+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 3, Issue 22, November 11, 2004.

An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development.

++ISSUE 22 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: EVALUATION & TESTING.
05: EVENTS.
06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
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.

Using Tables to Layout Forms
By Garrett Dimon
"While there are many great ways to build forms using pure XHTML and CSS without any tables, many forms are much more complex than what this method allows. I firmly believe that there is a place in forms layout for using tables intelligently for several reasons."
http://tinyurl.com/46n3m

The Sound of the Accessible Title Tag Separator
By Peter at standards-schmandards
"To help you select an accessible title tag separator I have created a table of commonly used separator characters and recorded the ouput from JAWS..."
http://tinyurl.com/5rdkp

Accessibility Guidelines are Harmful
By Mike Davies
"The proliferation of multiple accessibility guidelines by organizations independent of the W3C is creating confusion in web accessibility. Each new set of guidelines waters down crucial information, and discards important concepts. What remains after the succession of Chinese whispers is a tick box developers can tick without understanding, or even bothering to care about, the problems they present to their own disabled customers."
http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/access/AccessibilityGuidelinesAreHarmful


+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Getting Started with CSS
The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks and Hacks
Chapter 1 of The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks and Hacks
By Rachel Andrew
"In this first chapter, which takes a different format than the rest of the book, I'll guide you through the basics of CSS and show you how it can be used to simplify the task of managing a consistently formatted Website."
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/css-anthology-tips-tricks-1/2

Uncollapsing Margins
By Eric A. Meyer
"In this article Eric explores "how margin collapsing can lead to weird behaviors, why these behaviors arise, and ways to work around it when you want a different result. If you've ever tried to figure out why a heading's top margin seems to disappear when it's the first thing in a div, this article will be of interest."
http://www.complexspiral.com/publications/uncollapsing-margins/

More than Just Bullets
By Brian Huisman
"When marking up content which could be defined in some way as a list, you should consider using an unordered list (<ul>) for presentation. Not only does it improve the readability of your HTML code, it also applies meaning to content which would otherwise have none."
http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/unordered-lists

Debunking the Myth of Style Defaults
By Michael Meadhra
"Most Web builders take default styles for granted. But the small (and not so small) differences in the default style sheets of the various browsers are responsible for a significant portion of the page rendering inconsistencies between browsers."
http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-5435275.html


+03: COLOR.

Webmaster Resources: Color
By Bad Luck Sue
Lists of links to web-based tools for selecting color, and converting color codes, charts, articles, and other color resources.
http://badlucksue.bravepages.com/web/grafcolor.html


+04: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Acting on User Research
By Jakob Nielsen
"User research offers a learning opportunity that can help you build an understanding of user behavior, but you must resolve discrepancies between research findings and your own beliefs."
http://useit.com/alertbox/20041108.html

Personas: Empathetic Focus
By Don Norman
"A persona is a valuable design concept, aiding the designer in maintaining an 'empathetic focus,' providing a common language for communication among the diverse groups who work on a product -- different product groups, engineers, usability specialists, designers, marketing, and executives. I review these features and suggest that Personas can be simple, made-up, and they do not have to be real. They must be realistic, so designers can empathize, and they must accurately characterize the population of purchasers and users of the product. Aside from that, I argue, exhaustive prior research and development for each persona is not only unnecessary, it is probably a waste of resources. (This essay, I predict, will be highly controversial.)"
http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/personas_empathetic.html

Demystifying Usability - Electoral Ethnography
By Frank Spillers
"Ethnography is a technique developed largely by anthropologist Margaret Mead. It involves behavioral observation, contextual interviewing and analysis of users in their work, home or play spaces. The key strength to ethnography is context. Context provides insight into not only who users are (demographics) but what is important to them and what causes them to act and make decisions (psychographics)."
http://tinyurl.com/52cz5


+05: EVENTS.

Designing for the 21st Century III
December 7-12, 2004
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
http://www.designfor21st.org/

4th Integrating the Web into Your Admissions Strategy
Academic Impressions Conference
January 24-26, 2005
San Diego, California U.S.A.
https://www.academicimpressions.com/conferences/0105_integrating.htm


+06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

Techniques For IA
By IA wiki
http://www.iawiki.net/TechniquesForIA


+07: JAVASCRIPT.

Using Named Arguments in JavaScript Functions
By David Andersson (Liorean)
"Normally, a JavaScript function takes an list of arguments, with the order of each argument predetermined."
http://javascriptkit.com/javatutors/namedfunction.shtml


+08: MISCELLANEOUS.

Ten questions for John Allsopp
By Russ Weakley
"John Allsopp is a founder of Westciv, an Australian web software development and training company, which provides some of the best CSS resources and tutorials on the web. Westciv's software and training are used in dozens of countries around the World..."
http://webstandardsgroup.org/features/john-allsopp.cfm


+09: NAVIGATION.

