+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 2, Issue 1, July 1, 2003. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 1 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: COLOR. 04: EVALUATION & TESTING. 05: EVENTS. 06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 07: JAVASCRIPT. 08: MISCELLANEOUS. 09: NAVIGATION. 10: PHP. 11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 12: USABILITY. 13: XML. SECTION TWO: 14: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 W3C Working Draft 24 June 2003 http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/ Accesskeys: Unlocking Hidden Navigation By Stuart Robertson This article has some nice theory, but it doesn't mention the issue of the extreme lack of available keys once you take operating systems, user agents etc. and so forth into consideration. In most cases, allowing the user to work with his or her own device, system, and shortcut key set up in their working environment and not running the risk of replacing those with website accesskey assignments is better. http://www.alistapart.com/stories/accesskeys/ Text descriptions for images By Peter Rainger "Images can be made accessible to those using non-graphical browsers (text only) or those with impaired sight who use screen readers by providing 'alternative' text which aims to provide equivalent information to the user that is presented visually by the image. Every single image must have an ALT description tag giving equivalent functional, descriptive or contextual information in a clear text format. However if an image has no significant meaning then it must been given an empty ALT tag in preference to no ALT tag. When the site is viewed without pictures it must have as much information and be as easily accessible as the graphics version." http://www.techdis.ac.uk/seven/precept3.html Text and links By Joe Clark "What's the best way to keep your text accessible? Use proper markup." http://joeclark.org/book/sashay/serialization/Chapter07.html General Mark-up By Peter Rainge "You must ensure that your web page source code is written correctly according to the html specifications. You should validate the mark-up including syntax and style sheets, using all applicable validators, on each selected page. Run at least one validation tool across entire the Web site or expanded page selection." http://www.techdis.ac.uk/seven/precept4_a.html +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. CSS Menus Uberlink CSS Rollovers: Overview By Al Sparber "What if you could make a great looking CSS navigation bar that looked and behaved like an image swapping menu? And what if it used just two images to power an unlimited number of links?" http://www.projectseven.com/tutorials/css_menus/list_01/ Stylesheets By Joe Clark "We are told that stylesheets hold tremendous untapped power in accessible Web design. Could it be almost completely untrue?" http://joeclark.org/book/sashay/serialization/Chapter11.html Guide to CSS3 Selector Support By MacEdition Here is a guide that details how today's browsers support features in the proposed CSS3 standard. http://www.macedition.com/cb/resources/css3support_selectors.html +03: COLOR. Colour and contrast By Peter Rainger "The choice of colour for your images, text and background is very important to provide sufficient contrast between the elements of the page. Do not use colour as the only means of distinguishing pages from one another. However, colour can be very effective when used in combination with clear labelling to distinguish pages, sections and categories." http://www.techdis.ac.uk/seven/precept2_c.html +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Usability Test Data By Philip Hodgson "People often throw around the terms 'objective' and 'subjective' when talking about the results of a usability test. These terms are frequently equated with the statistical terms 'quantitative' and 'qualitative'. The analogy is false, and this misunderstanding can have consequences for the interpretations and conclusions of usability tests." http://www.userfocus.co.uk/articles/datathink.html FAQ Questionnaires in Usability Engineering By Jurek Kirakowski "Over the years, I have seen many questions asked about the use of questionnaires in usability engineering. The list on this page is a compilation of the questions I have heard most often and the answers I gave, should have given, or would have given if I had thought of it first." http://www.ucc.ie/hfrg/resources/qfaq1.html +05: EVENTS. forUSE 2003 Second International Conference on Usage-Centered Design October 19-22, 2003 Portsmouth, New Hampshire, U.S.A. http://www.foruse.com/2003/ ACM Conference on Universal Usability November 10-11, 2003 Vancouver, BC, Canada http://sigchi.org/cuu2003/ Humanizing Information Technology American Society for Information Science and Technology Annual Conference October 20-23, 2003 Long Beach, California, U.S.A. http://www.asis.org/Conferences/AM03/ +06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Solving Mobile Challenges with Psychology-driven IA By Oded Napchi As the field of information architecture matures, we are beginning to understand the new challenges it raises for wireless media. This article suggests that some of these challenges can be best addressed through an approach called 'psychology-driven information architecture' which bases design decisions and solutions on the psychological profile of the end user. http://tinyurl.com/f565 Understanding Information Taxonomy Helps Build Better Apps By Jie-Hong Morrison "Taxonomy represents the foundation upon which information architecture stands, and all well-rounded developers should have at least a basic understanding of taxonomy to ensure that they can create organized, logical applications. But before diving into the topic of taxonomy, let's look briefly at information architecture. That way, we can view taxonomy in its proper place within a broader field of study." http://tinyurl.com/ff8p +07: JAVASCRIPT. HTML and Dynamic HTML By Microsoft This is HTML/JS documentation from MSDN. http://tinyurl.com/1wax +08: MISCELLANEOUS. An interview with Mark Newhouse By Craig Saila "The Web is a platform, and like any real world platform you need at least three supports, or legs, for stability...The three legs are (X)HTML, CSS, and Accessibility." http://digital-web.com/interviews/interview_2003-06.shtml Web team roles and responsibilities are changing By Gerry McGovern "A major shift is occurring in relation to who is in charge of the Web. Previously, responsibility tended to be with IT. Occasionally, marketing was in charge. Today, the website, particularly the intranet, is the responsibility of the communications department..." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2003/nt_2003_06_23_roles.htm RNIB redesign does not go far enough By Ian Lloyd "Among the crimes that have been committed in this redesign are...A table based layout...Invalid or deprecated markup...Incorrect document structure...Poor use of margins..." http://tinyurl.com/f93n The new RNIB site in CSS By Simon Willison Simon Willison redesigns the Royal National Institute for the Blind web site with valid HTML 4.01 Strict and CSS 2. http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2003/06/25/RNIBinCSS +09: NAVIGATION. Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster By Jakob Nielsen "The easier it is to find places with good information, the less time users will spend visiting any individual website. This is one of many conclusions that follow from analyzing how people optimize their behavior in online information systems." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030630.html Navigation By Joe Clark "For a mobility-impaired person (and, to a lesser extent, for a blind person), moving around within Websites is tedious. Learn how to ease the tedium." http://joeclark.org/book/sashay/serialization/Chapter08.html Navigation and page layout By Peter Rainger "A website should have a dependable navigational structure on all web pages so that users can move progressively deeper into the site or effectively retrace their steps by using a trail that returns them with ease. Branches from the main navigational links should be equally clearly structured. Page layouts (with the inclusion of Frames, tables and other design issues) should follow the similar guidelines for clarity and ease of use." http://www.techdis.ac.uk/seven/precept1.html On Search: The Users By Tim Bray "Nobody uses advanced search...Except the people who do." http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/06/17/SearchUsers On Search: Precision and Recall By Tim Bray "Searching is a branch of computer programming, which is supposed to be a quantitative discipline and a member of the engineering family. That means we should have metrics: measures of how good our search techniques are. Otherwise, how can we ever measure improvements in one system or the differences between two systems? ÒPrecisionÓ and ÒrecallÓ are the most common measures of search performance. But they're not as helpful as we'd like." http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/06/22/PandR +10: PHP. Managing Users with PHP Sessions and MySQL By Kevin Yank "In this case study, Kevin explains how to use PHP with MySQL to build a site that requires users to sign up and then log in for access. The code presented in this tutorial highlights practical uses of email, MySQL, and sessions in PHP. Newly updated for PHP 4.2." http://www.phpclasses.org/newsletter.html/news/1_71351.html Easier form validation with PHP By Simon Willison This article discusses "... embedding validation and redisplay rules in the markup of the form itself. The form is written in XHTML, but with a number of additional tags and elements." http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2003/06/17/theHolyGrail +11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Web Standards in Action By D. Keith Robinson This is a case study explaining the benefits of Web standards. http://tinyurl.com/f5hc Michigan Virtual University: A Promising Practice in Developing Standards for Online Courses By AccessIT "In order to ensure that instructors design high quality online courses, MVU developed a set of standards in four categories: Technology, Usability, Accessibility, and Instructional Design." http://www.washington.edu/accessit/articles?215 Conspiracy Theory By Jeffery Zeldman "...Yet regardless of Microsoft's intentions, those standards did make it into all recent browsers and the availability of browsers that commonly support CSS1, XHTML, some of CSS2, and the DOM is changing the way designers and developers create websites. And that will not stop. So long as we design with standards, we and the end-users on whose behalf we toil will continue to have a choice." http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0603a.shtml#conspiracytheory The End of Free not the end of Web Standards By The Web Standards Project "This is an opinion piece from the Web Standards Project reminding Microsoft and the web development community that Microsoft's move to a for-pay browsing software model does not to diminish its responsibility to preserve and improve standards compliance of its Web software." http://webstandards.org/opinion/archive/2003/06/27/ +12: USABILITY. Take full responsibility for your web content By Gerry McGovern "You should only publish the content that is necessary to further your objectives. Old or unnecessary content is like weeds. It pollutes your website and chokes attention away from quality content...Organizations publish vast quantities of unnecessary content. All this content confuses readers as they are presented with all these unnecessary choices. It increases the chances they will click on the wrong link, wasting more of their time, diverting them from the choices you want them to make." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2003/nt_2003_06_16_review.htm Diversity is Power for Specialized Sites By Jakob Nielsen "Small websites get less traffic than big ones, but they can still dominate their niches. For each question users ask, the Web delivers a different set of sites to provide the answers." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030616.html +13: XML. HTML 4.01 or XHTML for university web pages? By Jim Byrne "In a different environment with less users, more technically aware publishers, and tools that assist in the creation of standard markup, XHTML would probably be the best option. However given the current expertise and tools in most universities, I suggest that advocating HTML 4.01 is a more practical option - for the following reasons..." http://www.mcu.org.uk/showlog.php?weblogid=17 [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +14: 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. + 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 + TEXT EMAIL NEWSLETTER (TEN) STANDARD. As a navigation aid for screen readers we do our best to conform to the accessible Text Email Newsletter (TEN) Standard. Please let me know if there is anything else we can do to make navigation easier. For TEN Standard information please visit: http://www.headstar.com/ten + SIGNATURE. Laura L. Carlson Information Technology Systems and Services University of Minnesota Duluth Duluth, MN 55812-3009 mailto:lcarlson@d.umn.edu [Issue ends.]