+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 2, Issue 12, September 13, 2003. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 12 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: EVENTS. 05: FLASH. 06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 07: NAVIGATION. 08: PHP. 09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 10: USABILITY. 11: XML. SECTION TWO: 12: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Accessibility issues of checkboxes and radio buttons By Jukka "Yucca" Korpela "These issues are important to a person with a motoric disability, to a person using e.g. a portable computer with a mouse system he is not familiar with, and to a user whose mouse is broken or works poorly with no immediate cure. Besides, some people just prefer to use the keyboard, especially when filling out a form with text input fields, so that a lot needs to be done via the keyboard anyway." http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/forms/kbd.html Assistive Device Behaviour Chart By Mary Martinson "These charts have been produced to help developers understand how assistive devices work." http://www.juicystudio.com/assistivedeviceschart.html Accessible web design articles By Carmen Mardiros "A series of articles on accessible web design trying to persuade designers of the necessity of addressing accessibility issues." http://www.mardiros.net/accessible-web-design.html +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Exploring the Limits of CSS Layout by Kevin Yank "The current CSS spec wasn't designed with multi-column layouts in mind. Where does this leave designers aiming for the lauded 3-column layout? Kev has the answers in this quick-and-dirty tutorial." http://www.sitepoint.com/article.php/1213 Making the Absolute, Relative By Doug Bowman Here is a clear explanation of absolute and relative positioning. http://www.stopdesign.com/log/2003/09/03/absolute.html +03: COLOR. Natural Selections: Colors Found in Nature and Interface Design By Luke Wroblewski "The web is awash with sterile design solutions. IBM, Dell, Microsoft, and countless others are virtually indistinguishable from each other. Though one might say this makes browsing easier by virtue of a standardized interface, in reality such sites create mundane experiences for their users and fail to make a positive connection with their audience." http://tinyurl.com/mrgy +04: EVENTS. STC's 51st Annual Conference Navigating the Future of Technical Communication May 9-12, 2004 Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A. http://www.stc.org/51stConf/ ED-MEDIA 2004 World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia & Telecommunications June 21-26, 2004 Lugano, Switzerland http://www.aace.org/conf/edmedia/ +05: FLASH. Flash Accessibility Presentation By Bob Regan "I have been working on a presentation for a few months, I keep refining it and adding examples to it. I thought it might be worth sharing with this group. I know several of you will read through it and send me comments. For that, I am eternally grateful." http://www.markme.com/accessibility/archives/003223.cfm IE, Flash, and patents: here comes trouble By Jeffery Zeldman "Besides paying over half a billion dollars to the patent holder, Microsoft is supposed to cripple its market-leading browser so that IE/Windows will no longer seamlessly play Flash, Quicktime, RealVideo, or Adobe Acrobat files, Java applets, and other rich media formats. Once the company does this, any site that uses these technologies will no longer work in the browser most people use." http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0903b.shtml#patentnonsense +06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Information Architecture for Designers: Structuring Websites for Business Success By Peter Van Dijck "This is a free version of pages 45, 46, 47, 53 and 54 of Information Architecture For Designers." http://iabook.com/samplechapter.htm +07: NAVIGATION. Sitemaps and Site Indexes: What They Are and Why You Should Have Them By Chiara Fox "Sitemaps and site indexes are forms of supplemental navigation. They give users a way to navigate a site without having to use the global navigation. By providing a way to visualize and understand the layout and structure of the site, a sitemap can help a lost or confused user find her way. Sitemaps are more widely implemented than site indexes, but both have their place and fulfill a unique information need." http://tinyurl.com/mqk2 +08: PHP. Introduction to File Handling in PHP By gjbmiller "Learn how to use simple file handling functions in PHP. This tutorial briefly covers creating, renaming, deleting, reading and writing to files using PHP functions." http://www.phpnoise.com/tutorials/20/1 +09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. SimpleQuizzes By Dan Cederholm These quizzes cover various topics with a focus on how you would take on a semantic markup challenge. The questions are interesting to think about but the discussion is were it gets really interesting. http://www.simplebits.com/tips/simplequiz/ +10: USABILITY. Writing photo captions for the Web By Ruth Garner, Mark Gillingham, and Yong Zhao "Photographs are rarely self-sufficient. They need captions. A caption tells us something about the person or thing photographed, also something about the photographer. In this article, we discuss how to write photo captions for the Web. We provide examples from adults' and children's work." http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_9/garner/index.html Are We There Yet? Effects of Delay on User Perceptions of Web Sites By Kath Straub This article discusses "recent research on how download times affect user perceptions of your Web pages." http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/aug03.asp#susan Websites: think the way your customers think By Gerry McGovern "Like university websites that have a 'Prospective Students' classification. I heard the results of a survey recently that found that students thinking of going to university didn't relate to this classification. The university response: 'That's what we've always called them.' Repeat after me: What you call your customer is irrelevant. It's the way your customer sees the world that matters. On the Web, you've got to think the way your customer thinks. You've got to use the words and it's all about words on the Web that your customer uses..." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2003/nt_2003_09_08_ibm.htm Misconceptions About Usability By Jakob Nielsen "Misconceptions about usability's expense, the time it involves, and its creative impact prevent companies from getting crucial user data, as does the erroneous belief that existing customer-feedback methods are a valid driver for interface design." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030908.html +11: XML. RSS - Really Simple Syndication By Jennifer Kyrnin "If you frequent Weblogs, you've seen the little XML icons inviting you to 'syndicate this site', but what does that really mean?..." http://webdesign.about.com/cs/rss/a/aa052603a.htm With E-mail Dying, RSS Offers Alternative By Steve Outing "Who'd have thought that things could get this bad? E-mail -- long touted as the 'killer app' of the Internet and the best online channel for publishers -- is rapidly being decimated by spammers and virus writers. Yes, 'decimated' is an accurate word. The evidence is quickly mounting that e-mail is no longer an efficient means for ethical publishers to reach subscribers..." http://tinyurl.com/lel5 Introduction To XML By Gayathri Gokul "It's a fact of life that XML, which stands for eXtensible Markup Language, is invading our lives more and more as programmers, and I feel this is a "good thing". The reason being XML has the ability to cross all sorts of boundaries, and probably the only chance we have to obtain a truly independent, cross-platform data transfer format." http://www.devshed.com/Server_Side/XML/XMLTutorial/page1.html [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +12: 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.]