+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 3, Issue 02, July 08, 2004. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 02 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: DREAMWEAVER. 05: EVALUATION & TESTING. 06: EVENTS. 07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 08: JAVASCRIPT. 09: MISCELLANEOUS. 10: NAVIGATION. 11: PHP. 12: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 13: TOOLS. 14: TYPOGRAPHY. 15: USABILITY. 16: XML. SECTION TWO: 17: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. What is Tagged PDF? By Duff Johnson "In addition to content, PDF files may also include 'structure'. Structure is the term for a set of instructions that define the logic that binds the content together - the correct reading order, for example, and the presence and meaning of significant elements such as figures, lists, tables, and so on." http://www.planetpdf.com/mainpage.asp?webpageid=1269 PDF files can comply with Section 508. Now it's your move. By Duff Johnson "Problem: you host PDF files, and they are some of the most heavily downloaded files on your site. You need to make them compliant with Section 508. At the same time, you want them to deliver a good experience to the end-user, beyond formal compliance. Can it be done?" http://www.planetpdf.com/mainpage.asp?webpageid=3248 What does Section 508 mean for your PDFs? By Duff Johnson "A paragraph-by-paragraph review of the code, and it's implications for your PDF files." http://www.planetpdf.com/mainpage.asp?webpageid=3262 Tags or Scripts for Accessible Forms? By Duff Johnson "Forms pose special challenges for PDF files. Early in 2003, I asked Bryan Guignard for his view on this complex and thorny subject." http://www.planetpdf.com/mainpage.asp?webpageid=2579 Why PDF sucks By Dorothea Salo "My chief quarrel with PDF: it is a dead-end format; it as well as its inputs are utterly putrid for archival purposes. Once you have a PDF, you are not guaranteed to be able to back it out to anything useful..ItÕs simply not future proof." http://tinyurl.com/2y3be PDF vs. HTML (take two) By Christopher Phillips There were a couple of good comments on my post regarding the differences in accessibility PDF and HTML and I wanted to follow up with some more thoughts on the issue." http://tinyurl.com/2w3dd +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Strategies for Long-Term CSS Hack Management By Molly Holzschlag "Using CSS in a contemporary browser? You'll probably need to use a variety of CSS hacks to accomplish the best possible cross-browser compatibility. Molly Holzschlag helps you determine if you need hacks, how to manage them effectively if so, and which hacks you can employ to solve a range of common compatibility problems." http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=170511 Designing Data Part 2: Adding Style 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. In Part 2, we apply style to the structure of our document that we created in Part 1...." http://www.snook.ca/archives/000167.html CSSbeauty.com By Hector Alexander Giron "Cssbeauty.com is a project focused on providing its audience with a database of well designed CSS based websites from around the world. It's purpose is to showcase designers' work and to act as a small portal to the CSS design community." http://www.cssbeauty.com/ +03: COLOR. CSS: Use Shorthand Hex Colors By Andrew B. King "Shorthand hex notation abbreviates 6-character RRGGBB CSS colors into 3-character RGB shorthand." http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/hex/ +04: DREAMWEAVER. Valid Code In Dreamweaver By Justin Kozuch "In today's wild, wild Web, the catch phrases are usability, accessibility, standards-compliance, and valid code. Why is valid code so important? The sheer number of browsers out there that display the same code differently make it virtually impossible to have different versions of code for each browser. In this day and age, maintaining standardized and valid code is essential." http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=BB89C +05: EVALUATION & TESTING. 90% of All Usability Testing is Useless By Lane Becker "Ninety percent of all usability testing performed on Web sites is useless. This is not to say that it doesn't have a significant role to play in user experience design. When done right, usability testing will improve your Web site and your development process, but the current culture surrounding Web site usability testing is such that it rarely benefits the design. Worse, this misapplication can undermine the acceptance of this important technique throughout an organization." http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000328.php On Usability and Usability Testing By Matthew Oliphant "What I want is for you to think even bigger. Usability and Usability Testing should be a part of the development of a business case. Put it right smack in there with the section on Cost/Benefit. Then if the business case gets approved, and a project is funded, design with usability in mind. I find that everyone I work with on the design team, and the project team in general, buys into usability (and even usability testing) easily if I say one sentence: Just keep in mind that there are actual people who will be using what we build. Some of you are designated to take support calls, right?... My assessment of the Adaptive Path article is that you can get rid of usability testing 90% of the time if you just have good designers that design with usability in mind. Again, how do you know they are good? Just in the same way great writers aren't born, they're edited, great designers aren't born, they're usabilitied. Yes, have designers and developers and business analysts who believe in making useful, usable and satisfying products and services. But yes also test to see if you are making the products you think you are making." http://usabilityworks.typepad.com/uwdotorg/2004/06/defining_the_di.html +06: EVENTS. 