+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 2, Issue 45, April 30, 2004. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 45 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: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 07: JAVASCRIPT. 08: MISCELLANEOUS. 09: PHP. 10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 11: TOOLS. 12: TYPOGRAPHY. 13: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 14: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. I Care About Accessibility By Matt May "What concerns me most is this: that one sound bite is slowly getting filed away in the minds of people who genuinely don't care about accessibility. Those in Jeff Veen's sphere of influence (and given his history, that's more than a few) may have heard that he just gave them a free pass to be unconcerned with accessibility issues. And now, people like Sharron Rush, John Slatin and my colleague Wendy Chisholm - who were on the panel with Jeff - and people like me have to explain to designers that what Jeff said isn't just to stop paying attention to accessibility." http://www.bestkungfu.com/archive/?id=453 Do You Care About Accessibility? By Kirk Biglione "Veen, of course, was exaggerating his position to make a point. After proclaiming he didn't care about accessibility, he went on to explain what he does care about: professional web design practiced as a craft by skilled practitioners who understand the limits of the media as well as the opportunities presented by the media. He noted that in the past he always had problems working with print designers who felt constricted by the limitations of web technology Ð but those designers are no longer a problem for him because he no longer works with them. The designers Veen works with now are steeped in web standards and interactive design, and welcome the challenges of their chosen media. Because Veen is now fortunate enough to be working with skilled web craftsmen, accessibility is much easier to achieve..." http://www.alttags.org/archives/2004/03/31/32/ Web Usability Checking for Blind and Vision Impaired By David Woodbridge and Robert Spriggs These are presentation materials based around a list of questions that Royal Blind Society's Adaptive Technology Consultants commonly ask when checking websites for accessibility. The questions could also be used as an auditing tool for web designers and developers to assess their sites for accessibility." http://webstandardsgroup.org/go/resource168.cfm Web Accessibility: No More Mr. Nice Guy By David Travis "Last week the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) published a significant report on web accessibility. This report marks the DRC's intention to get tough with organisations whose websites cannot be used by disabled people. Over the next twelve months, we predict that the report will influence redesigns of virtually every major website in the UK as organisations jockey with each other to avoid getting sued." http://www.userfocus.co.uk/articles/drc_report.html +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. CSS Drop Shadows II: Fuzzy Shadows By Sergio Villarreal "Picking up where Part I left off, in Part II designer Sergio Villarreal takes his standards-compliant drop-shadow to the next level by producing warm and fuzzy shadows." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/cssdrop2/ CSS3: The New Frontier By Dante Evans (AKA Sean M. Hall) "It's the future and the future is now: CSS3. This site will grow over time since CSS3 Support is very limited. Nonetheless we need tests." http://geocities.com/seanmhall2003/index.html?/seanmhall2003/css3/ CSS tutorial Starting with HTML + CSS By Bert Bos "This short tutorial is meant for people who want to start using CSS and have never written a CSS style sheet before. It does not explain much of CSS. It just explains how to create an HTML file, a CSS file and how to make them work together. After that, you can read any of a number of other tutorials to add more features to the HTML and CSS files. Or you can switch to using a dedicated HTML or CSS editor, that helps you set up complex sites. At the end of the tutorial, you will have made an HTML file that looks like this..." http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/011/firstcss.html Style Master CSS Tutorial By westciv.com "This tutorial teaches CSS using both hand-coding and Style Master for Windows. You can also follow it using instructions for Style Master for Mac OS X. By working through the exercises you will learn all about CSS for text styling and page appearance including layout, and create a stylish looking page like this. If you want to learn CSS by hand-coding alone, simply work through all the exercises and code examples and skip all the specially styled Style Master instructions." http://www.westciv.com/style_master/academy/hands_on_tutorial/index.html +03: DREAMWEAVER. Macromedia Dreamweaver MX Fundamentals By trainingcafe.com "Macromedia Dreamweaver MX is a professional visual editor for creating and managing websites and pages. With Dreamweaver, you can create pages that can be viewed on any browser, any platform. Dreamweaver provides advanced design and layout tools, enabling you to create web pages without writing a line of code. For instance, it uses Macromedia's Roundtrip HTML technology to import HTML documents without reformatting the code and you can set Dreamweaver to clean up and reformat HTML when you want to." http://www.trainingcafe.com/members/mmf/learn.asp?m_id=17 +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Remote Contextual Inquiry: A Technique to Improve Enterprise Software By Jeff English and Lynn Rampoldi-Hnilo "Enterprise software usability is difficult to evaluate because the standard product shipped on a CD is almost always customized when it is implemented. How then can we learn about the design issues that actual users encounter with customized software?" http://tinyurl.com/28fvy Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner's Guide to User Research By Andrew Hinton "With all the attention to usability over the last five years or so and the wonderful swelling of information-architecture-related books just since 2001, you would think we would have enough methods and advice to keep our projects in perfect tack. But so many of these resources, excellent though they are, tend to be more about how to pilot the ship than how to find that all-important star and keep it in sight." http://tinyurl.com/2jexm +05: EVENTS. Web Essentials 04 September 30 - October 1, 2004. Sydney, Australia http://we04.com/ +06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. IA Library By Asilomar Institute of Information Architecture "Welcome to the IA Library. The IA Library is a selection of resources related to the field of information architecture. The collection includes articles, books, blogs, and more." http://aifia.org/library/ +07: JAVASCRIPT. Enhancing JavaScript's built in types By Simon Willison "Javascript is often falsely derided as a simple language, devoid of the object oriented features so favored by other modern scripting languages. People holding this opinion really need to take another look at the language, for beneath its beginner friendly interior Javascript packs some powerful language features. In addition to its support for functional programming (where functions can be passed around a script in the same way as the data structures they operate on) Javascript supports a form of OOP known as prototype-based inheritance..." http://www.sitepoint.com/blog-post-view.php?id=162697 +08: MISCELLANEOUS. Ten Questions for Eric Meyer By Russ Weakley "Eric Meyer is an internationally renouned expert on the subjects of HTML, CSS, and Web standards. A widely read author, he is also the founder of Complex Spiral Consulting, a company which focuses on helping clients save money and increase efficiency through the use of standards-oriented Web design techniques." http://webstandardsgroup.org/features/eric-meyer.cfm +09: PHP. The Hitchhiker's Guide to PHP An Oracle series of PHP articles "Learn everything about PHP, from getting your first application started to what the future of the language holds." http://otn.oracle.com/pub/articles/php_experts/index.html +10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. The Learning Curve of Web Standards By Bobby van der Sluis Web standards have passed the stations of the innovators and the early adopters. Right now the early majority of the industry is ready to adopt the new stuff. Say you are one of those people. You are convinced you should use web standards and prepared yourself by absorbing as much information as you could from the web and from books. But now you are standing at the doorstep of doing your first standards compliant design, suddenly everything seems a bit daunting. http://www.bobbyvandersluis.com/articles/learningcurve.php Standards Compliant method to add Quicktime movies to pages By Anne van Kesteren "The method currently used to embed Quicktime movies into pages relies on the embed tag which, while widely supported by browsers, has never been part of any W3C standard. There is a good reason for this: why add another tag to (X)HTML, when a perfectly good one already exists? The object tag is intended as an all-purpose tag to embed [sic] external files into web pages. It has clever features such as being able to be nested, so that if a browser does not understand what is meant by the outer element, it can parse the inner element instead. This means that the inner most element could contain an image, which would be rendered to the user if all else fails." http://realdev1.realise.com/rossa/rendertest/quicktime.html +11: TOOLS. CSS Variable Border 2/3 Columned Page Maker By ClevaTreva Designs This is an online CSS tool to aid in creating 2 or 3 column layouts. http://207.44.137.103/pagemaker_form.php Accessibility Extensions for Mozilla By Center for Instructional Technology Accessibility "accessibilityext.xpi adds features to Mozilla to make it easier for people to view and navigate web content based on the structural markup used to create the web page. accessibilityext.xpi can be used directly by everyone (including people with disabilities) to navigate the structure of a HTML web resource. It can be used by authors to check their structural markup to make sure it matches the actual content structure of the resource. Accessibilityext supports users to use structural markup to view the main topics of a web resource (H1-H6), find collections of related links (MAP), find and use keyboard shortcuts (accesskeys) and navigate links." http://cita.rehab.uiuc.edu/software/mozilla/index.html Download it from: http://cita.rehab.uiuc.edu/software/mozilla/download.html +12: TYPOGRAPHY. Type on the Web By Todd Dominey, Jeffrey Zeldman, Gabe Kean, Jim Coudal, and Craig Kroeger "I wanted to ask a handful of top interactive designers something that has become more important lately. Type as it appears in Web browsers. It's really come to the forefront for me personally since the release of Apple's Safari Web browser and its native support of anti-aliased text (you can't turn it offÑeasily). What does this mean for interactive designers? What affect will this have on branding or any image-based text that we specify? What kind of typographic control will designers have (or not) in the near future? Will aliased text survive? What's next for HTML type or textual content as it appears in Web-browsers running on desktop or laptop systems?" http://www.reservocation.com/04_01/art_type-04_02.html +13: USABILITY. Security and Usability By Brian R. Krause "The more secure a system is, the harder it is to use. The harder it is to use a system, the less secure it will be." http://www.encentuate.com/perspectives/usability.htm Good Web Page Titles By D. Keith Robinson "Proper titling of you Web pages is probably the easiest and best thing you can do to improve the usability of your Web site. So, I ask you, why do people insist on using clever and/or vague titles?" http://www.7nights.com/asterisk/archives/good_web_page_titles.php This Cake is All Frosting By Ryan Singer "But I'm not so sure this treatment is more usable than the plain markup version. Does a single article really need its own menu bar? Is it easier for people to understand the article in chunks, or does the lack of context make it harder to follow along? Will someone viewing a single chunk expect the whole article to print? What if they hit the print button on each screen and get five copies? These questions may be open for debate, but some of the problems with this design are clear-cut..." http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives/000651.php How To Quantify The User Experience By Robert Rubinoff "This article outlines a quick-and-dirty methodology for quantifying the user experience, which I've found to be very useful in providing clients with a quick, objective, visual representation of where their site stands vis-a-vis the competition or past development efforts." http://www.sitepoint.com/article/quantify-user-experience [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.]