+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 2, Issue 20, November 8, 2003. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 20 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: EVALUATION & TESTING. 05: EVENTS. 06: FLASH. 07: JAVASCRIPT. 08: MISCELLANEOUS. 09: PHP. 10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 11: TOOLS. 12: TYPOGRAPHY. 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. Use Alternative Style Sheets To Give Users Control Of Critical Elements Such As Text Size Or Colour On Your Web Pages By Jim Byrne http://www.mcu.org.uk/show.php?contentid=70 +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Sliding Doors of CSS, Part II By Douglas Bowman "In Sliding Doors of CSS Part I, Douglas Bowman introduced a new technique for creating visually stunning interface elements with simple, text-based, semantic markup. In Part II, he pushes the technique even further with rollovers, a fix for IE/Win's CSS bugs, and much more. And because web designers do not live by design and code alone..." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/slidingdoors2/ A Turbo-Charged Style-Sheet Switcher Providing user customization options by making css files scriptable. By Jim Byrne Here is a "...a more flexible style sheets switcher using server side scripts. In summary: 1) presentation elements such as text size and colour are chosen from an HTML form; 2) after the submit button is pressed, the form is processed by a script which captures the chosen values and stores them in cookies; 3) the style sheet being used to alter the presentation of the page, uses the cookie values to set the presentation variables, e.g. text size and background colours." http://www.mcu.org.uk/articles/styleswitcher.php Style Sheet Switching By Gez Lemon "Of course, the Byrne/Lemon technique name is tongue in cheek, but it's easier than constantly referring to the server side style sheet switching with flexible interface preference technique. By providing persistent, preferred, and alternate style sheets with a style switching form, visitors have the opportunity to combine the scripts to add more flexibility on how they customize your pages." http://www.juicystudio.com/tutorial/css/styleswitch.asp CSS Float HTML Tutorial By bigbaer.com "CSS float for HTML elements! It's time to think outside the box, or maybe, more accurately, floating alongside of it. Where did we lose our collective CSS coding creativity? Are we all still burdened with a table layout mentality? Do we read the W3C Cascading Style Sheets Specification and not get it? CSS allows for so much freedom from traditional table based layouts that we sometimes do not consider page and layout design alternatives. What a pity. Time to think outside the box!" http://www.bigbaer.com/css_tutorials/css.float.html.tutorial.htm +03: DREAMWEAVER. Dreamweaver Tips from the Developers Who Dreamt Them Up By Troy Dreier "Last month we highlighted the new Dreamweaver features that will tempt you to upgrade. This month we interviewed the actual Macromedia developers who created Dreamweaver and asked them for their favorite hidden tips. If you regularly use Dreamweaver, you're bound to find a time-saver or two." http://tinyurl.com/twco +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Don't Test Users, Test Hypotheses By Avi Soudack "I find that by basing hypotheses on a site or application's goals, I can integrate usability testing into the design process. By thinking in terms of hypotheses based on design goals I can generate relevant, action-oriented findings. In this way, usability doesn't stifle creativity, it focuses it." http://tinyurl.com/tltm +05: EVENTS. Digital Design World Thunder Lizard Event February 18-20, 2004 San Francisco, California, U.S.A. http://www.ftponline.com/conferences/digitaldesignworld/ Information Architecture Summit 2004 Breaking New Ground February 27-29, 2004 Austin, Texas, U.S.A. http://www.asis.org/Conferences/IA04/ +06: FLASH. Excuse me sir, your Flash is broken! By Joe Gillespie "Microsoft have just been successfully sued for half a billion dollars by a small company called Eolas, who claim to hold the patent rights for the technology that permits plug-ins like Flash and QuickTime to work in browsers – and the judges seem to agree. The upshot of all this is that Microsoft has to alter Internet Explorer so that plug-ins can't launch automatically as they do at present. This is true for all Active-X and Java applets as well. A modified version of IE, due early next year, will simply put up a dialog box asking if you want to view the content - with just an 'OK' button, so you don't really have much choice..." http://www.wpdfd.com/editorial/wpd1103.htm#footnote +07: JAVASCRIPT. Quirksmode.org By Peter Paul-Koch "Here is Peter Paul-Koch's new site for browser quirk documentation and workarounds and JavaScript techniques. It has more than 150 pages with technical information about browser incompatibility problems, both in CSS and in JavaScript. http://www.quirksmode.org/ An explorer script with no need for ID By Chris Heilmann "As a lot of people use windows explorer to navigate through their harddisk, more and more people ask for the same navigation for deeply nested web sites. This article explains how to develop one of these in a backward-compatible, expandable and accessible way" http://tinyurl.com/t5tr +08: MISCELLANEOUS. An Interview with Joe Clark By Craig Saila "...