+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 2, Issue 50, June 5, 2004 An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 50 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: NAVIGATION. 10: PHP. 11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 12: TOOLS. 13: TYPOGRAPHY. 14: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 15: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. PDF vs. HTML By Christopher Phillips "Our discussion has revolved around both accessibility and usability. Regarding accessibility, I put forth an article titled Adobe Acrobat Accessibility Techniques from the good folks at WebAIM. John-Paul thoughtfully went through the article and rebutted six points made at the beginning of the article, here are his comments, verbatim..." http://tinyurl.com/3e6za Minutes of April 19 AccessibleWeb@U By Ginny Redish Regarding skip links: "skip navigation is jargon" "skip to content Jaws mispronounces"; "skip to main content seems best." http://tinyurl.com/2fb2l +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Stylish, accessible forms By Andy Clarke "I can't think of many web sites that don't include at least one form, and I can't think how many times I have compromised on a form's visual design because of looming deadlines, leaving a 'Must get around to styling this form properly' comment in the code. Form design can often be an after-thought, so I thought I'd make a form 'template' styled with CSS and post it here for anyone who might be interested." http://tinyurl.com/yvs6y Ticked Off? Visited Links How-To By Simon Collison This is a technique uses background images on block-level link elements to display a image "tick" next to links that have been visited. It also provides a hover effect as well. http://www.collylogic.com/index.php/weblog/comments/40/ +03: DREAMWEAVER. Avoiding Horizontal Scroll Bars By Jolantha Belik "Horizontal scrolling is one of those usability nightmares that cause visitors to never come back to your web site. Actually, I do not mean a horizontal scroll bar of a layer that contains a small gallery. That is a special situation. Experience has shown that visitors love to scroll in galleries to find out what is still hidden." http://tinyurl.com/yuusq +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Bookmarks for standards testing By Joe Clark "Over the course of a year-long project, and because Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group members never seem to actually surf the Web, I bookmarked sites that seemed to be examples of certain topics in standards-compliant Web development and accessibility. The bookmarks are cleaned up slightly and presented here." http://www.fawny.org/webstandards/bookmarks/bookmarks-040526.html +05: EVENTS. Louis Rosenfeld on Enterprise Information Architecture and Steve Krug on Usability: September 23 - November 9, 2004. This fall Louis Rosenfeld and Steve Krug take their two workshops to New York, Chicago and San Jose. Enterprise Information Architecture Seminar New York: September 23, 2004. Chicago: October 28, 2004. San Jose: November 8, 2004. http://louisrosenfeld.com/presentations/seminars/eia/ Don't Make Me Think: The Workshop New York: September 24, 2004. Chicago: October 29, 2004. San Jose: November 9, 2004. http://www.sensible.com/workshops.html +06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Developing and Creatively Leveraging Hierarchical Metadata and Taxonomy By Christian Ricci "In content metadata and hierarchies, you will often find a goldmine of implicit and explicit data that you can leverage to creatively contextualize content. After a brief introduction on taxonomy and metadata, this article focuses on finding and utilizing such relationships in hierarchies." http://tinyurl.com/349ns +07: JAVASCRIPT. Closures and executing JavaScript on page load By Simon Willison "My other post has a run-down of why this technique is needed and an explanation of how it works, but what I'd like to expand on that here by talking about the way the above code uses a JavaScript language feature known as a closure." http://www.sitepoint.com/blog-post-view.php?id=171578&ct=1 +08: MISCELLANEOUS. New Top Level Domains Considered Harmful By Tim Berners-Lee "The Web must operate independently of the hardware, software or network used to access it, of the perceived quality or appropriateness of the information on it, and of the culture, and language, and physical capabilities of those who access it [WTW]...For a time, many Web site designers did not see the necessity for such device independence, and indicated that their site was 'best viewed using screen set to 800x600'. Those Web sites now look terrible on a phone or, for that matter, on a much larger screen. By contrast, many Web sites which use style sheets appropriately can look very good on a very wide range of screen sizes." http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/TLD Ten questions for Patrick Griffiths By Russ Weakley "Patrick Griffiths (or PTG) is a London-based freelance webmaker. He is most widely known for his site HTML Dog, an HTML and CSS resource for beginners and experts alike. Patrick has written some highly acclaimed articles including