+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 3, Issue 04, July 20, 2004. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 04 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: 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. More Web Accessibility Myths By Trenton Moss "With more and more countries around the world passing laws about blind and disabled access to the Internet (including the Disability Discrimination Act in the UK), web accessibility has been thrown into the spotlight of the online community. This article attempts to put a stop to the misinformation that has been thrown around and tell you the truth behind web accessibility." http://www.dmeurope.com/default.asp?from=f&ArticleID=2311 PDF vs. HTML By WebAIM Forum "Since the requirements for creating an accessible PDF document closely mirror the requirements for accessible HTML 'conversion', the effort required is approximately equal. However, one is a proprietary format, the other is an 'open' and public format. One requires a 'free' downloadable 'plugin or stand alone app', the other displays natively in all HTML browsers including text only browsers and older versions of browsers - no need to upgrade to the latest version (not that I advocate *NOT* upgrading whenever appropriate and possible). However, this point alone makes HTML inherently more accessible." http://www.webaim.org/discussion/mail_archive.php?sort_by=2&from=0 PDF tagging for the blind By electricnews.net "A new online service will supply automatic tagging for PDF documents to make them easier for blind and visually impaired readers to understand." http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/11/pdf_tags_blind/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Raise text relevance by rearranging a three-column layout By Michael Meadhra "Michael Meadhra demonstrates how to build on the basic technique for creating a three-column liquid layout by adding a wrapper div surrounding the divs for the three columns." http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-5259882.html Bulletproof Slants By Dan Cederholm "Keeping in mind my bulletproof yearnings, to create slant-separated navigation, I found a simple solution that fulfills the fast, flexible and accessible criteria. The solution requires just a single, small GIF image that will be used as a background for each navigation link..." http://www.simplebits.com/notebook/2004/07/12/bulletproof_slants.html The Practice of CSS Column Design: Boxes in Columns By John Gallant and Holly Bergevin "This tutorial expands our discussion about making accessible layouts using divs for basic page construction blocks. Using CSS, we'll show how to build a column of separate bordered boxes, each with a colored header, similar those currently in use on the CMX main page (as of July, 2004). We'll also discuss collapsing and escaping margins, and a few other things to look out for on our way to some nicely styled Bordered Boxes." http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=CB7B3 Floats Don't Suck If You Use Them Right By Eric A. Meyer "...float was never meant as a layout tool. I summarized the history of floats in the article Containing Floats, but the short version is that floats are not supposed to be a design tool. They're simply meant to take an element, put it to one side, and let other content flow around it. That is all..." http://tinyurl.com/5lhab Competent Classing By Eric A. Meyer "The first recommendation I had was to use classes and IDs in conjunction. Not everyone is aware that an element can carry both a class and an ID. Well, they can." http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2004/07/18/competent-classing/ +03: COLOR. Hypermedic Color Pages By Frank Boumphrey This color theory site expands on classic print color theory to include the digital and web design. http://www.hypermedic.com/color/index.php +04: DREAMWEAVER. Dreamweaver MX 2004 Extensions By Jen deHaan "In this chapter we will: Look at the Macromedia Extension Manager and how it is used it to install, disable, and remove extensions, and package new extensions we have written ready for distribution; Showcase a couple of the most popular extensions the Yaromat Check Form extension, and the Massimocorner CF Upload extension; Learn how to use the Dreamweaver Server Behavior Builder to build a CFML form mailer..." http://tinyurl.com/4mjul +05: EVALUATION & TESTING. Internet Explorer - Where are Users Going? By Shirley Kaiser "It's no surprise then that I recommend developing sites based on the latest W3C Recommendations, including supporting a wide range of browsers and alternative devices. My own routine includes first testing with browsers that have the best CSS support, followed by testing with browsers with less CSS support. That means I typically initially test with Opera and Mozilla since they provide the best CSS support right now. Once everything is fine, I then test using Internet Explorer 6, followed by Netscape 4, Lynx, speech recognition software, keyboarding only, and final testing using Browsercam. I take this browser testing order approach because of IE not following some of W3C's CSS Recommendations. I've had far fewer cross-browser, cross-platform problems with this approach than if I test with IE first." http://brainstormsandraves.com/archives/2004/07/18/ie6/ +06: EVENTS. Conference: Is IT Accessible? September 9, 2004 University College Northamption Northampton, United Kingdom http://oldweb.northampton.ac.uk/it_services/conference/index.htm +07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Card Sorting: How Many Users to Test By Jakob Nielsen "Testing ever-more users in card sorting has diminishing returns, but you should still use three times more participants than you would in traditional usability tests." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040719.html Nielsen on card sorting By Donna Maurer "You could hardly expect me not to comment on Jakob Nielsen's alertbox on card sorting...a card sort is not a 'test' so the language of 'testing' users confuses the issues of generative and evaluative activities...I truly don't believe that users have a mental model of an information space. A card sort doesn't elicit this model - it just gets some ideas of what things people think are similar...I can't tell whether the number of users is in reference to individual sorts or group sorts..." http://www.maadmob.net/donna/blog/archives/000568.html Are Useful Requirements Just A Fairy Tale? (and why an IA should care) By Dan Willis "In the culture of the other worlds, people didn't really believe in requirements so much as they agreed to accept that requirements, in fact, might exist." http://tinyurl.com/4umpf Scalability vs Performance By Drew McLellan "When designing the architecture for a web application, it is normally desirable to design every aspect of the system to be as scalable as possible. It's only too often that badly designed apps have need to be completely refactored before any further development work can be done, entirely due to an unscalable architecture. If the app hasn't been designed with an attitude of what if we wanted to ?? then adding a dot-dot-dot six months down the line can be a massive undertaking with needless slaughtering of otherwise good code." http://allinthehead.com/retro/213/ +08: JAVASCRIPT. Trimming Form Fields By Andy Clarke This article explains how to remove unrequired form fields using Javascript, the DOM and CSS. http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/archives/trimming_form_fields.html +09: MISCELLANEOUS. Tim Berners-Lee, Inventor of the World Wide Web, Knighted by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II By W3C "Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web and Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was dubbed a Knight Commander, Order of the British Empire (KBE) by Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II during an Investiture in London on Friday, 16 July 2004. The rank of Knight Commander is the second most senior rank of the Order of the British Empire, one of the Orders of Chivalry..." http://www.w3.org/2004/07/timbl_knighted Victor Lombardi: The InfoDesign profile By Peter J. Bogaards "Victor Lombardi is actively participating in the fields of information architecture and interaction design. He co-founded and served on the board of the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture. He slaved away as designer for a number of companies, most notably four years at Razorfish. All this while teaching at the Parsons School of Design. He also led the information architecture practice at a global financial services company. Noise Between Stations is Victor's personal website." http://www.informationdesign.org/special/lombardi_profile.php Muddling Through By Kirk Biglione "We can't control how our users use the Internet, but we can control our own processes. As our jobs become more complex it makes good sense to do whatever we can to minimize our own muddling. We'll likely make our users lives easier in the process." http://www.alttags.org/archives/2004/06/29/37/ +10: PHP. PHP 5 "The PHP team is proud to announce the final release of PHP 5!" http://www.php.net/downloads.php#v5 Why PHP 5 Rocks! By Adam Trachtenberg This is a quick tour around PHP 5 http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/php/2004/07/15/UpgradePHP5.html High Performance, High Scalability PHP is a Lie By John Lim "...most web technologies that are popular today are scalable with good performance (perl, php, c, python, asp, java, cold fusion). But to achieve high performance and scalability is not easy - it won't happen just by running a software installer - you need talented people to achieve it. And the truth is not everyone is Spartacus." http://phplens.com/phpeverywhere/?q=node/view/55 Smarter Image Hotlinking Prevention By Thomas Scott Learn how to prevent bandwidth theft with PHP and mod_rewrite. http://alistapart.com/articles/hotlinking/ +11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Validation: CSS and HTML (Quick Tutorial) By Maxine Sherrin "If your HTML is not valid, or you use syntax in your CSS which is not correct, then you have a much greater chance that your style sheet based web pages won't work. This final