+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 3, Issue 23, November 18, 2004. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 23 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. 05: JAVASCRIPT. 06: MISCELLANEOUS. 08: NAVIGATION. 09: PHP. 10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 11: TOOLS. 12: USABILITY. 13: XML. SECTION TWO: 14: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Dispelling the Myths - Web Accessibility is for All By Andrew Arch "The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are generally considered to be applicable only for people with disabilities, whereas many of the Checkpoints in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are actually general usability requirements and a number of others are equally applicable to other sections of the community, e.g. rural Australians, new Australians, new users, techno-phobes, technologically disadvantaged, and techno-freaks with the latest 'toys'. The paper highlights the fact that over half the Accessibility checkpoints benefit those without a disability as much as people with disabilities." http://ausweb.scu.edu.au/aw02/papers/refereed/arch/paper.html Question From a Friend By Bob Regan "What is the biggest challenge for the federal agencies to enhance their web accessibility these days? And tell me the reason why...." http://www.markme.com/accessibility/archives/006292.cfm +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Developing a CSS Strategy By Michael Meadhra "There are different strategies for CSS style management. You may need to try variations on several approaches before you find what works best for you. The important thing is to avoid the chaos of an ad hoc style sheet by planning your CSS style development for a given site, and then following that plan." http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-5437796.html CSS Shorthand Properties By Trenton Moss "One of the main advantages of using CSS is the large reduction in web page download time...By using CSS shorthand properties you can reduce the size of your CSS document..." http://tinyurl.com/5p9q9 Use Class with Semantics in Mind By Sybren Stuvel "Often people use class names like bluetext, or redborder. A much better way to name your classes is with the role a certain HTML element of that class has..." http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/goodclassnames +03: DREAMWEAVER. Introduction to Understanding CSS Design Concepts: Part 2: Setting Up Default Properties and Overriding Them with Specificity By Adrian Senior "Learn how to set up default properties for your HTML elements and how to override them with specificity." http://tinyurl.com/6uwrr +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Usability Testing for Accessibility By The Georgia Institute of Technology "This chapter provides detailed guidance on usability testing for accessibility..." http://www.ittatc.org/technical/access-ucd/ut.php How Do We Perform Usability Testing When the Tasks are so Novel that Users Don't Even Know They Want to Perform Them? By Samuel A. Burns and J. Patrick Williams "Based on our discussion with the group, we devised the following set of tips for testing novel tasks and new technologies..." http://tinyurl.com/4ufto +05: EVENTS. Good Experience Live (Gel) April 28-29, 2005 New York, New York U.S.A. http://www.goodexperience.com/gel/ +06: JAVASCRIPT. JavaScript and Embedded Objects By Thomas Powell and Fritz Schneider This chapter an excerpt is from the book, 'JavaScript: The Complete Reference'. http://tinyurl.com/6r99j +07: MISCELLANEOUS. Ten Questions for Roger Johansson By Russ Weakley "Roger Johansson talks about web standards, round corners, development mistakes, ampersands and more" http://webstandardsgroup.org/features/roger-johansson.cfm +08: NAVIGATION. Navigation Accessibility 1: Menus and Links By Roger Hudson "The Web is a navigation environment, where travelers move around in a virtual world by activating hypertext links. Successful Websites have logical navigation systems that mirror real world navigational expectations and experiences and have been built to meet the needs of the site user." http://www.usability.com.au/resources/menus-links.cfm Navigation Accessibility 2: Accessing Page Content By Roger Hudson "Helping the user locate and go to a Web page is crucial to site navigation, but it is only part of the story. Once the user has arrived at the page they should then be able to easily access the content it contains. This is not likely to be problem for an able-bodied person who can use a mouse and quickly scan the content of the page." http://www.usability.com.au/resources/page-content.cfm +09: PHP. What's New in PHP 5 By David Fells "The long anticipated PHP 5 release comes with a slew of new features aimed at simplifying development with PHP. With PHP 5 comes the introduction of exception handling, the Standard PHP Library (SPL), enhanced support for