+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 3, Issue 08, August 11, 2004. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 08 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: ASSOCIATIONS. 03: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. 04: DREAMWEAVER. 05: EVALUATION & TESTING. 06: EVENTS. 07: FLASH. 08: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 09: JAVASCRIPT. 00: MISCELLANEOUS. 11: NAVIGATION. 12: PHP. 13: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 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. Three Things I Learned About Screen Reader Users By Joshua Kaufman "1. No one that I observed used the access keys that I specified in the main navigation... 2. ...make sure most major screen readers can read your skip navigation link... 3. ...If you have a form on your website with descriptive text in the middle of a form, such as a heading or paragraph, my recommendation is to do one of two things. Either explicitly label each control so that itÕs completely understandable when taken out of context...Or split the form between two pages so that itÕs more easily understood by screen reader users." http://unraveled.com/archives/2004/08/screen-readers Why Accessibility is Important to You By John S. Britsios According to Usablenet.com, accessibility and usability are becoming increasingly critical to the internet experience. Is your site accessible to people with disabilities? Is it compatible with browsers other than Internet Explorer? Continue reading to discover how accessibility can benefit you, as well as your visitors." http://www.webnauts.net/accessibility.html +02: ASSOCIATIONS. The Interaction Design Group (IxDG) "IxDG is an international community of people who are practicing, teaching, and studying interaction design." http://www.ixdg.org/ +03: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Curing Float Drops and Wraps By Zoe Gillenwater "Floats are a great way to create layouts with multiple ÒcolumnsÓ: they allow blocks to be taken out of the normal flow, where they would just be stacked top to bottom, and positioned beside each other instead. Unfortunately, however, you'll occasionally run into a situation where one block drops down below the other one instead of sitting side-by-side as you anticipated. This is commonly referred to as a Òfloat drop." http://nemesis1.f2o.org/aarchive?id=11 CSS - Auto-height and margin-collapsing By Minz Meyer A good explanation of margin collapse. http://tinyurl.com/4hkwv Common DTDs By css-discuss Wiki http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=DocType +04: DREAMWEAVER. Web Standards in Dreamweaver, Part 1 By Rachel Andrew and Kevin Marshall "The first half of this chapter focuses on the use of XHTML and CSS when working in Dreamweaver. Discover why developing in XHTML instead of HTML is a good idea and how to start working in valid XHTML Transitional. Some basics of CSS design are also covered. (From the book 'ASP.NET Web Development with Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004'." http://tinyurl.com/3rzck +05: EVALUATION & TESTING. Honest Appraisal Shows That Asking Users May Give Misleading Results By Ann Light "...it does reinforce one's doubts about self-administered questionnaires - users do not necessarily know what they are talking about." http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article1764.asp +06: EVENTS. ACM Special Interest Group on University and College Computing Services (ACM SIGUCCS) October 10-13, 2004 Baltimore, Maryland U.S.A. http://www.acm.org/sigs/siguccs/Conference/Fall2004/index.htm +07: FLASH. Simple Text Navigation By Bob Regan "One of the most basic uses of Flash is to create a simple text navigation bars...When you are evaluating a simple text navigation bar, there just a couple of things you want to check. First, you want to be sure you can tab to every button in the navigation bar....Second, you need to check with a screen reader." http://www.markme.com/accessibility/archives/005768.cfm +08: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Yet More Thoughts on Global Information Architecture By Louis Rosenfeld Lou discusses some global IA issues encountered when designing sites. http://louisrosenfeld.com/home/bloug_archive/000280.html Planning for redesign, 1: Establishing the context By Adam Greenfield "So just as I recommend my clients do, I'm undertaking an exploration of how the site is currently failing to meet my goals for it, and all those ways in which it might reach, exceed, or outright demolish those goals in the next version." http://www.v-2.org/displayArticle.php?article_num=780 +09: JAVASCRIPT. Why document.write() doesn't work in XML By Ian Hickson "Several people recently asked me why their scripts, which worked fine when they were using HTML, stopped working when they started using XHTML (and actually sent their markup with an XHTML MIME type)...So in order to remain compliant