+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 2, Issue 19, November 1, 2003. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 19 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: DREAMWEAVER. 04: EVENTS. 05: FLASH. 06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 07: JAVASCRIPT. 08: MISCELLANEOUS. 09: NAVIGATION. 10: PHP. 11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 12: TOOLS. 13: USABILITY. 14: XML. SECTION TWO: 15: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Accesskeys and Reserved Keystroke Combinations By John Foliot "In a non-scientific study conducted in the summer of 2002, we researched the availability of available Accesskeys which had not already been reserved by various other software technologies which might be employed by various users. The results indicated a real problem in that most ALT + keystroke combinations (assuming the Windows operating platform) have already been reserved by one type of application or another." http://www.wats.ca/resources/accesskeysandkeystrokes/38 +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Styling Nested Lists By Dan Cederholm "At their very basic - nested, unstyled lists deliver the exact hierarchy I was looking for. I could feel good about the structure that all browsers and devices would read, while easily styling it with CSS." http://tinyurl.com/rwi7 The Difference Between CSS and XSLT By Jennifer Kyrnin "Cascading Style Sheets or CSS were developed a few years ago to define the look and feel of markup languages. Extensible Style Sheet Language for Transformations or XSLT were created to transform documents. They are both style sheets, but they serve vastly different purposes..." http://webdesign.about.com/library/weekly/aa101901a.htm Top 10 Reasons to Learn CSS By sessions.edu This is an interview with Christopher Schmitt. http://www.sessions.edu/newsletter/Schmitt_C/interview.html +03: DREAMWEAVER. Tableless Layout in Dreamweaver Using the CSS Box Model By Betsy Bruce "In this tutorial, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to boldly move forward to separate web page content from the code that governs its presentation. One way to accomplish this noble separation is to combine HTML content (or XML content in the future) with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)." http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/max2003/articles/sp_bbruce.html An Overview of CSS in Dreamweaver MX 2004 By Julie Hallstrom "The most obvious change to the way Dreamweaver supports CSS is in its implementation of CSS within the interface. Don't worry. For those of you familiar with previous versions of Dreamweaver, the CSS Styles panel is still around. But, you should see how things have changed..." http://tinyurl.com/serk Build PHP Applications With Macromedia Dreamweaver MX By Icarus "Looking for a RAD tool to help you develop PHP-based Web applications? Spend some time with Dreamweaver MX, the latest revision of Macromedia's HTML editor, which comes with some nifty ideas designed to minimize hand-coding of PHP scripts." http://www.sitepoint.com/article/1232 +05: EVENTS. 2003 Web Content Management Conference December 8-10, 2003 Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. http://www2.ragan.com/html/main.isx?sub=2171 +05: FLASH. Flash for the Future By D. Keith Robinson New resource site for Flash designers and developers. It's still in beta. http://www.flashforthefuture.com/ +06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Should you centralize or decentralize your web publishing? By Gerry McGovern "There is a definite trend towards the centralization of information architecture: metadata and classification design, navigation, search, layout and graphic design. Because the Web is inherently a navigational space, readers like a consistent architecture. Of course, adhering to standard templates is also more cost-effective, faster to implement, and easier to manage." http://tinyurl.com/seru Good Information Architecture Increases Online Sales By Ivan Walsh "Information Architecture can be applied to resolve breakdowns in site design and navigation structure. The role of good Information Architecture is to make the Website work not in the technical sense, but from a functional, organized, conceptual perspective." http://www.sitepoint.com/article/1235 +07: JAVASCRIPT. Determining cookie support in client's browser By JavaScript Kit "If your script relies on JavaScript cookies to store and persist information, it's a good idea to always first make sure the user's browser has cookies enabled. This tutorial shows you how to perform this detection." http://javascriptkit.com/javatutors/cookiedetect.shtml +08: MISCELLANEOUS. Which Projects are Worth Your Time? By Joshua Weinberger "Knowing your technology department can deliver on time and on budget is one thing - but how do you know it's working on the right initiatives in the first place? By assessing your corporate strategies, assigning a real value to each project and enforcing some strict guidelines." http://tinyurl.com/scjw +09: NAVIGATION. Controlled Vocabularies: A Glosso-Thesaurus By Karl Fast, Fred Leise and Mike Steckel "the glossary is itself a controlled vocabulary, more specifically a thesaurus. So you will find all of the standard features of any thesaurus: broader, narrower, and variant term indicators, as well as scope notes. In this case, however, the scope notes provide the definition of the particular glossary term being presented." http://tinyurl.com/sv0y +10: PHP. Session Management in PHP By gjbmiller "This tutorial is designed to give the reader a brief introduction to session management in PHP. Contents cover creating, assigning values to and destroying sessions in PHP." http://phpnoise.com/tutorials/24/1 A Tour of Decision Making Structures in PHP By Timothy Boronczyk "A new tutorial has been posted that will give you a great overview of the decision structures in PHP" http://codewalkers.com/tutorials/52/1.html +11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. The Importance of Code Validation By John Foliot "Authoring to standards allows developers a level of assurance that what they are posting to the web will be accessible not only to the popular browser of the day, but to any standards compliant user agent in the marketplace." http://www.wats.ca/articles/htmlvalidation/28 Corralled By Eric A. Meyer "...Permit me to repeat myself: 'When one company owns the medium, everyone else loses.' Everyone from design firms to tool vendors to browser makers will have to dance to Microsoft's tune. We have until about 2007, maybe 2008, to prevent that from happening. Can it be done? How? By whom? If XAML lives up to its potential, Microsoft won't need the W3C any more. Why should they play by the open community's rules when they can create their own very lucrative and highly controlled gated community?..." http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/200310.html#t200310024 +12: TOOLS. WebXACT By WatchFire "WebXACT is a free online service that lets you test single pages of web content for quality, accessibility, and privacy issues." http://webxact.watchfire.com/ He Who Casts The First Stone By Mark Pilgrim Mark reviews WebXACT. http://webstandards.org/buzz/archive/2003_10.html#a000228 Online Content Accessibility and Quality Tester form By HiSoftware This online tool will check web pages for Section 508; WCAG 1.0 Priority 1, WCAG 1.0; Priority 1,2; or WCAG 1.0 Priority 1,2,3. http://www.hisoftware.com/accmonitorsitetest/ +13: USABILITY. "About Us" - Presenting Information About an Organization on Its Website By Jakob Nielsen "Study participants searched websites for background information ranging from company history to management biographies and contact details. Their success rate was 70%, leaving much room for usability improvements in the 'About Us' designs." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20031027.html +14: XML. XHTML: Differences between Strict & Transitional By liorean.web-graphics.com Here is a listing of elements and what is different between XHTML Transitional and Strict. http://liorean.web-graphics.com/xhtml/comparison.loose-strict.html Comparison of Strict and Transitional XHTML By zvon.org This is another listing that has links to more details for all elements and related attributes. http://www.zvon.org/xxl/xhtmlReference/Output/comparison.html The Missing in the World Wide Web By Derek Featherstone "The link element in (X)HTML is possibly the most underused and underachieving element available to us today - it's not for lack of trying, though. It's because (X)HTML needs to change, and so do user agents." http://www.wats.ca/articles/missinglink/49 [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +15: 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.]