm> WCAG 2.0: New Challenges, New Technologies, New Concepts By Wendy Chisholm & Ben Caldwell <http://www.csun.edu/cod/conf/2003/proceedings/216.htm> Fast Track To Web Accessibility Using A Template-Based Design Strategy By Paul Bohman <http://www.csun.edu/cod/conf/2003/proceedings/233.htm> ICDRI Update On Global Accessible Web Policy And Law By Cynthia D. Waddell <http://www.csun.edu/cod/conf/2003/proceedings/136.htm> Web Site Accessibility: A Study of ADA Compliance By Emily Jackson-Sandbor and Kerri Odess-Harnish <http://ils.unc.edu/ils/research/reports/accessibility.pdf> (Please note that it is an acrobat PDF file. If you do not have acrobat you can download the acrobat viewer from <http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/main.html>. This download is for people who do not have Acrobat installed on their computers. It allows you to open and view a PDF file. Additional Adobe free tools are available to assist visually impaired users at <http://access.adobe.com/>) The US Web Accessibility Jigsaw By William Hudson <http://www.syntagm.co.uk/design/articles/accessibility.htm> Add alt attributes to spacer images By Jim Byrne <http://www.mcu.org.uk/weeklytips/altforspacer.html> Equal access ByÊAmanda Morgan <http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/03/07/1046826526491.html> Tables and Accessibility By Tim Roberts <http://www.madeforall.com/tutorials/tables.html> A Dyslexic Perspective on e-Content Accessibility By Peter Rainger <http://www.techdis.ac.uk/seven/papers/> * 2: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Incorporating CSS Ideally By Christopher Schmitt <http://www.informit.com/content/index.asp?product_id=%7B466DD521%2DE004%2D439E%2DB5C3%2D4D388FE57C13%7D> The Elusive CSS Footer By Todd Dominey <http://whatdoiknow.org/archives/000793.php> CSS Media types and printer friendly pages By javascriptkit <http://www.javascriptkit.com/dhtmltutors/cssmedia.shtml> Centering Block Elements By css-discuss <http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=CenteringBlockElement> CSS: Between the Style Sheets SXSW 2003 Presentation By Celik Tantek <http://www.tantek.com/presentations/2003SXSW/stylesheets.html> Got Doctype? By Molly E. Holzschlag and Eric A. Meyer <http://www.uiconf.com/7west/holzschlag_meyer_article.htm> * 3: COLOR. Color and Technology Using Color On and Off the Computer With Students with Disabilities By Judith P. Sweeney <http://onionmountaintech.com/PDFfiles/ColorHandout.pdf> (Please note that it is an acrobat PDF file. If you do not have acrobat you can download the acrobat viewer from <http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/main.html>. This download is for people who do not have Acrobat installed on their computers. It allows you to open and view a PDF file. Additional Adobe free tools are available to assist visually impaired users at <http://access.adobe.com/>) Color on the Web By Daniel Will-Harris <http://www.will-harris.com/radio/color_web.html> * 4: EVALUATION & TESTING. Conducting International Usability By Peter Merholz <http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000098.php> "This essay draws from my experience leading an international user testing project, and I hope you can learn from my mistakes and successes..." * 5: EVENTS. WebDevShare Call for Participation Workshop Proposal deadline: April 15, 2003 <http://webdev.indiana.edu/2003/call.html> WebdevShare 2003 October 5 - 9, 2003 Indiana University Bloomington Bloomington, Indiana <http://webdev.Indiana.edu/2003/> HCI Educators Workshop March 31 - April 1, 2003 Edinburgh, Scotland <http://www.bcs-hci.org.uk/hcie2003/> STC's 50th Annual Conference Society for Technical Communication Conference May 18-21, 2003 Dallas, Texas, U.S.A. <http://www.stc.org/50thConf/index.asp> Don't Make Me Think: The Workshop Steve Krug May and June 2003 Washington DC, Los Angeles and Chicago <http://www.sensible.com/workshops.html> Information Design International Conference September 8-11 2003 Recife, Brazil <http://www.ufpe.br/sbdi/conference.htm> * 6: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. The Hippie Period of the Web is Over By Gerry McGovern <http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2003/nt_2003_03_17_hippie.htm> "Information architecture is all about the definition and organization of content. The fact that there isn't a commonly agreed definition is because the discipline is immature. If information architecture is to solve problems cost-effectively, it will have to become rigorously defined. Just like most other