7th Annual Accessing Higher Ground Conference: Assistive Technology and Accessible Media in Higher Education November 9-12, 2004 University of Colorado - Boulder Campus Boulder, Colorado, U.S.A. http://www.colorado.edu/ATconference/ +07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Out with the New! The IA Summit at Five Years By Andrew Dillon According to Andrew Dillon information architecture is no longer considered a new field. http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Jun-04/dillon.html User Experience Honeycomb By Peter Morville "For me, user experience design is a big hive: a dynamic, multi-dimensional space where there's still plenty of room to build new boxes and draw new arrows, at least for the next ten years." http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000029.php +08: JAVASCRIPT. JavaScript and Accessibility By Molly E. Holzschlag "Encouraging developers to place scripts outside of their documents and testing with a wide range of user agents is sound advice whether aiming for accessibility, security, standards compliance, or just plain good web site management." http://www.webstandards.org/buzz/archive/2004_06.html#a000367 +09: MISCELLANEOUS. Ten questions for Richard Rutter By Russ Weakley "I'm a big believer in liquid layouts. I believe liquid layout is more appropriate to a Web where known variants include screen resolution and window size. Those designing for the Web as a medium know their designs must work for any (reasonable) text size so why not any window width? I would hazard a guess that more visitors would know how to change window size than text size." http://webstandardsgroup.org/features/richard-rutter.cfm Ten questions for Molly Holzschlag By Russ Weakley "Implementing standards allows us much more opportunity to reach into the future with a solid footing beneath us, and keep the web both technically clean as well as enhancing society's ability to communicate in myriad ways without the need for much more than connectivity and a user agent of some sort." http://webstandardsgroup.org/features/molly-holzschlag.cfm Ian Hickson Interview By Craig Saila "There are so many things we could do if the dominant browser was actually being developed and followed standards." http://www.digital-web.com/articles/ian_hickson/ +10: NAVIGATION. Drop-Down Menus, Horizontal Style (A List Apart 184) By Nick Rigby "Multi-tiered drop-down menus can be a hassle to build and maintain -- especially when they rely on big, honking chunks of JavaScript. Nick Rigby presents a way to handle this common navigation element with a cleanly structured XHTML list, straightforward CSS, and only a few concessions to browser quirks." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/horizdropdowns/ Architectural Digest vs. This Old House (A List Apart 184) By Jeffery Zeldman "When web designers discuss their craft, they almost always focus on how to do a thing, rather than what things should or should not be done. As an industry, we are more like "This Old House" than Architectural Digest. This week's ALA, on a nifty semantic approach to creating drop-down menus, offers a case in point. Now, me, I hate drop-down menus. I hate them as a user. Too many choices. It's like those big laminated menus you get at a New York diner. Spaghetti, diet plate, French Toast, broiled filet of sole, pizza, ice cream sundae, Atkins menu, veggie burger.... The eyes blur. You slam the menu shut and order coffee." http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0604f.shtml#ala184 Question Time: Visited Links by Simon Collison "How should we represent the distinction between visited and unvisited links within our designs? Recently, a number of industry writers have sought to explode suggested guidelines and reassure us that it's fine to experiment, so long as we consider the end user. I consulted several established commentators, namely Andy Clarke, Jason Santa Maria, Mike Davidson, D. Keith Robinson, Cameron Moll, Derek Featherstone and Simon Willison in an attempt to consolidate these views, and reflect the broad range of methods in use today..." http://www.collylogic.com/index.php/weblog/comments/227/ +11: PHP. PHP on the Command Line - Part 1 By Harry Fuecks "Routine administration of your PHP Website is easily achieved via PHP's CLI, or command line interface. In the first installment of his two-part series, Harry looks at the fundamentals of working with the PHP command line." http://www.sitepoint.com/article/php-command-line-1 PHP Gotchas (Part 1) by Harry Fuecks "Over the next few weeks (perhaps months) will be attempting to highlight PHP 'gotchas'; things that lead to developer slow-down and *****ing, when working with PHP. In other words the types of problem which aren't obvious up front and only become clear once you've "been there". Some will be purely technical issues (PHP configuration, legacy headaches etc.) while others will be more theoretical (what "works" and what doesn't in terms of code design)." http://www.sitepoint.com/blog-post-view.php?id=176388 Handling multiple submits in a single form with PHP By builder.com guestÊcontributor "Processing form data in PHP is significantly simpler than most other Web programming languages. This simplicity and ease of use makes it possible