+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 3, Issue 16, September 30, 2004. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 16 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: EVENTS. 05: FLASH. 06: JAVASCRIPT. 07: MISCELLANEOUS. 08: PHP. 09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 10: TOOLS. 11: USABILITY. 12: XML. SECTION TWO: 13: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Sites Slowly Seeing the Need to Make the Web Accessible to the Blind By Mark Thompson "Navigating the Internet with software that dictates text can be an obstacle course. But some enterprising news sites are designing their sites with blind readers in mind -- and finding it's easier than they expected, and it hardly costs a thing." http://ojr.org/ojr/technology/1071101847.php Writing an Accessibility Statement By Lorna Gibso "An accessibility statement makes a good addition to all web sites. It is a place to demonstrate that you are taking accessibility seriously and also provides extra information for visitors to your site - particularly disabled people who need to know about the accessibility of the information and services you provide." http://tinyurl.com/6edhz Introduction to Device Independence By Peter Mikhalenko "The goal of the Device Independence Activity is to develop ways for future web content and applications to be authored, generated, or adapted for a better user experience when delivered via many device types." http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/09/22/di.html ADA Web appeal knocked back again By Raena Armitage "I'm well aware that for every bit of good the ADA has done, there have been many frivolous and stupid decisions Ð but this is ridiculous. Why is there even a question of whether a Web site should be accessible to the disabled? And why should it take a lawsuit for companies like Southwest to understand the inherent usefulness of providing Web accessibility? TodayÕs technology offers great opportunities for the disabled to access information easily and simply, particularly the blind. Instead of having to go out of oneÕs way to ask for large print, embossed or spoken word material, a blind user can just access that information on the Web Ð if the siteÕs Web master has bothered to make that possible." http://blog.raena.net/entries/2004/09/28/ada-appeal/ ADA doesn't extend to the Internet By Eric Bangeman "The court dismissed the appeal on largely procedural grounds, finding that the plaintiffs changed tack on their appeal to the Circuit Court..." http://arstechnica.com/news/posts/20040927-4238.html No decision from the Appeals Court By Jim Thatcher "This case, from a Florida District Court alleged that Southwest.com, being inaccessible, violated the ADA - because they held, Southwest.com was a place of public accommodation and therefore fell under Title III of the ADA. This decision of the Appellate Court offers nothing new. On appeal, the case was made that Southwest.com was a 'travel service' and thus subject to ADA. The appellate brief and oral arguments didn't even allege that Southwest.com is a place of public accommodation. The Appellate court ruled on neither issue. They didn't rule on the travel service idea because that was not raised in the District Court. They didn't rule on the public accommodation issue because the appeal didn't raise that issue. They dismissed the appeal on procedural grounds and did not consider the question of 'public accommodation'." http://www.webaim.org/discussion/mail_message.php?id=5127 +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. CSS Properties By Patrick Griffiths "...a comprehensive index to of all of the valid properties belonging to the latest standard of CSS." http://htmldog.com/reference/cssproperties/ CSS Standards By Christian Heilmann "For my developers here I defined some loose standards as to how to approach CSS..." http://www.onlinetools.org/articles/cssguides.html Do You Want To Do That With CSS? Centering a Wrapper By John Gallant and Holly Bergevin "This article will deal with one of the most basic problems encountered when developing a tableless design, namely getting a fixed width "page wrapper" element to center at all window resolutions and in all modern browsers. We'll review what a wrapper is, explain how to center it, and then discuss how to get IE5.x/Win browsers to cooperate. Finally, we'll touch on a little Gecko-based problem with the method, and ways to overcome that, as well." http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=A8BBA Flowing a List Across Multiple Columns By Paul Novitski "The list below is a single structure. Each item is given a unique class name 'item1', 'item2', etc. In the stylesheet, all of the items in a single column are given the same margin-left. Items that begin a new column (in this example, item6 and item11) are given a negative margin-top sufficient to bring them back up to the vertical position of item1. Normal document flow does the rest." http://novitskisoftware.com/test/multiplecolumnsEms.html Multiple Column Lists By Zoe M. Gillenwater "If you want to split a single list across multiple columns, you have a number of options without having to resort to breaking it into multiple separate lists." http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=MultipleColumnLists Styling Form Controls By Roger Johansson "A question that is frequently asked in forums like the css-discuss mailing list is how to style form controls in a consistent way across platforms. Most of the time, the question