XML, reflection, and quite a few enhancements to the object oriented features of the language. PHP 5 also offers a sizable list of new functions, many of which will not be covered in this article but are available in the manual..." http://www.devshed.com/c/a/PHP/Whats-New-in-PHP-5/ +10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Web Service Model By Michael McGuire "This page attempts to provide a resource of higher education institutions that have a published Web Services Mission Statement, Web Services Site, Web Policy, Web Oversight, Style Guide, Web Accessibility, or Portal." http://fanghorn.ws.utk.edu/ws +11: TOOLS. Color Scheme Generator 2 By Petr Stanic ek (pixy) "Generator of color schemes and palettes to create good-looking and well balanced and harmonic web pages. This is the new version of the previous color generator." http://wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html Color Palette Creator v1.6 By Steve Chipman "This tool...will create 10 shades of the base color, located top-left, at varying degrees of opacity. The top row emulates opacity over a white background, the bottom over black (or colors of your choosing as of v1.4). The opacity values are 100% opaque, 75%, 50%, 25% and 10% on the top row. The bottom row begins at 85% rather than 100% and continues on as the first." http://slayeroffice.com/tools/color_palette/ Color Designer By Kasper J. Jeppesen "A quick and easy to use tool to design color sets...released as a free (as in free beer) application for MacOS X." http://macosx.narcissisme.dk/ +12: USABILITY. How to Write a Tagline By Peter Van Dijck "Good taglines don't describe the service, they describe the benefit." http://tinyurl.com/679d7 Beware of Opening Links in a New Window By Neil Turner "Many websites open links in new windows, especially when linking to external websites. Webmasters who do so should perhaps think twice about this, as it's not always appropriate." http://tinyurl.com/5vme2 The End of Usability Culture By Dirk Knemeyer "The usability culture that has pervaded and defined the last few years needs to go. This is not a criticism of those skills or people. In fact, the reason the Web is healthy in so many ways today is thanks to the gains we've made during this time. But the pendulum has swung too far in that direction. The only way to bring things back into balance is to wrest the focus from that extreme and create a culture that is holistic, balanced and every bit as daring and creative as it is thoughtful and analytical. Only through a balanced approach to the Web will the media enjoy its full potential. This is a trend that will happen on its own, and sweep us along with it whether we want it or not. But we have a chance to take control" http://digital-web.com/articles/end_of_usability_culture/ You'll Never Have Enough Cheese By Jeff Atwood "We may think our applications are compelling, but I seriously doubt they look that compelling to users. Unless you are providing users free mp3s, or access to pornography, it's highly unlikely you will ever have enough cheese to overcome even the mildest of electric shocks. The only variable you can really control is your application's usability. The barrier to entry has to be absurdly low to even get people to look at your software - much less use it..." http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000127.html Do You Manage a Website or a Warehouse? By Gerry McGovern "There are two types of people involved in websites today: those who see content as an asset, and those who see it as a commodity. The latter better start looking for a new career." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2004/nt_2004_11_05_portals.htm +13: XML. Election Markup Language (EML) Recommended to Member States by Council of Europe. By XML Cover Pages "The Council of Europe Committee of Ministers has issued a Recommendation to its forty-six (46) member states on standards for e-voting. The Recommendation of the Council includes reference to Legal Standards, Operational Standards, and Technical Requirements. It "emphasizes the need for new voting methods to meet the principles of universal and equal suffrage, free and secret ballots and for the systems to be secure, transparent and accountable. It covers issues such as electoral lists, information to voters, and vote counting." http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2004-11-10-a.html MIME Type Test Suite By Gez Lemon "In the comments of the It's all in the MIME post, Jacques Distler suggested putting together some examples of valid XHTML documents to help illustrate the difference between serving content as application/xhtml+xml and text/html. I've put together the following basic test suite..." http://juicystudio.com/mime-type-test.asp [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +14: 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 U.S.A. 55812-3009 mailto:lcarlson@d.umn.edu [Issue ends.]