+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 2, Issue 25, December 13, 2003. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 25 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: JAVASCRIPT. 07: MISCELLANEOUS. 08: NAVIGATION. 09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 10: TOOLS. 11: TYPOGRAPHY. 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. More reasons why we don't use accesskeys By Derek Featherstone "The topic of accesskeys regularly appears on mailing lists, forums, and other arenas. Developers ask what the concensus is, and the answer is -- there isn't one. We believe that the functionality accesskeys provide is worthwhile, but their implementation and standardization leave something to be desired." http://www.wats.ca/articles/accesskeyconflicts/37 Link Relationships as an Alternative to Accesskeys By Derek Featherstone "We like the concept of accesskeys providing quick keystroke access to various parts of a particular site. However, we also believe that given their standardization and implementation problems, we need a more robust method for providing the functionality." http://www.wats.ca/articles/accesskeyalternatives/52 +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Stylish Buttons By Michael Matti "In this article, Michael Matti uses CSS to create colorful, stylish alternatives to the common buttons found in standard web forms." http://www.webreference.com/programming/css_stylish/ No Margin for Error By Andy Budd This post is about collapsing margins and the headaches they can cause. http://www.andybudd.com/blog/archives/000114.html Selectutorial - CSS selectors By Russ Weakley Here is a Russ Weakley tutorial on CSS selectors. http://css.maxdesign.com.au/selectutorial/index.htm CSS Design: Creating Custom Corners and Borders By Soren Madsen "Must CSS layouts be boxy and hard-edged? In this article, we'll show how customized borders and corners can be applied to fully fluid and flexible layouts with dynamic content, using sound and semantically logical markup." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/customcorners/ +03: COLOR. If You Pick One Color, Pick Them All By Olivier Thereaux and Susan Lesch "A surprising number of Web sites have color specified for body text, headings, and links of all kinds yet not for the background. Because your visitor may have any color set in their preferences, they may see an incongruous or alarming combination of colors. Worse happens when your visitor's browser preferences are light on dark, and the site is dark on light or vice versa. The visitor may find the text invisible, dark on dark or light on light." http://www.w3.org/2003/07/30-color +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Criteria for Evaluating the Quality of Online Courses By Clayton R. Wright "The criteria presented in this guide are based on the national and international experiences of staff in the Instructional Media and Design department at Grant MacEwan College. Although they were developed to assist educators in evaluating the effectiveness of online courses, they may also be used as guidelines for course developers." http://www.imd.macewan.ca/imd/content.php?contentid=36 +05: EVENTS. HCI International 2005 11th international conference on Human-Computer Interaction July 22-25, 2005 Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S.A. http://hcii2005.engr.wisc.edu/ Communications, Public Relations & Marketing on the Internet Council for Advancement and Support of Education (Case)Conference April, 14-16, 2004 Washington, DC, U.S.A. http://classic.case.org/conferences/cmcyber/frames.cfm +06: JAVASCRIPT. Validation with JavaScript By Nariman K. Melonfire "Form validation can help to reduce the amount of bad data that gets saved to your database. In this article, find out how you can write a simple JavaScript form validator for basic client-side validation, and learn a little bit about JavaScript OOP in the process as well." http://tinyurl.com/xp3f +07: MISCELLANEOUS. WaSP Interviews Todd Dominey By WaSP "Instead of just pushing news and other content out, we thought it would be interesting to have a space that pulled readers in..." http://www.webstandards.org/learn/interviews/tdominey/ Stuart Weibel Interviews Tim Berners-Lee By Stuart Weibel "Tim agreed to discuss his perspectives on major trends in the information landscape and their impact on use and access to public information. This interview was conducted in support of the OCLC environmental scan of the Library and Information communities, developed for strategic planning purposes for OCLC and its member libraries..." http://tinyurl.com/yey2 +08: NAVIGATION. Where Nav Meets Taxonomy By Victor Lombardi "I had a great session at work recently massaging a general taxonomy to be navigable. Hunched over wireframes and a hierarchical view of the taxonomy with a programmer, business analyst, and manager we were all able to communicate and understand the issues..." http://tinyurl.com/xzze +09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. HTML Techniques for WCAG 2.0 W3C Working Draft 09 December 2003 By W3C "The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group has released the first public Working Draft of HTML Techniques for WCAG 2.0. The draft provides information to Web content developers who wish to satisfy the success criteria of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, currently a Working Draft." http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-WCAG20-HTML-TECHS-20031209/ Retooling Slashdot with Web Standards Part II By Daniel M. Frommelt "In Part I, we showed how Slashdot could save money and reduce bandwidth requirements by converting to semantic XHTML markup and CSS layout. In Part II, we explore how standards-compliant markup and deft use of CSS could make Slashdot (and your sites) play nicely in print and on handheld devices." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/slashdot2/ +10: TOOLS. STEP508 By section508.gov "STEP508, the Simple Tool for Error Prioritization for Section 508 compliance, is an electronic tool that: Prioritizes the repairs you should make to ensure that your Web site is compliant with the accessibility requirements of Section 508. (It) provides the metrics to report your progress in improving the accessibility of your site over time." http://tinyurl.com/ylsv +11: TYPOGRAPHY. Care With Font Size By Olivier Thereaux and Susan Lesch "A certain trend among designers, believing that small text gives a Web page a sleek appearance and provides more space per 'page' for actual content, sometimes results in the use of unreasonably small font sizes. Unfortunately, this does not go well with the diversity of platforms used to access Web pages, from portable devices with tiny screens to projection devices hooked to computers. And even within a specific platform, text settings may vary. The problem here is a basic usability and accessibility issue: a good design should look good without requiring the user to enlarge or reduce the text size..." http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/font-size +12: USABILITY. Testing the Three-Click Rule By Josh Porter Josh Porter debunks the three-click rule. http://www.uie.com/Articles/three_click_rule.htm What is good hypertext writing? By Jutta Degener "There is more to writing than putting words next to each other, and there is more to writing hypertext than throwing together a bunch of links. When writing text, I have certain goals; when I come across text I dislike, there are certain reasons why I do not like it. You're about to read an attempt to describe these reasons and goals; it is incomplete, subjective, and honest." http://kbs.cs.tu-berlin.de/~jutta/ht/writing.html Dangerous Words By Jutta Degener http://kbs.cs.tu-berlin.de/~jutta/ht/writing/words.html +13: XML. SchemaWeb - RDF Schemas Directory "SchemaWeb is a place for developers and designers working with RDF. It provides a comprehensive directory of RDF schemas to be browsed and searched by human agents and also an extensive set of web services to be used by RDF agents and reasoning software applications that wish to obtain real-time schema information whilst processing RDF data." http://www.schemaweb.info/ [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. For information on how to subscribe and unsubscribe please visit: http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/webdevlist The Web Design Reference Site also has a RSS 2.0 feed for site updates. + 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.]