is asked by someone who has just tried to do that, and noticed the difference in rendering across browsers and operating systems." http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200409/styling_form_controls/ +03: DREAMWEAVER. Accessibility Features of Dreamweaver MX and MX 2004 By Jared Smith "Dreamweaver MX, developed by Macromedia, is one of the most popular and powerful Web development applications available today. Macromedia has greatly improved the accessibility features of Dreamweaver MX over previous versions. MX and MX 2004 now allow developers to be prompted when inserting certain Web elements that may need accessibility attributes added to them. Dreamweaver includes many new tools, features, and reference materials to help developers in developing accessible Web content." http://webaim.org/techniques/dreamweaver/ Building a Blog in Dreamweaver with PHP and MySQL Part 1: Creating the Basic Application By Marius Zaharia "This article is the first of a series of six tutorials that will guide you through building a complex blog using Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 within the PHP MySQL development environment. You can build this blog on either a Windows/IIS, Mac/Apache, or Linux/Apache development platform." http://tinyurl.com/4ype8 Building a Blog in Dreamweaver with PHP and MySQL Part 2: Creating an Administration Section By Marius Zaharia "In this article, you learn how to: implement user authentication for your blog; restrict access to the administration section; add new topics using an insert record form; delete articles using a delete record server behavior; and edit topics and articles using update record forms." http://tinyurl.com/56dos +04: EVENTS. Second Annual Usability and Accessibility Conference October 26-27, 2004 East Lansing, Michigan, U.S.A. http://usability.msu.edu/conf/index.html Web Design: The First Decade January 21-22, 2005 Amsterdam, The Netherlands http://www.decadeofwebdesign.org/ +05: FLASH. Getting Designers to do Flash Accessibility By Bob Regan "When kicking off a project, here is how I handle accessibility and Flash..." http://www.markme.com/accessibility/archives/006069.cfm +06: JAVASCRIPT. OOP in JavaScript By Sergey Zavadski "The article by Sergey Zavadski introduces the object model of the JavaScript programming language and demonstrates common practices in the OOP (object oriented programming) with the JavaScript." http://www.webdevtips.com/webdevtips/article.php?item=73 +07: MISCELLANEOUS. The Joel Test for Web Development, Part 1, 2, and 3 By Drew McLellan "Previously, I have asserted that web development is software development and that the lessons learned by the software industry can and should be applied to our own work. One good source of commentary on software development is Joel on Software. Joel takes a down-to-earth approach and communicates lucidly (his books come highly recommended, too). Based on his experience as a developer and running his own software company, Joel devised a quick test to help anyone rate the quality of their development team. You can read about it ? in fact please go do that now. I'll wait. As the Joel Test is based on traditional software development, I though it would be interesting to try and apply it to a web development team (to my web development team), and see how we come out. Of course, some of the concepts need to be tweaked to apply more succinctly to typical web development, but hopefully between us (I welcome your feedback) we can come up with something close the The Joel Test for Web Development. This is going to be lengthy, so I'll run it over a few days. Here goes..." http://allinthehead.com/retro/228/ http://allinthehead.com/retro/229/ http://allinthehead.com/retro/230/ My Recipe For Web Design By D. Keith Robinson "Defining Web design with a fun little recipe analogy. Yummy." http://www.7nights.com/asterisk/archive/2004/09/web-design-recipe.php +08: PHP. PHP 4.3.9 Released By the PHP Development Team "PHP Development Team is proud to announce the immediate release of PHP 4.3.9. This is a maintenance release that in addition to over 50 non-critical bug fixes, addresses a problem with GPC input processing. This release also re-introduces ability to write GIF images via the bundled GD extension. All Users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to this release as soon as possible. For changes since PHP 4.3.8, please consult the ChangeLog." http://www.php.net/downloads.php +09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. FAQ: A Beginners Introduction to Standard Markup and Accessibility By Jim Byrne "There have been many different versions of HTML since the World Wide Web was invented in the early 90s by Tim Berners-Lee. The 'rules' for using each version are encapsulated in the standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The standards dictate the tags publishers are allowed to use (and in what order), and how those tags should be interpreted by browsers and 'user agents'. For example, text within header tags are interpreted as headings, text within paragraph tags are interpreted as paragraphs." http://www.gawds.org/show.php?contentid=104 Dear one-browser Web designers: Don't say I didn't warn you By Robin 'roblimo' Miller "The point here isn't that MSIE is bad and other browsers are good, but that there are many browsers out there, and it's almost impossible to predict which one will dominate in three or four years -- or whether any of the current ones will dominate. For all we know, someone in China or Brazil