with XML, document.write() doesn't work on documents that are parsed with an XML parser...So in order to remain compliant with XML, document.write() doesn't work on documents that are parsed with an XML parser. http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1091626816&count=1 +10: MISCELLANEOUS. Thomas Vander Wal: The InfoDesign profile By Peter J. Bogaards "Learn everything you can from those that have gone before you. Learn to tear apart as well as defend everything you do. Test everything known and assumed. Learn where things break and why. Spend time with people that don't get it and understand why they do not get it." http://www.informationdesign.org/special/vanderwal_profile.php Interview: Rasmus Lerdorf, PHP Guru By Robert Adkins and Mayank Sharma "Robert Adkins and LFY's associate editor Mayank Sharma talked with Rasmus Lerdorf over breakfast while attending Linux Bangalore 2003. Rasmus currently works for Yahoo in Silicon Valley having great fun as their resident PHP expert." http://www.technetra.com/Writings/recent/interview_lerdorf_html/view +11: NAVIGATION. Adaptive Menu Design By Kath Straub "80% of usability is Navigation. That's what the gurus tell us. If you get the navigation right it seems almost guaranteed that users will be able to find what they are looking for on your application or site...But getting the navigation right is not that easy. Several layers of design factor into effective menu systems." http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/jul04.asp#susan +12: PHP. PHP Trouble By Noel Davis "Welcome to Security Alerts, an overview of recent Unix and open source security advisories. In this column, we look at problems in PHP, Samba, mod_ssl, HP-UX's xfs and stmkfont, Ethereal, l2tpd, Domino, APC PowerChute Business Edition, Webmin, and Lexmark network printers." http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/07/26/insecurities.html PHP 5: A Sign that PHP Could Soon be Owned by Sun By Ian Felton "PHP 5's official release occurred on July 13th with a complete re-haul of object-oriented programming features and improved MySQL functions. These are sure to be great additions to the package for PHP developers. However, many of the changes to PHP are hinting to something that may not necessarily be something PHP developers will like down the road..." http://tinyurl.com/4v4p8 +13: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Design sites do Web standards. Or rather, they don't do Web standards, either. By Joe Clark "In essence, design sites are about as informative as those failed old portal sites were...Not according to batch testing. My esteemed colleague Bryce Johnson ran a few dozen sites through the CSE validator, and none of them passed..." http://blog.fawny.org/2004/07/28/design/ Working Draft: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 By W3C "The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group has released an updated Working Draft for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. Version 2.0 widens the range of technologies covered and simplifies wording." http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-WCAG20-20040730/ +14: TYPOGRAPHY. Readability By Ben Hunt "Everyone benefits from clear, readable text content. People with visual impairments benefit particularly." http://scratchmedia.co.uk/readability.cfm +15: USABILITY. Fixed or fluid, you decide By Andy Clarke "In a recent conversation with Swedish web accessibility advocate Tommy Olsson, Tommy impressed on me again the importance of fluid, rather than the more commonly used fixed-width design techniques that I and so many others designers favour." http://tinyurl.com/5cvn9 Fixed vs Liquid vs Elastic By Tommy Olsson "The question about fixed-width, liquid or elastic design has been debated for a long time. Which one is best? Is any of those more or less accessible than any of the others? Let's begin by defining what the terms mean in the first place." http://tinyurl.com/4as7v Why Usability is Important to You By John S. Britsios http://www.webnauts.net/usability.html +16: XML. Behind the Scenes with XHTML By Lee Underwood "In a previous article, we quickly touched on the requirements for proper XHTML coding, especially in relation to HTML 4.01. In this article, we'll take a closer look at what some of those requirements are in relation to the head portion of the Web page. This is the portion of the document that the user agent (i.e., browser) will read first. It's important that it doesn't stumble here. Remember, our goal is to develop standards-based Web pages..." http://www.webreference.com/authoring/xhtml/coding/ Seven Deadly Markup Sins By Molly Holzschlag "By looking at what we're doing wrong and how to do it right, we can quickly address poor markup practices and create more compliant documents." http://www.informit.com/articles/printerfriendly.asp?p=170512 [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.]