professionals, information architects will require accreditation." ia/recon By Jesse James Garrett <http://www.jjg.net/ia/recon/> "A six-part essay on the information architecture community, where we are, and where we're going." * 7: JAVASCRIPT. DOM Scripts Five JavaScript patches designed to improve DOM support By Chris Nott <http://www.dithered.com/javascript/dom.html> Recursion tightens JavaScript code By Edmond Woychowsky <http://builder.com.com/article.jhtml?id=u00220030304woy01.htm> * 8: MISCELLANEOUS. Poor planning is project management mistake number one By Tom Mochal <http://builder.com.com/article.jhtml?id=u00420030318moc01.htm&rcode=&page=1> Designing in Public By Douglas Bowman <http://whatdoiknow.org/archives/000829.php> Macromedia.com Progress Report By Todd Dominey <http://whatdoiknow.org/archives/000829.php> Revamped Macromedia site irks customers By David Becker <http://news.com.com/2100-1046-991868.html> Macromedia lacks common sense By Forrester Research <http://news.com.com/2009-1122-992201.html> Macromedia.com Beta: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly By John Dowdell <http://www.markme.com/mesh/archives/001901.cfm> * 9: NAVIGATION. Why you need your very own taxonomy. By Tom Smith <http://www.othermedia.com/Articles/Articles0000000028.asp> * 10: PHP. Working with Dates and Times in PHP By Hermawan Haryanto <http://www.devarticles.com/art/1/453> Working with Forms in PHP, Part 1 By John Coggeshall <http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/php/2003/03/13/php_foundations.html> Write Secure Scripts with PHP 4.2! By Kevin Yank <http://www.sitepoint.com/article/758> Verify a User's Email Address Using PHP By Joe Marini <http://www.sitepoint.com/article.php/1051> * 11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. HTML validation is a good tool, but just a tool By Jukka Korpela <http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/validation.html> * 12: TOOLS. Cynthia Says Portal By HiSoftware, ICDRI and The Internet Society Disability Chapter <http://www.contentquality.com/> "Cynthia is a web content accessibility validation solution, it is designed to identify errors in design related to Section 508 standards and the W3C WCAG guidelines. It is also designed to educate web site developers in the development of Web Based content so that is accessible to all." CardZort By Jorge A. Toro <http://condor.depaul.edu/~jtoro/cardzort/cardzort.htm> "CardZort is a computer application that runs card sorting exercises. Its main purpose is to offer a complete computer-aided system that allows the fast creation and execution of card sorting exercises, and the analysis of the resulting groups via cluster analysis." It is free for academic purposes but runs only on the Windows platform. * 13: TYPOGRAPHY. Accessible web text - sizing up the issues By Jim Byrne <http://www.mcu.org.uk/articles/textsize.html> Part two of Jim Byrne's introduction to accessible web typography. This article concentrates on the important topic of how to set the size of text on your web pages. The Best Faces for the Screen By Daniel Will-Harris <http://www.will-harris.com/typoscrn.htm> Georgia & Verdana Typefaces designed for the screen (finally) By Daniel Will-Harris <http://www.will-harris.com/verdana-georgia.htm> * 14: USABILITY. Blurbs: Writing Previews of Web Pages By Dennis G. Jerz <http://www.uwec.edu/jerzdg/orr/handouts/TW/web/blurbs.htm> Two Kinds of Titles for Web Pages By Dennis G. Jerz <http://www.uwec.edu/jerzdg/orr/handouts/TW/web/titles.htm> Do Productivity Increases Generate Economic Gains? By Jakob Nielsen <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030317.html> "...usable design saves money and saves jobs." Welcome to The HTML Hell Page By Eric S. Raymond <http://www.catb.org/~esr/html-hell.html> * 15: XML. XML Is Too Hard For Programmers By Tim Bray <http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/03/16/XML-Prog> "XML is a bouncing thriving five-year-old now, and yet I've been feeling unsatisfied with it, particularly in recent times. In particular in my capacity as a programmer..." [Section one ends.] * SECTION TWO: 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.] * SUBSCRIPTION INFO. WEB DESIGN UPDATE is available by subscription only. For information on how to subscribe and unsubscribe please visit: <http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/webdevlist> * SIGNATURE. Laura L. Carlson Information Technology Systems and Services University of Minnesota Duluth Duluth, MN 55812-3009 mailto:lcarlson@d.umn.edu [Issue ends.]