+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 3, Issue 03, July 16, 2004.
An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development.
++ISSUE 03 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: FLASH.
07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
08: JAVASCRIPT.
09: MISCELLANEOUS.
10: NAVIGATION.
11: PHP.
12: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
13: TOOLS.
14: USABILITY.
15: XML.
SECTION TWO:
16: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site?
[Contents ends.]
++ SECTION ONE: New references.
+01: ACCESSIBILITY.
Is accessible web design a cost or a benefit for clients?
By Jim Byrne
"Members of the Guild of Accessible Web Designers consider whether accessible web design is a cost or a benefit for clients."
http://www.gawds.org/showquestionanswers.php?questionid=7
10 Accessibility Blunders of the Big Players
By Trenton Moss
"Web accessibility is about making your Website accessible to all Internet users (both disabled and non-disabled), regardless of what browsing technology they're using. More and more countries have passed laws stating that Websites must be accessible to blind and disabled people. With this kind of legal pressure, and the many benefits of accessibility, the big players on the Web must surely have accessible Websites, right? Let's find out..."
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/blunders-big-player-2
Contradictions in Accessibility - Hidden Information
By Derek Featherstone
"Many of the techniques we employ as developers to make our web sites more accessible result in hidden information that may only make them more accessible to a small portion of users rather than more accessible to everyone."
http://www.wats.ca/articles/hiddeninformation/63
On 'separate but equal' design
By Matt May
"It seems a lot of Web designers are trying to buy their way out of good design again. I've had a number of people ask me recently not how to create an accessible Web site...This is wrong. Do not do this."
http://www.bestkungfu.com/?p=507
+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.
Why CSS styling is for tables too
By Michael Meadhra
"Even when designers use HTML tables appropriately, the table tags traditionally include a lot of inline formatting attributes to specify column widths, cell borders, cell padding, background colors, and more. This is the opposite of the recommended practice of separating presentation styling from structural markup. However, you don't have to stick with the traditional practice of embedding formatting attributes in the table markup. Instead, you can replace almost all the inline attributes of the table tags with CSS styling."
http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-5244791.html
Structural Naming
By Eric A. Meyer
"Conventions and ground rules exist for a reason: to provide a lower barrier to entry, and to help guide those new to the field. Once you become experienced, you can break the rules in creative ways."
http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2004/06/26/structural-naming/
+03: DREAMWEAVER.
Introducing Dreamweaver
By Costas Hadjisotiriou
"Get familiar with the Dreamweaver workspace, its document window, property inspector, common tab and ASP.NET tab and the grouped panels. (This is chapter 1 from the book ASP.NET Web Development with Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004.)"
http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/HTML/Introducing-Dreamweaver/
+04: EVALUATION & TESTING.
Restoring Confidence in Usability Results
By Jeff Sauro
"Adding confidence intervals to completion rates in usability tests will temper both excessive skepticism and overstated usability findings. Confidence intervals make testing more efficient by quickly revealing unusable tasks with very small samples. Examples are detailed and downloadable calculators are available.
http://www.measuringusability.com/conf_intervals.htm
+05: EVENTS.
Introductory Usability Testing
September 1, 2004
Melbourne, Australia
http://www.steptwo.com.au/seminars/040901/index.html
06: FLASH.
How to hide a flash movie from screen readers and keyboard users
By Jim Byrne
"Adding a Flash movie to your web page may be making the content of that page inaccessible to some visitors. For example, Keyboard users and people using screen reader users are likely to run into the following problems..."
http://www.mcu.org.uk/show.php?contentid=94
+07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
GoLive - the interaction designer's hammer and nail
Prototyping with Adobe GoLive
By Henrik Olsen
"If Visio is the interaction designers nail gun, GoLive is hammer and nails. But if you are going to run a usability test on a prototype, your might consider surrendering to a HTML editor. A HTML prototype is more consistent with the final web site than prototypes build with a non-HTML tool. In a usability test, a HTML prototype can facilitate a smoother flow, enable us to test more details, and reduce false assumptions about usability problems caused by the prototype."
http://www.guuui.com/issues/03_04.php
+08: JAVASCRIPT.
JavaScript: accessible or not?
By Bruce Lawson
"But the worst, very worst aspect is the use of pop-up windows that are triggered by a JavaScript onclick with no provision to degrade to a good old-fashioned href if those naughty customers fail to have exactly the same browser set-up as the designer. It makes those links completely inaccessible to users of screenreaders, or PDAs or mobile phones. This is a major sin."
http://brucelawson.co.uk/index.htm#accessiblity
+09: MISCELLANEOUS.
Drew McLellan Interview
By zlog
"...For semantics to be worthwhile on a site at the present time they need to be backed up by a strong public standard. Standards such as XHTML are designed to offer semantic meaning to the data too, so if you're using the standard as designed then you get the semantics thrown in cheap...The point of adhering to a standard such as XHTML is that the document can then be understood by anything which consumes XHTML. If the elements aren't used as specified, then no matter what the validator says, the document hasn't achieved that goal..."
http://zlog.co.uk/features/interviews/drew_mclellan/
The 5 Pitfalls of Estimating a Software Project
By Christopher Hawkins
"It took me 6 years to learn how to produce an estimate that accurate, however, and along the way I've noticed a set of behaviors that always lead to blown estimates and broken budgets. Avoiding these pitfalls will put any organization on the road to more accurate estimating, happier clients, and profitable projects."
http://www.christopherhawkins.com/06-01-2004.htm
+10: NAVIGATION.
Should visited links get distinctive styling?
By Michael Meadhra
"When your navigation links are obviously and unequivocally identified by their context, you can safely abandon the usual stylistic clues that identify links in body text. Instead, you can concentrate on developing a separate style scheme that makes sense for those navigation links. When styling navigation elements, a good rollover effect (hover state) helps to reinforce the identity of the links as interactive elements. A different style for visited links in a navigation bar doesn't seem necessary or even desirable in most circumstances, but a separate treatment for the link to the current page (a You Are Here button) can help orient visitors to their current location in the site."
http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-5224846.html
+11: PHP.
Dynamic CSS with PHP
By Timothy Boronczyk
"The more I thought about it the more I began to see some of the benefits of generating style sheets with PHP. It can help keep related styles together in one document as opposed to having separate files for various browsers and JavaScript can be used on the client side to pass values back to the server so a custom style sheet can be created. In this tutorial I'll explain each of these options."
http://codewalkers.com/tutorials/75/1.html
+12: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
5 questions to ask your web development team
By John Allsopp
"As a client or manager responsible for a web development project you don't need to know anything about how a standards based web site is created. However you do need to know that your project is addressing these five important issues."
http://www.westciv.com/style_master/house/good_oil/5_questions/
!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Unrestricted
By Cameron Adams
"The goal of Web Standards is to make them invisible, display no differently than tables or a quagmire of presentational tags. So it's our duty to design well and Standardize later."
http://www.themaninblue.com/writing/perspective/2004/07/02/
Safari Extensions
By Anders Pearson
"Dave Hyatt and the Safari team have been busy lately adding support for a number of extensions to html to be used by the upcoming Safari RSS reader and Dashboard. On the list is IE's contenteditable, along with a slider widget, search fields, a composite attribute on the ![]()
element, and a new