to do some fairly complex things with forms, including multiple submit buttons in the same form." http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-5242116.html +12: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Web Standards and The Novice Editor By Tom Werner "Had the pages been constructed with web standards and CSS instead of some heinously concocted, invalid, stupor-inducing mess of tags, my poor client may have stood the chance of being the master of his own destiny. Web standards and CSS allow novice users to update content on their own. Removing the style from the HTML code allows a novice to quickly grasp the organization of the document, and helps them learn the subset of HTML that they will require to get the results they're after." http://www.mojombo.com/archives/000044.html Validation, Moderation, Constipation By Dave Shea "Designers: the coders are trying to tell you that there are ways to encode those ampersands and validate things like comments, do it with minimal time investment, and make it happen automatically. Coders: the designers are trying to tell you they don't have the skills to implement these methods and they need guidance here...What we need is to start working together...You've gone to lengths to programmatically fix improperly nested tags? Great, write it up. You have a killer PHP function for parsing out raw ampersands that can be copied and pasted into a site-wide header? Perfect, share it. You can make a bad tool better? Do it! We don't have to keep re-inventing the wheel for every new site, we can build common code bases that make validation painless and share them." http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2004/06/17/validation_m/index.php The Cost of Supporting Non-Standards By Mike Davies "Close on a year after Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer will no longer be offered as a stand-alone product, this decision has been reversed. This may be as a result of the rapid improvement of alternate browsers like Firefox, Safari and Opera. Microsoft can no longer hold back the tide of innovation as more and more people switch to these newer browsers. Not surprisingly, Internet Explorer is no longer to 'Best Product' when it comes to magazine reviews. Amongst web designers, Internet Explorer's reputation is now similar to that of Netscape 4 - non-compliant and problematical." http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/standards/CostOfSupportingNonStandards Internet Explorer Too Risky By Molly E. Holzschlag "Tired of standards woes related to IE 6.0? So are we. There's been a lot of discussion about how to handle this both at WaSP and around the Web, with some individuals taking a 'wait-and-see' stance and others suggesting an anti-IE protest. Well, if more articles hit the commercial press as hit Business Week Online today, we won't have to argue standards at all. In an article by Stephen H. Wildstrom, 'Internet Explorer Is Just Too Risky', recent as well as ongoing security concerns and their impact on the consumer are explored in brutally clear terms..." http://www.webstandards.org/buzz/archive/2004_06.html#a000366 +13: TOOLS. NVU "A complete Web Authoring System for Linux Desktop users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver. Nvu (pronounced N-view, for a 'new view') makes managing a web site a snap. Now anyone can create web pages and manage a website with no technical expertise or knowledge of HTML." This is an open collaborative project. NvuDev.org will be the main site for developers who want to get the latest version of Nvu as well as for those who want to contribute to the project. http://www.nvu.com/ XHTML Validator to RSS By Ben Hammersley "I've made a widget to create a XHTML Validation Results RSS feed from any page. To use it, just append your URL to http://www.benhammersley.com/tools/validate.cgi?url= and subscribe to that in your nearest RSS reader." http://www.benhammersley.com/tools/xhtml_validator_to_rss.html +14: TYPOGRAPHY. All you wanted to know about Web type but were afraid to ask By Joe Gillespie "Can I use any typeface I like? What fonts are safe to use? How should I specify them? Are there any alternatives? Why are some typefaces better than others for Web use? All this and more in this month's editorial." http://www.wpdfd.com/editorial/wpd0704news.htm#feature +15: USABILITY. Usability and Listening to Customers have Limits By Gerry McGovern "Listening to customers and making sure your website is usable are important to website success. It is much more important, however, to have a website that delivers real value both to the organization and the reader. Going for value can sometimes mean going against customer feedback and usability best practice." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2004/nt_2004_07_05_usability.htm +16: XML. Making the switch to XHTML By Michael Meadhra "It's been more than four years since XHTML replaced HTML 4 as the standard markup for Web documents, according to the W3C, and yet most Web builders still haven't switched to XHTML. That's a puzzling observation considering that XHTML boasts several advantages over the older HTML standard, and you can implement the new standard with only modest changes to your code." http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-5237333.html [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +17: 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 + SIGN OFF. Until next time, Laura L. Carlson Information Technology Systems and Services University of Minnesota Duluth Duluth, MN 55812-3009 mailto:lcarlson@d.umn.edu [Issue ends.]