Suckerfish Dropdowns, Sons of Suckerfish and Elastic Design. He also shares his knowledge with the world via his blog - aptly titled 'Dog Blog'." http://webstandardsgroup.org/features/patrick-griffiths.cfm +09: NAVIGATION. An alternate technique for You Are Here button styling Michael Meadhra "Last week's column addressed the importance of helping your Web site visitors stay oriented to where they are in your site. By providing visual feedback, you can indicate the current page's position in the site navigation scheme. The column also showed one common technique for providing this feedback: by highlighting the button for the current page in a navigation bar composed of pure CSS buttons. I call the highlighted button a You Are Here button because it serves the same purpose as the You Are Here pointer on the store directory/map at the mall. This column demonstrates a different technique for applying CSS styling to a You Are Here button and compares the advantages of the two techniques. To give credit where it is due, I first encountered this particular technique in Jeffrey Zeldman's Designing with Web Standards." http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-5210251.html +10: PHP. Migrating from PHP 4 to PHP 5 By Derick Rethans Derick Rethans has posted his presentation from the International PHP Conference on his website. http://www.derickrethans.nl/pres-breaking/talk.html International PHP Conference in Amsterdam By Filip de Waard Filip de Waard of NewsForge has posted a summary of his time spent at the International PHP Conference in Amsterdam. http://www.newsforge.com/programming/04/05/11/1352240.shtml +11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. HTML and CSS Validation: Should You Validate Your Web Page? By Christopher Heng "If you don't hang around webmaster circles, you may not realize that HTML validation and CSS validation are controversial issues with some people. This article discusses some of the positions taken in these discussions to provide some perspectives on issues that have come increasingly to the fore in web development. Hopefully, the article will also provide a practical method that overworked webmasters can use to improve their website." http://www.thesitewizard.com/webdesign/htmlvalidation.shtml Learn how to implement an effective web style guide By Gerry McGovern "A style guide helps you quickly and cost-effectively publish content that is of a consistent quality. It is particularly important when there are lots of editors and authors involved in the publishing process. A good style guide takes a lot of time and effort to create. Unless its implementation is policed, it will not achieve its objectives." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2004/nt_2004_05_17_web_style_guide.htm +12: TOOLS. The Color Palette Creator By S.G. Chipman "This tool was inspired directly by the excellent Creating Color Palettes article by Andy Clarke. It will create 10 shades of the base color, located top-left, at varying degrees of opacity. The top row emulates opacity over a white background, the bottom over black. The opacity values are 100% opaque, 75%, 50%, 25% and 10% on the top row. The bottom row begins at 85% rather than 100% and continues on as the first." http://slayeroffice.com/tools/color_palette/ +13: TYPOGRAPHY. SVG and Typography By Fabio Arciniegas A. "SVG is back in style on XML. Fabio Arciniegas and Antoine Quint will be covering typography, video and mobile topics over the coming weeks." http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/04/07/svgtype.html SVG and Typography: Characters By Fabio Arciniegas A. "In the second part of our discussion of SVG and typography we explore some time-honored practices of typographic excellence; as we go along, each 'type issue' will lead to the discussion of relevant technical aspects of SVG. The typography issues covered are listed below..." http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/05/12/svg.html +14: USABILITY. Put The Friendly Back In User-Friendly By D. Keith Robinson "The term 'User-Friendly' is pretty straightforward, no? Well, maybe. I'm not sure what the "official" definition is, but to me it means making something, could be pretty much anything, not only easy for others to use, but attractive or desirable to use as well. You know? Friendly. This desirability is something that doesn't seem to get talked about much when we talk about user-centered Web design. We talk quite a bit about ease-of-use but ease-of-use doesn't necessarily mean friendly. In fact there are some folks out there who treat these things as always in opposition to each other. I think we need to put a bit more friendly into user-friendly." http://tinyurl.com/23kgq Be a web editor, not administrator By Gerry McGovern "There are two roles in web content management that matter: editors and writers. Editors decide what should get published. Writers create the content. Most websites started off with administrators webmasters who had lots of responsibility and little authority. Today, we see the emergence of the web editor, a position that will become increasingly important." http://tinyurl.com/2xvzx [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.]