+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 2, Issue 52, June 18, 2004. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. + +ISSUE 52 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: USABILITY. 14: XML. SECTION TWO: 15: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Library students help agencies make web sites more accessible By Barbara Wolff "Assorted state agencies and libraries in Madison will be peppered at the end of this semester with enhanced-accessibility Web projects conceived, designed and executed by students in the Information Architecture class in the School of Library and Information Studies at UW-Madison." http://www.news.wisc.edu/9779.html Captioning FAQ By Media Access Group "This brief description of captioning style was distilled from the Media Access Group at WGBH's in-house reference manual. It is being made available in the hope that exchanging our ideas might move the captioning industry at large toward a greater consistency of style." http://tinyurl.com/2bxm4 WCAG and the Myth of Accessibility By Kevin Leitch "So it becomes clearer that Tim Berners Lee is either lying or wrong according to the current state of the accessibility movement. 19% of disabled users are not even slightly represented in WCAG 1.0 or the proposed draft of WCAG 2.0 at the time of writing, and the accessibility community don't really care anyway. Could it be that the accessibility community (flushed with pride at their corner of the design community becoming fashionable) have simply latched on to the idea of web accessibility without either thinking it through or taking Tim Berners Lee at his word? And have designers keen to be associated with something laudable after the years of dotcom boom and bust stigma also latched on to a movement that pays simple lip service to Berners Lee's ideas? It certainly seems that the idea that because its difficult, we shouldn't bother has taken root, thanks to contributions from people like Joe Clark. Its very difficult to find anything from self styled accessibility gurus touching on making sites accessible to those with learning difficulties." http://www.juicystudio.com/wcag-myth.asp Start with the assumption that you cannot predict the access needs of your audience By Jim Byrne "A better approach is to design pages so that the presentation of content can be changed by the end user." http://www.mcu.org.uk/show.php?contentid=91 Benefits of an accessible website - part 2: The business case By Trenton Moss "There are, however, two very good reasons as to why businesses should start taking these issues seriously: 1. An accessible website will make you more money. 2. An accessible website will save you money." http://www.dmeurope.com/default.asp?from=f&ArticleID=1989 +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Position with Style: Fixing the Maori Land Court By Joe Lindsay "When a client asks for a minor site amendment, little does he know that his request will mean an entire page overhaul! But, realizing the importance of standards-compliance to his governmental client, Joe embarks on a redevelopment... with interesting results!" http://www.sitepoint.com/article/style-fixing-maori-land-court? Designing Data Part 1: Table structure By Jonathan Snook "The goal of this two-part article is to demonstrate how to create XHTML-compliant tables and how to style them effectively using CSS." http://www.snook.ca/archives/000164.html CSS Teaser Box By Roger Johansson "Just a little something that may be of use to someone. It's pretty common for websites to have 'teasers' that show an excerpt of a full article or document. The design for a recent project called for a teaser box with rounded corners, and below is an example of the result." http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200406/css_teaser_box/ +03: DREAMWEAVER. Visual Formatting By Zoe Gillenwater "Support for cascading style sheets, or CSS, has been present in Dreamweaver for many years; you may have taken advantage of it as just another software feature without really knowing how to utilize it fully, efficiently, and correctly. This article will introduce you to some general guidelines to follow while setting up and working with CSS-based Web pages so you can achieve more consistent rendering cross-browser." http://www.sys-con.com/story/?storyid=44901&DE=1 +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Capturing User Experience Closes the Feedback Loop By Jon Udell "Developers who possess deep but tacit knowledge of complex hardware and software environments are notoriously unable to project themselves into the beginner's mind. Observation is the only way to bridge the gap, but Pausch's innovative exercise notwithstanding, that's easier said than done. It's expensive to rent a so-called 'fixed lab' and to bring people there to conduct a formal study. Even commercial developers can't do this routinely; many enterprise developers never get the opportunity to see users interact with their wares. Portable labs...are a cheaper and more convenient alternative to fixed labs. These are typically suitcases packed with gear for capturing and editing videos of both onscreen activities and the users performing them." http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/06/04/23FEuser_1.html +05: EVENTS. OZeWAI 2004 December 1-3, 2004 La Trobe University Melbourne, Australia http://www.ozewai.org/2004/ +06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Information architecture - arranging your content By Ben Hunt "Architecting web sites is similar to architecting buildings. They are complex disciplines, which impact several areas including visual design, user experience, navigation, visitor flow, accessibility, construction cost, and maintenance costs." http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/?id=information_architecture Information architecture models By Ben Hunt "A toolkit of a few basic patterns (or models) that describe solutions to common IA problems. One or more of these patterns will naturally apply to many information architecture problems. These may serve as off-the-peg solutions, or as helpful descriptive shortcuts during the design process." http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/?id=ia_models +07: JAVASCRIPT. "JavaScript is the worst invention ever" By David Andersson "Well, that is the position taken by Bert Bos (W3C) at the Web Applications and Compound Documents workshop W3C held recently. Brendan Eich, inventor of JavaScript and maintainer of the Mozilla roadmap, reacts on his blog Brendan's Roadmap Updates..." http://web-graphics.com/mtarchive/001240.php +08: MISCELLANEOUS. Ten questions for Simon Willison By Russ Weakley "Simon Willison is a seasoned Web developer from the UK, currently working in Lawrence, Kansas. By day, he develops web