is secretly working on a revolutionary Web browser that will be faster, more flexible, and more secure than those that are in common use, today. In the end, the only 'standards' likely to stay with us are those set by worldwide, non-corporate bodies like the W3C and the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). Forward-looking Web designers and Internet business people already know this, but not everyone has enough foresight to look at trends like shifts in browser usage patterns, then look beyond the immediate trends and say, 'The true lesson here is that I shouldn't be preparing for increased use of one browser or another, but that I should make my work usable through all standards-compliant browsers.'" http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/09/17/1436256 W3 Compliant Sites By Sean Ho "W3 Compliant Sites is not an initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), but rather an inspiration that came out of it. The site has one goal. The same goal that responsible web designers all share. That is to promote web sites that are designed to comply to the web standards. Also, I would like to congratulate those who have already started in designing web standard compliant sites as a common practice. We all know that your efforts are not wasted. But for those who have yet to be convinced 'why design with standards', I hope that you can take some time to look through some of the web sites that others have done. And hopefully you will be able to learn how designing with web standards can be of benefit to you as the designer as well as to your readers." http://www.w3csites.com Why You Need Coding Standards By David Mytton "The best applications are coded properly. This sounds like an obvious statement, but by 'properly', I mean that the code not only does its job well, but is also easy to add to, maintain and debug." http://www.sitepoint.com/article/coding-standards +10: TOOLS. Opera's Small-Screen Rendering By Opera Software "With the release of Opera 7, Small-Screen Rendering is available for testing in a desktop browser for the first time. Just download the latest version of Opera 7 for Windows, open a Web page and hit Shift+F11." http://www.opera.com/products/smartphone/smallscreen/ +11: USABILITY. Profits First, Users Second By John S. Rhodes "The purpose of this article is to challenge a core belief in usability. An argument is made that profits are more important than users since organizations cannot survive without profits. Although the business value is high, usability is only one mechanism for driving profits and success." http://oristus.com/resources/profits_first.html Web Design: ROI Is Not a Silver Bullet By Scott Hirsch "For years now, the 'ROI of user experience' has been sought as a means to justify larger corporate investments in Web design. Although ROI methodology can be a useful tool for prioritizing possible Web development projects, by itself measuring ROI is not the path to a greater competence in user experience design." http://comment.cio.com/weighin/092104.html You DO Talk to Customers, Don't You? By Mark Hurst "...if a customer experience practitioner isn't involving real customers in the project, I'd have to ask: what are you afraid of?" http://www.goodexperience.com/blog/archives/000055.php Checkboxes vs. Radio Buttons By Jakob Nielsen "Even prominent websites make elementary errors in the use of basic user interface controls. The main guidelines are clear, but there are ten other things you should consider when using checkboxes and radio buttons." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040927.html Opening New Browser Windows: A User-Centred Approach By Dey Alexander "Opening new browser windows can confuse or annoy users, so designers should take care when considering this approach. New windows should only be opened when doing so supports users' tasks. And users should always be given a clear warning about what will happen when they click on a link that triggers a pop-up or opens a new window." http://deyalexander.com/papers/new-windows.html When Newer is Not Better By Kevin Chen "Redesigning a site has traditionally been a fairly big event. Whether one likes a design or not, one tends to grow accustomed to the design. Any changes made stick out, especially an entire overhaul. When Honda redesigns a car engine, they don't just pray that it's a better engine than their last one. They test it; measuring its acceleration, top speed and dozens of other numbers I can't even begin to comprehend. Yet when sites are redesigned - often with new or different functionality - there seems to be an assumption that newer = better and change = good. Let's look at a recent example..." http://tinyurl.com/4oyrk +12: XML. XML: Too Much of a Good Thing? By David Becker "While some industry observers worry proliferation has gone too far, potentially creating new instances of the interoperability problems that XML was meant to solve, proponents say the explosion of schemas is a testament to the format's success." http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-5348445.html An Introduction to XML By Dan Wellman "If you need convincing as to why to use XML, Dan Wellman can tell you. He gives a little background, some details on its ease of use, and a basic example to demonstrate the qualities of XML." http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/XML/An-Introduction-to-XML/ [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +13: 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.]