section looks at the process of validating and checking our HTML and CSS code." http://www.westciv.com/style_master/house/tutorials/quick/validation/ AllMusicGuide: A Web Standards case study By Simon Willison "I'm calling this entry a case study, because AMG's new design is a case study in how not to handle a redesign in 2004." http://www.sitepoint.com/blog-post-view.php?id=181192 Dashboard Again By Eric A. Meyer "It seems that both Tim and Ian felt that creating a new DOCTYPE was a poor idea; one reason was that it would mean recreating the entirety of HTML in DashboardML, with elements bearing the same name and given (presumably) the same semantics. I donŐt really see why that's a problem, since it's already been done once before, for a little number we call XHTML." http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2004/07/15/dashboard-again/ +12: TOOLS. Net-guide.co.uk By David Poehlman This is a beta search engine that gives an accessibility rating for the websites returned for any query entered. http://www.net-guide.co.uk/ +13: USABILITY. Reading Online Text: A Comparison of Four White Space Layouts By B. Chaparro, J.R. Baker, A.D. Shaikh, S. Hull, and L. Brady "In this study, reading performance with four white space layouts was compared. Margins surrounding the text and leading (space between lines) were manipulated to generate the four white space conditions. Results show that the use of margins affected both reading speed and comprehension in that participants read the Margin text slower, but comprehended more than the No Margin text. Participants were also generally more satisfied with the text with margins. Leading was not shown to impact reading performance but did influence overall user preference." http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/62/whitespace.htm The Effects of Contrast and Density on Visual Web Search By D. Weller "This study evaluated the effects of white space on visual search time.Ę Participants were required to search for a target word on a web page with different levels of white space, measured by level of text density. Screens were formatted with one of four types of graphical manipulation, including: no graphics, contrast, borders and contrast with borders under two levels of overall density and three levels of local density. Results show that search times were longer with increased overall density but significant differences were not found between levels of local density. Only the use of contrast was found to be significant, resulting in an increase in search time." http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/62/density.htm The Web: Inside the bubble was a revolution By Gerry McGovern I know of numerous organizations that allocate the creation and management of content to the most junior resource they can find...If written well, content can be a critical asset that will increase productivity, profitability, staff and customer loyalty. Done badly it can undermine all these things. Content requires serious attention from senior management and it is not getting that attention, except in organizations that have truly embraced the Web... http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2004/nt_2004_07_12_web.htm New Thinking challenges Usability By Ann Light "All these months I've been covering the McGovern column because he usually takes an interesting perspective on design. It's sad to have to take issue with his ideas. Usability... fancy? Perhaps, like Nielsen, other people can have a column so long that providing content gets grueling and standards slip." http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article1802.asp Brand Value and the User Experience By Kelly Goto "A positive user experience is an end-user?s successful and streamlined completion of a desired task." http://digital-web.com/articles/brand_value_and_the_user_experience/ Nielsen: It's Time for a Redesign By Brad Wieners "After making his name as a champion of minimal, easy-to-use Web design, Danish-born Dr. Jakob Nielsen believes companies can achieve 1,000 percent ROI simply by making their intranets more effective." http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1619954,00.asp +14: XML. Atom and RSS: What Next? By Jason Cook "Site syndication is delicious, but it's even better when served up with the works. Jason holds the pickles and digs into advanced RSS." http://webmonkey.wired.com/webmonkey/04/28/index4a.html?tw=authoring Prepare for the transition from HTML forms to XForms By Tony Patton "XForms are an XML-based replacement for conventional HTML Web forms. Learn about the basic elements of XForms and see how to implement them in a standard Web form." http://www.builderau.com.au/program/web/0,39024632,20276682,00.htm WHAT Working Group Issues Call For Comments on Web Forms 2.0. By XML Cover Pages A draft specification for Web Forms 2.0 has been released by members of the Web Hypertext Application Technology (WHAT) Working Group. http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2004-07-07-a.html [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 + 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.]