applications, specializing in both client- and server-side development, for the Lawrence Journal-World. By night, he writes about web standards and technologies on his web development weblog - as well as writing regular articles for Sitepoint. He recently became a member of the Web Standards Project." http://webstandardsgroup.org/features/simon-willison.cfm Ten questions for Dan Cederholm By Russ Weakley "Dan Cederholm is an award-winning web designer and author living in Salem, Massachusetts. As principal of SimpleBits, Dan's design and development consulting firm, he brings years of experience in designing and building sites with web standards. Dan is well known for his redesigns of Fast Company and Inc.com using standards-compliant methods, while pushing the limits of CSS." http://webstandardsgroup.org/features/dan-cederholm.cfm +09: NAVIGATION. Contradictions in Accessibility Links and Default Link Styles By Derek Featherstone "One of the fundamental conventions on the web doesn't live up to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines." http://www.wats.ca/articles/linkstyles/61 +10: PHP. Learning PHP 5 By David Sklar Beta Chapter 8: Remembering Users with Cookies and Sessions http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/0596005601/chapter/index.html Building a Site Engine with PHP, Part 1 By James Murray "Content management systems are becoming very popular, but what if you took it a step further than that? That's exactly what I plan to show you how to do in this series of articles. I'm going to explain how to build a site engine. A site engine is a core code base and database that can run multiple sites that are completely different while all running in unison, using all the same code, yet separate from each other." http://www.devshed.com/c/a/PHP/Building-a-Site-Engine-with-PHP-1/ PHP Security Mistakes By Dave Clark "The purpose of this document is to inform PHP programmers of common security mistakes that can be overlooked in PHP scripts. While many of the following concepts may appear to be common sense, they are unfortunately not always common practice. After applying the following practices to your coding, you will be able to eliminate the vast majority of security holes that plague many scripts. Many of these security holes have been found in widely-used open source and commercial PHP scripts in the past." http://www.devshed.com/c/a/PHP/PHP-Security-Mistakes/ +11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Do Web Standards Have a Future? By John Allsopp In the Sydney Morning Herald, John Allsop laments 'Web Standards, RIP' and argues for Apple to develop a Windows version, or Google to brand Mozilla, and things along those lines. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/06/02/1086058908173.html WHAT about Internet Explorer? By Mike Davies "The W3C workshop into Web applications and compound documents has sparked off quite a discussion in the web community. The aim is to have a consistent foundation for building web applications - this seems to be the next evolution of the web." http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/standards/WhatAboutInternetExplorer +12: TOOLS. Readability analyser By readability.info "Find out for yourself where your writing style places your prose compared to other Web pages and writing samples..." http://www.readability.info/ ColorBrewer! "ColorBrewer is an online tool designed to help people select good color schemes for maps and other graphics. It is free to use, although we'd appreciate it if you could cite us if you decide to use one of our color schemes." http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/c/a/cab38/ColorBrewerBeta.html +13: USABILITY. Apples and Oranges By Didier P. Hilhorst "Usability and design are two fields that collide more often than not. But why is that? Why can't we all just get along and center our efforts around delivering a better product, a top-notch Web site or a user-friendly interface. Everybody would benefit from an open-minded, reciprocal understanding. Right?" http://www.digital-web.com/articles/apples_and_oranges/ Chunking Information By Gez Lemon "To help cope with information overload, we naturally organize complex information into more manageable groups. The technique of organizing complex information into more manageable groups is called 'chunking'. Some people are better able to chunk information than others, and certain groups of people with cognitive difficulties tend to find chunking particularly difficult. Based on this observation, I considered the option of delivering content in outline form. The basic idea is that instead of displaying the whole page, only the headings are displayed. When a visitor selects a heading, the content belonging to that heading is also displayed on the page." http://www.juicystudio.com/chunking.asp Everything I Know About User Experience I Learned While Scooping Ice Cream By Dave Rogers "...while I may have learned more about user experience from Rosenfeld, Morville, Wodtke, Wurman, Nielsen, Goto, Spool, Garrett, et al, I learned my foundational lessons while scooping ice cream. I'll always be grateful." http://www.gotomedia.com/gotoreport/news_0607_davescolumn.html Working toward more realistic design goals By Michael Meadhra "This isn't just a theoretical exercise; it's a tested and proven approach to Web design called liquid layout. Using a liquid layout successfully takes forethought and planning. But, most of all, it takes a willingness to give up tight control over the position of every page element and allow your page design to flex and flow on its own. It means thinking about your design in terms of its structure and flow, and defining key relationships between page elements instead of striving for pixel-precise control. (The parallels to structural markup and CSS styles are no coincidence.)" http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-5220589.html +14: XML. SMIL Tutorial By w3schools "SMIL is an easy-to-learn HTML-like language for describing audiovisual presentations. After you have studied this tutorial you will know what SMIL is, and how to create web based multimedia presentations which integrate audio, video, images, text or any other media type." http://www.w3schools.com/smil/default.asp Ampersands matter By Anne Van Kesteren "XML has 5 important entities that need to be encoded as in: <, &, >, ' and ". The rest of the special characters can be handled using either UTF-8 (optimal/best solution) or by using decimal or hexadecimal entities (make sure you convert Windows characters). The most made error is probably the one with & and the fact that people don't get that it is important to get it right." http://annevankesteren.nl/archives/2004/06/ampersands-matter [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.]