Do You Make This Obvious Web Design Mistake?
By Gerry McGovern
"The most common web design mistake is to design for the exception, and to ignore the obvious. That's because designing for the obvious is boring, while designing for the exception is fun."
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2004/nt_2004_11_08_navigation.htm


+10: PHP.

Creating an MySQL Wrapper Class - Introduction
By Haiden
"This article will hopefully provide a practical Object Orientated method of reducing and centralizing all MySQL related php code. We will do this by developing a MySQL wrapper class."
http://www.phpnoise.com/tutorials/43/1


+11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

If I Said You Had a Beautiful Body...
By Dan Wellman
"A standard can be defined as a specification that is stable and well understood, has multiple, useful applications both independently and in conjunction with other standards or systems, and is used and supported publicly. The specifications for new standards are circulated between the various standards bodies and to the internet public in general initially as RFC (Requests For Comments) documents. These documents are stored on publicly accessible sites across the Web."
http://tinyurl.com/7ybnx

Oh That Elitist Smell
By Molly E. Holzschlag
"A great many discussions have taken place regarding the sense of elitism in the creation, implementation, and study of web standards. Here's what I've been thinking about that elitist smell that surrounds us, where it comes from, and how we can freshen the air."
http://www.molly.com/2004/11/06/oh-that-elitist-smell/

Worst Redesign of the Year
By Joe Clark
"Corporate Web professionals labor under the delusion that they can stay insulated from trends in Web development. They feel free to create expensive new sites whose guts are no different from something published in, say, 1999. They're like baby boomers who cannot stand any music released after 1979. The way they made Web sites while they were growing up works fine and dandy for them. Not only are no improvements necessary, as far as they're concerned there are no improvements available to make, save for this Flash thing their kids keep telling them about. Their way is the state of the art - but, unbeknownst to them, back when they were learning to build Web sites we had no idea what the art actually was."
http://blog.fawny.org/2004/11/08/chapters/


+12: TOOLS.

MIME Tools
Gez Lemon has provided two new MIME Tool services "to help developers wishing to understand more about working with XHTML, and serving it as application/xhtml+xml." They are:

Check Headers
By Gez Lemon
"This page returns the HTTP headers for the requested document. The value returned for Content-Type determines how the page was sent."
http://juicystudio.com/mimetest/headers.asp

Try out application/xhtml+xml
By Gez Lemon
"This page is intended to let you try your XHTML documents delivered as application/xhtml+xml. If the document isn't well-formed, it will result in a parse error. For this reason, only view valid XHTML documents with this form, not HTML documents. Internet Explorer doesn't support application/xhtml+xml. To experiment with your documents, you will need to use a modern browser such as Firefox."
http://juicystudio.com/mimetest/deliverxhtml.asp

Further MIME tool info by Gez:
http://juicystudio.com/all-in-the-mime.asp
http://juicystudio.com/mime-tools.asp


+13: USABILITY.

Creativity vs. Standard Layouts
By Garrett Dimon
"In a lot of cases, things are a certain way just because that's how they work best. Yes, it may be boring, but when the alternative is frustrating, confusing, or just plain doesn't work, I feel most people would rather have boring."
http://tinyurl.com/4zwuu

Cost-Effective Website Acceleration
By Thomas Powell and Joe Lima
"This three-part series outlines a common sense, cost-effective approach to Website acceleration according to the two simple laws of Web performance:    1. Send as little data as possible (and) 2. Send it as infrequently as possible. If used properly, these basic principles should result in: faster web page loads, reduction of server usage, improved bandwidth utilization.
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/effective-website-acceleration

Long Copy vs. Short Copy
By MarketingExperiments.Com
"Marketing Experiments Journal tested short vs. long copy and, surprisingly, found that long copy significantly outperformed short copy, but with some caveats."
http://www.MarketingExperiments.Com/archives/long_vs_short.cfm

Sink the Splash Page
By Andrew B. King
"Splash pages can backfire with users. Rather than enticing them to explore further you repel them clicking and screaming. Splash pages decrease performance, credibility, traffic, and search engine rankings. Bailout rates up to 30% have been reported with some splash pages. If you must use a splash page, make sure it loads quickly, provides bypass links and keywords, and optionally uses cookies to display it just once."
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/splash/

Top 10 Ways to Lose Your Intranet Users
By Paul Chin
"Well, unless you actually want your users to abandon your intranet, make sure that you avoid these 10 common intranet mistakes..."
http://www.intranetjournal.com/articles/200410/ij_10_13_04a.html


+14: XML.

An Introduction to XML Schemas
By Dan Wellman
"XML Schemas help you control what elements appear in your XML documents. Similar to Document Type Definitions, they offer distinct advantages over the older syntax. Dan Wellman provides a basic overview, with examples to get you started working on your own."
http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/XML/An-Introduction-to-XML-Schemas/


[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:
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+ 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.]