(skip-navigation links have) gotta be visible. Blind people aren't the only users of skip-navigation links." http://www.digital-web.com/interviews/interview_2003-10.shtml Content management: web publishing needs real discipline By Gerry McGovern "Too many organizations take an unprofessional approach to the content they publish on the Web. Many web managers still seem to believe that if they get the technology right the publishing will look after itself. Quality publishing requires skill and discipline. Unfortunately, discipline is something many web teams are lacking." http://tinyurl.com/twd6 +09: PHP. Secure Login Using Cookies By gjbmiller "This tutorial is designed to give the reader a framework for building a secure login using PHP cookies. This tutorial requires you have some basic knowledge of php coding." http://www.phpnoise.com/tutorials/26/1 String Manipulation By gjbmiller "This tutorial is based on string manipulation for the beginning PHP programmer." http://www.phpnoise.com/tutorials/25/1 +10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. The Importance Of Standards Compliance and The Process of Validation By Karl L. Groves "Among the more troubling observations I've made during my (admittedly short) studies into web development has been the complete and shameful disregard 'web designers' have for standards. This disregard is responsible for accessibility and general usability problems for Internet users. It is also a contributing factor to decreased efficiency of corporate IT departments, not only in terms of repair costs of the general markup when errors are found, but also in terms of the cost of "making it work" on browsers whose manufacturers have long ignored these standards." http://www.karlcore.com/articles/article.php?id=9 Coding for Easier Redesigns By Jeffrey Zeldman "Slowly, and not without growing pains, web professionals are transitioning from old-school HTML table layouts to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) backed by streamlined, structural XHTML markup. Successfully making the transition requires a change in thinking. As designers, we're trained to see web pages as pure visual layouts Ñ like print you can click. But a standards-conscious designer won't even think about how a page looks until she has first figured out its underlying structure." http://tinyurl.com/twdl Web Standards, XHTML and CSS - Lessons Learned From A Redesign By D. Keith Robinson "I can't stress enough how beneficial going with a Web standards based approach was..." http://tinyurl.com/t5qe +11: TOOLS. Testing Tools for Developing Accessible Web Sites By John Foliot "For those developers out there who would like to try and build an accessible site, or would like to just have some neat and useful testing tools, we have collected a few which are provided here as a service. They are provided 'as is' and remained licensed to their original authors, who have provided them royalty free." http://www.wats.ca/resources/testingtools/44 +12: TYPOGRAPHY. Typography: Case By Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton "Whether you choose uppercase or lowercase letters has a strong effect on the legibility of your text. Indeed, words set in all uppercase letters should generally be avoided - except perhaps for short headings - because they are difficult to scan." http://www.webstyleguide.com/type/case.html +13: USABILITY. Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines By The National Institutes of Health in partnership with The National Cancer Institute Even though these recently updated guidelines are clear and easy to follow and each is backed up by references to academic research, they should be examined with a critical eye. They make no mention of using web standards or validating. http://usability.gov/guidelines/ The Art of Usability Benchmarking By Scott Berkun "Usability benchmarking is one way to get a longer term view of how easy to use things are, and what progress is being made over time." http://www.uiweb.com/issues/issue27.htm +14: XML. Diagramming the XML Family By Daniel Zambonini "A graphical overview of the main members of the XML technology family, entirely produced using XML technologies: XML, Namespaces, RDF, SVG, XSLT and XSL-FO." http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/10/08/family.html Effective XML: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your XML By Elliotte Rusty Harold "This is a book excerpt from "Effective XML: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your XML". http://www.webreference.com/programming/xml/ Effective XML: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your XML. Part 2 By Elliotte Rusty Harold "XML documents are just too rich in syntax sugar to be processed by anything short of a full-blown XML parser. If the software does not perform its function, the rest is useless." http://www.webreference.com/programming/xml/parser/ ++ 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.]