+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 2, Issue 44, April 23, 2004. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 44 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: BOOKS. 03: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. 04: DREAMWEAVER. 05: EVALUATION & TESTING. 06: EVENTS. 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. AIIM meeting sets PDF/Access standard in motion By Don Fluckinger "It's fun to watch the incredible, expanding PDF standard grow and morph into a multimedia e-paper format that makes paper look so 20th century. Unless, of course, you are blind or have poor vision. In that case, getting work done, reading e-books or filling out forms can be a nightmare." http://www.pdfzone.com/news/965-PDFzone_news.html Accessible Solutions to Difficult Web Design Problems By Crista Earl and Elizabeth Neal "Web designers looking for solutions to accessibility problems know they need to label graphics, make links stand alone, and make many other simple-to-implement accessibility changes. The presenters discuss the harder to implement, harder to understand, or harder to test accessibility details. Correct markup of data tables, when to use an alternative to a data table, how to mark up forms, when Java script presents a major barrier to users and alternative approaches, how to test for low-vision-friendliness of displays and how to fix problems and much more will be discussed..." http://www.csun.edu/cod/conf/2004/proceedings/249.htm How To Sell Accessibility By Trenton Moss "By now, we've all heard about Web accessibility and how important it is to us Internet users. You may think so, too. But how can you persuade your client, or your boss, that accessibility is worth it?" http://www.sitepoint.com/article/sell-web-accessibility Don't rely on automated tools for checking web accessibility By Jim Byrne "Your site will be accessible to a wider audience if you take a comprehensive approach; testing by people with different abilities and skills, and evaluation by individuals with knowledge related to accessible web design (that might be you) - or a combination of both. Evaluation website accessibility is an art not a science - it can't be reduce to running your site through Bobby and keeping your fingers crossed that everything will be ok." http://www.mcu.org.uk/show.php?contentid=87 Web Accessibility and UK Law: Telling It Like It Is By Trenton Moss "There's been widespread speculation about new legislation being introduced in the UK to ensure that websites are accessible to disabled users. In fact, many countries have already introduced some kind of law about this. (If you're not UK-based, please see this excellent list of links to country-specific information at UI Access.)" http://www.alistapart.com/articles/accessuk/ +02: BOOKS. Meyer, Eric. A. More Eric Meyer on CSS, New Riders Publishing, 2004. +03: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Styling Tables with CSS By Dan Delaney More CSS Tables examples... http://fluidmind.org/test/css/tables.html Equal Columns with CSS By Gez Lemon "I was asked the best way to produce a design with equal height columns in CSS today, and it reminded me just how bad the scenario of being frozen in Internet Explorer time is. I'm not sure when the next version of the browser is due out, but it's at least a couple of years away. Considering Microsoft have decided it's part of the operating system, even when it is released, it'll be a long time before it becomes a mainstream browser. Let's just hope that when it is in the mainstream, it has better support for CSS than the current version. Creating equal size columns is an absolute breeze using the CSS table model." http://www.juicystudio.com/css-tables/ +04: DREAMWEAVER. Use Dreamweaver templates to control pages edited in Contribute By Michael Meadhra "Like many other Web builders, I use Macromedia Dreamweaver for much of my Web page creation work. (In the interest of full disclosure, I must confess to writing three books about the product.) Dreamweaver's templates are a unique feature that I find myself using more and more especially in Web sites that end users will maintain using Macromedia Contribute." http://builder.com.com/5100-6371-5182638.html Protect your sites from potential Dreamweaver vulnerabilities By John McCormick "If you use any version of Dreamweaver MX, MX 2004, or UltraDev 4, you need to learn what vulnerabilities exist and what steps your development team can take to resolve these problems." http://builder.com.com/5100-6371-5193547.html +05: EVALUATION & TESTING. The Secret of Managing a Successful Website By Gerry McGovern "Don't depend on website logs or surveys to get the information you need. I was told about a study that examined the attitude of a group of people towards web privacy policies. When surveyed, almost 40 percent said that they checked these policies when shopping online. However, when the shopping behavior of these people was tracked over a period of time, only 4 percent actually did check up the policies." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2004/nt_2004_04_19_feedback.htm +06: EVENTS. Accessible Layout: The Tension Between Accessibility and Visual Design May 18, 2004 New York, New York U.S.A. http://w4a.man.ac.uk/ +07: JAVASCRIPT. Separating behavior and structure By Peter-Paul Koch In this article Peter-Paul Koch discusses why JavaScript should be on its own layer from markup. http://tinyurl.com/2yty8 Let Them Eat Cake By Aaron Gustafson "A growing debate pits accessibility against usability. From our point of view, it's like pitting peanut butter against jelly. This article helps you create a page that is both usable and accessible, saving readers the trouble of scrolling with a little help from JavaScript and the Document Object Model." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/eatcake/ +08: MISCELLANEOUS. The Problem, the Balloon, and the Four Bedroom House By Joe Di Stefano "Without a problem, there is no project. Where there is a problem, however, there is a stakeholder who is desperate for a solution and who has a delivery deadline -- which is normally sometime yesterday. Find out how a good process can tame even the most unruly project" http://www.alistapart.com/articles/balloon/ +09: NAVIGATION. Fix Navigation to Improve Conversions, Part 1 By Bryan Eisenberg "Traditional card sorting is flawed. Usability expert Jared Spool agrees. He recently wrote about his own Category Agreement Analysis (CAA) card-sorting technique. In standard card sort, you put the one product per card on index cards without regard to category. Users then group cards into user-defined categories. CAA differs by allowing users to sort items into multiple categories." http://www.clickz.com/experts/design/traffic/print.php/3340391 Usability drawbacks of image based navigation systems By Nir Dagan "When images are used as links users cannot distinguish between visited and unvisited links. This increases the number of user's errors." http://www.nirdagan.com/webpublishing/articles/imglink +10: PHP. PHP For Newbies - Part 1: The Basics By Justin Kozuch "Welcome to Part 1 of "PHP for Newbies". Over the next few weeks, I will take you through the basic functionality of PHP. Today, we will look at the first part of the lexical structure of PHP to get you up to speed." http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=96E93 Tidying up your HTML with PHP 5 By John Coggeshall "This article is aimed at the web developer who would like to make use of HTML Tidy from within PHP scripts. No particular level of expertise is assumed." http://www.zend.com/php5/articles/php5-tidy.php +11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. The Matrix of W3C Specifications By W3C "The specifications in the Matrix are at least at Last Call stage, except if they are working on a Test Suite at Working Draft stage. An empty cell means that the data is either not available or not known by the maintainers of the Matrix. The Matrix contains 70 Recommendations, 18 Candidate Recommendations, 0 Proposed Recommendations and 15 Last Call Working Drafts." http://www.w3.org/QA/TheMatrix An exercise in clarity: Web Standards By Jason Fried "Explain why Web Standards are important to your clients (and their customers) in 10 words or less." http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives/000648.php +12: TOOLS. Colour Schemer By Michael Kear http://afpwebworks.com/colourschemer/ Beautify PHP "This program tries to reformat and beautify PHP source code files automatically. The program is Open Source and distributed under the terms of GNU GPL. It is written in PHP and has a web frontend." http://www.bierkandt.org/beautify/index.php Learning To Let Go (Styleswitcher on steroids) By Chris Heilmann This tool "...is a PHP based solution that enables you as the designer to offer various Style Sheets, and enable the user to change colours, layout and font sizes. The data entered will be stored in a cookie and you do NOT need any PHP knowledge." http://www.icant.co.uk/ltlg/ +13: USABILITY. IBM Usability: Role by phase matrix "The matrix above depicts the key user engineering roles and the phases of a generic development process. At each role-phase intersection is a synopsis of the contribution that role provides during the phase. You can use this matrix to access more detailed information about each role, each development phase, and role-phase activities. You may also use the topical index on the far left to get more information about various topics that are related to roles / phases, such as recommended work products and measures." http://www-306.ibm.com/ibm/easy/eou_ext.nsf/Publish/2096 Personas For Content Development By D. Keith Robinson "...I do find the actual creation of personas to be helpful in other ways. It forces you to connect with your readers and users and that is always a good thing. The personas themselves, well, they might be a bit over-rated." http://tinyurl.com/2q4e3 Quick Guide to Writing for the Web By webdevtips "When you're writing web content, keep sentences short and to the point. Remove anything that holds up the flow of words. Good web copy is like TV advertising. It grabs your attention, tells you what to do and then moves on...." http://www.webdevtips.com/webdevtips/article.php?item=55 +14: XML. Omit Redundant Classes and Default Attributes By Andrew B. King "By omitting redundant classes and default attributes you can shrink your XHTML code to speed page response times. Many tags and duplicate attributes can be safely removed with no change in appearance." http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/default/ [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. 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.]