+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 3, Issue 12, September 2, 2004. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 12 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: COLOR. 05: EVENTS. 06: FLASH. 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. Travel sites settle New York accessibility investigation By Out-law.com "The operators of Ramada.com and Priceline.com have undertaken to pay $77,500 and to improve their web sites' accessibility to settle an investigation by New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer that contradicts a federal court ruling of 2002." http://tinyurl.com/45m3m Text-Only Versions By Tommy Olsson "Advertisements for products that automatically creates an accessible version of a web site are abundant. No one seems to reflect upon the fact that such a product is impossible. These products create a text-only version of a web page, any web page. Okay, we can understand that. No problem. But then the marketing people claim that this text-only version is automatically accessible..." http://www.autisticcuckoo.net/archive.php?id=2004/08/17/text-only Web Standards: User Interface Makeovers By David Travis "When running our training course on web accessibility, we often come across the misperception that an accessible site means an ugly site. In fact, by following standards, designers can create virtually any visual design yet still make it accessible. What's more, these designs work in all modern browsers and on all platforms - and will continue to work in future browsers, including mobile devices. Just to prove it, our associate Trevor Morris carried out makeovers of nokia.com and vodafone.co.uk. Neither site met even the minimum levels of accessibility before he started. Once he had finished, both sites were 'AAA' accessible." http://www.userfocus.co.uk/articles/makeovers.html +02: ASSOCIATIONS. Usability and Accessibility Working Group (UA-WG) "Aiming to devise practical initiatives to remedy social exclusion from the Internet, the UA-WG has attracted scientists, academics, and industry professionals. The basic goals of the group are to raise awareness of problems and issues, promote best practice accessibility and usability and endorse the Accessibility Accreditation Scheme." http://www.ua-wg.org/ +03: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Stylegala By Stylegala.com "Stylegala is an online resource and inspiration guide for web agencies, designers and developers who takes interest in websites built with web standards and CSS as primary tools." http://stylegala.com/ +04: COLOR. Designers vs. The Real World: Favorite color By Cameron Adams Cameron Adams doing a survey that he hopes will settle the dispute about whether designers are really any different non-designers. http://www.themaninblue.com/writing/perspective/2004/08/30/ +05: EVENTS. Online Information November 30 - December 2, 2004 London, England http://www.online-information.co.uk/ CHI 2005 April 2-7, 2005 Portland, Oregon U.S.A. http://www.chi2005.org/ +06: FLASH. Introducing sIFR: The Healthy Alternative to Browser Text By Mike Davidson "With todayÕs release of sIFR, or Scalable Inman Flash Replacement, we finally have a standards-compliant way to deliver rich typographical text in a flexible manner to over 90% of web users. What is this all about, you ask?..." http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2004/08/sifr +07: JAVASCRIPT. The History of JavaScript and Databases By Jacques Surveyor "JavaScript and databases have a mixed history, due in part to JavaScript's success. But Web security provisions restricts the ability of a Web program to read (and write) local files. Here are some options to change that." http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/j_s/column9/ +08: MISCELLANEOUS. Websites: easy to start, hard to manage By Gerry McGovern "One of the biggest problems websites face is that they lack proper planning in the design and development phase. Generally, the design of the website tends to overreach, in that what is built requires more staff to professionally manage than are available." http://tinyurl.com/5s98z +09: NAVIGATION. Navigation Stress Test By Keith Instone "The idea behind my navigation stress test is to ask some really hard questions about your web site navigation to see if it can 'pass'. It is called a "stress test" because most pages will not pass. The failures may be serious, or they may not matter at all, but at least by performing the test you will have discussed the navigation issues and made conscious design decisions." http://user-experience.org/uefiles/navstress/ +10: PHP. PHP Debugging Basics By David Sklar "If you've got problems with your PHP programs, this article by David Sklar offers techniques to help you find and fix them: locate basic syntax errors, check the values of variables as your program is running, and make the PHP interpreter report the errors that interest you." http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/php/2004/08/12/DebuggingPHP.html PHP Form Handling By David Sklar "If your PHP program is a dynamic web page (and it probably is) and your PHP program is dealing with user input (and it probably is), then you need to work with HTML forms. Here are some tips for simplifying, securing, and organizing your form-handling PHP code." http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/php/2004/08/26/PHPformhandling.html +11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Web Development Mistakes By Roger Johansson "HereÕs a list, in no particular order, of some of the most common mistakes that even experienced web professionals tend to make..." http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200408/web_development_mistakes/ Unpractical Specifications By Anne van Kesteren "I think the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) doesn't lead the web to it's full potential, but rather leads it into the world of complex languages that are device specific..." http://annevankesteren.nl/archives/2004/08/specifications +12: TOOLS. Tidy Service By Scott Ahten "Tidy Service is a simple OS X Service that cleans up markup using the popular HTML Tidy library originally created by Dave Raggett." http://www.pixelfreak.net/tidy_service/ +13: USABILITY. Mastery, Mystery, and Misery: The Ideologies of Web Design By Jakob Nielsen "Simple, unobtrusive designs that support users are successful because they abide by the Web's nature -- and they make people feel good." http://useit.com/alertbox/20040830.html +14: XML. Web Forms By Dan Cederholm "LetÕs take a look at four different ways to mark up the same, simple formÑall of which achieve similar results. We'll go over each method and talk about the pros and cons that are involved. (From the book Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook".) http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/Web-Design-Standards/Web-Forms/ [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.]