+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 2, Issue 5, July 26, 2003. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 5 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: DREAMWEAVER. 05: EVALUATION & TESTING. 06: EVENTS. 07: JAVASCRIPT. 08: MISCELLANEOUS. 09: PHP. 10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 11: TOOLS. 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. Decorators with keyboards By Jack Schofield "Very few government and commercial websites are adequately usable by the partially sighted and blind, or offer an equivalent service to disabled users. That is simply not acceptable on social grounds. It is also, as a matter of fact, a betrayal of the principles of the web." http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,999218,00.html Future dreams By Joe Clark "The current state of the art barely qualifies as an 'art'. What do we need for Websites to be truly and elegantly accessible?" http://joeclark.org/book/sashay/serialization/Chapter15.html Accessibility and the law By Joe Clark "Is accessibility legally required? In some cases, yes. Read case history and precedent." http://joeclark.org/book/sashay/serialization/AppendixA.html Language codes By Joe Clark "How to specify languages in Websites." http://joeclark.org/book/sashay/serialization/AppendixB.html +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Rendering Mode and Doctype Switching By Holly Bergevin "Even though today's browsers have moved toward more standards-compliant behavior, it is still necessary to allow older pages to display as they have in the past. However, this can cause problems with modern pages written to (x)HTML and CSS standards if a browser cannot determine how to best render the page. The solution? Come learn about Rendering modes and the 'Doctype Switch'." http://tinyurl.com/gz7h Hiding CSS from Nav 4: The Caio Hack By Holly Bergevin "At the time the CSS 1 specifications were written by the W3C, there were naturally no browsers that supported them. Netscape Navigator was then the premiere browser, and Nav 4 was the first browser to attempt supporting those specs. It got many of them right, but many more wrong. Come discover a method of hiding stylesheets form Nav 4, that you may not be familiar with, called the Caio Hack." http://tinyurl.com/gz7l Lawrence weather site in all CSS By Adrian Holovaty Adrian Holovaty and Dan Cox have redesigned a weather report site for Lawrence, Kansas. http://www.holovaty.com/blog/archive/2003/07/13/1623 CSS Border Slants By Kevin Yank "This complex technique lets you create shapes with diagonal edges (and even curved ones if you have a lot of time and patience!) by taking advantage of the diagonal edges that appear between the horizontal and vertical borders of a CSS block." http://i2.sitepoint.com/g/newsletters/tt/cssslants.html +03: COLOR. Does Colour Exist? By Juan C. Dursteler "We think of colour as an objective thing: Red is red and can't be seen in any other way. But this is not so. The colour we perceive depends on things like the words we have in our language (our culture) to describe it, the other colours surrounding it and what the brain is expecting to see." http://www.infovis.net/E-zine/2003/num_126.htm Reference: Color Codes By WebMonkey http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/reference/color_codes/ Color Chart Pickers By Marie "To use, just click on the button color you wish to view. The background color of this page will change to that color." http://www.artistic-designers.com/bkgds/colorchart.html Choosing A Color By projectcool "There are four ways to specify color..." http://archive.devx.com/projectcool/developer/reference/color-chart.html +04: DREAMWEAVER. CSS Table Design: Overview By Al Sparber This is a tutorial on how to use CSS to control tables. http://www.projectseven.com/tutorials/css_t/index.htm +05: EVALUATION & TESTING. What's important to measure on your website? By Gerry McGovern "Websites are very measurable. However, reams of data can be time consuming and confusing. The knack is to know what is really important to measure. This includes the following: reader actions; reader numbers; most and least popular pages; subscribers; external links; search keywords; page size; broken links and malfunctioning processes." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2003/nt_2003_07_21_website.htm Testing Web Page Design Concepts for Usability By Dey Alexander and Derek Brown "In order to identify the extent to which visual designs assist users to locate particular elements that might be contained on a web page (such as search, site-wide navigation, and local navigation), we used a usability testing method described by Tullis (1998) to test a set of five web page design concepts. All text elements on each of the designs were "greeked", or turned into nonsense text. This meant that users had to rely on the communicative aspects of each design in order to perform their tasks. The results matched our initial predictions about design elements that might lead to usability problems." http://ausweb.scu.edu.au/aw03/papers/alexander4/paper.html +06: EVENTS. User Experience 2003 September 21-25, 2003 Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. http://www.nngroup.com/events/chicago/agenda.html +07: JAVASCRIPT. Restricting access of your JavaScript libraries By georgec Ê "The nature of JavaScript libraries means they can be accessed and utilized by any site online, not just yours. Learn how to restrict access of your libraries to only your own sites, warding off bandwidth theft in the process." http://tinyurl.com/htph Form and Spelling Validation By Matt Wade "In this tutorial, we will examine several of the more common items that need validation and provide examples for each. We will also explore how to check documents for misspelled words and suggest proper replacements." http://codewalkers.com/tutorials/47/1.html +08: MISCELLANEOUS. Top Sites' User Experience Teams and Their Challenge By Mark Hurst "Increasingly, in order to fulfill their online goals, customers interact with the company in a way that cuts across internal teams, and even questions how the company is organized...To the organization, this presents several challenges, especially if it hasn't yet addressed this issue strategically..." http://www.goodexperience.com/columns/03/0721.top.html AppleMatters Interview: Jeffrey Zeldman Talks Apple By Hadley Stern "Standards are standards. If you design with standards, your sites work across platforms, browsers, and devices. You can therefore design and develop websites on any platform. So the issue becomes, which platform do you enjoy the most? Which gets out of your way and allows to be as productive and creative as possible? For me, the answer is the Macintosh platform." http://www.applematters.com/comments.php?id=P80_0_1_0 A Conversation with Jef Raskin By Ubiquity "Jef Raskin created the Macintosh computer project (naming the computer for his favorite variety of apple) and is the author of "The Humane Interface" (Addison-Wesley, 2000). He is also, among a great many other things, musician, mathematician, professor, and...well, read the interview." http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/interviews/j_raskin_2.html Common technical queries about the design of this site By The Royal National Institute for the Blind "Summary: If you're a web developer or designer, here's the low-down on the technical choices we made in the design of this site and why." http://tinyurl.com/hdbd +08: PHP. Common Style Mistakes, Part 2 By John Coggeshall "Writing code well means balancing expressiveness with elegance. Remember, you're writing code that must be maintained. In the second of a series on PHP Paranoia, John Coggeshall gives three tips to write code that's easier to understand." http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/php/2003/07/10/php_foundations.html On MySQL and PHP An Interview With MySQL's Zak Greant MySQL's Zak Greant speaks about MySQL's new licensing policies and how they will affect the PHP Community. The "de-bundling of the MySQL library from the recently released PHP 5.0 Beta has caused quite a stir in the community. After all, MySQL is not an integral component of the AMP platform by mistake. It is, in fact, quite fair to estimate that a great majority of PHP users whose applications require a database to function employ MySQL in one form or another." http://www.phparch.com/mysql/ Playing devil's advocate with PHP5 By PHP Everywhere "While reading the latest issue of PHP Architect, Volume 2, Issue #7, I read some wise words from Peter Moulding that I would like to share with you. He wrote in his article Coding for PHP5 in PHP4 about the new exception handling mechanism..." http://php.weblogs.com/2003/07/23#a2776 +10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Notes: an introduction to standard HTML and accessibility By Jim Byrne This is a a short overview of standard HTML and accessibility. http://www.mcu.org.uk/show.php?contentid=15 +11: TOOLS. MonitorCentral By SourceForge "This project aims to aid webmasters and web content managers in finding and fixing the following problems: Section 508 Problems, WC3 standards compliance, Spelling Errors, Meta Tag Content validation (i.e. web pages missing meta data), broken web page hyperlinks, Freshness, out-of-date issues..." http://www.brownsite.net/moncen.htm +12: USABILITY. What is Fitts Law? and its relation to HCI By Fredy Ore "Fitts Law is a robust model of human behavior which enables the prediction of human movement and human motion based on rapid, aimed movement other than drawing or writing. In Human Computer Interaction Fitt's law is a useful guideline in interface design." http://www.reloade.com.au/main/4.0/entries/archives/2003/07/001983.php Personas and the customer decision-making process By Henrik Olsen "Personas doesnÕt provide us with reliable information on how people will actually interact with our designs, but they provide us with a tangible way of thinking of the customers, understanding their needs, and making informed decisions about the design of a site." http://www.guuui.com/issues/03_03.asp +13: XML. XML: Our first XML document By Adrian Senior "...in this article we will look at the basic contructs of an xml file and how the relative elements breakdown to create a well formed document." http://tinyurl.com/gz7f XHTML by Example: A Hybrid Layout (Part I) By Jeffrey Zeldman "Use your beginning XHTML skills to mark up a real-world design project. This is the first step in Jeffrey Zeldman's 'teaching by doing' XHTML plan." http://tinyurl.com/hodl What is RSS? By Mark Pligrim "RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites like Wired, news-oriented community sites like Slashdot, and personal weblogs. But it's not just for news. Pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS: the "recent changes" page of a wiki, a changelog of CVS checkins, even the revision history of a book. Once information about each item is in RSS format, an RSS-aware program can check the feed for changes and react to the changes in an appropriate way." http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html [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.]