+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 3, Issue 32, January 16, 2005. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 32 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: EVALUATION & TESTING. 04: EVENTS. 05: JAVASCRIPT. 06: MISCELLANEOUS. 07: NAVIGATION. 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. Big, Stark and Chunky By Joe Clark "You've designed for the screen and made provision for blind, handheld, and PDA browser users. But what about low-vision people? Powered by CSS, 'zoom' layouts convert wide, multi-column web pages into low-vision-friendly, single column designs. Accessibility maven Joe Clark explores the rationale and methods behind zoom layouts. Board the zoom train now!" http://www.alistapart.com/articles/lowvision/ WebAIM's response to the National Education Technology Plan and Call for Action By Cyndi Rowland "WebAIM applauds the plan with the exception of one prominent omission. The plan does not mention the critical need for accessible technology for millions of students with disabilities. Because this need is not identified, nor addressed, there are no apparent plans to remedy this ever-increasing digital divide. Perhaps there was a lack of input from the disability, or technology access, community. It appears that these stakeholders were not included in the work of the committee." http://www.webaim.org/alert Browsing Habits of Screen Reader Users By standards-schmandards "A while ago I read the article 'Observing Users Who Listen to Web Site'. In that article the authors report that visually impaired users scan web pages with their ears instead of reading them top to bottom. This may not come as a surprise to you if you read Jakob Nielsen's 'How Users Read on the Web' back in 1997. Recently I have had the opportunity to study a number of screen reader users and my observations are similar." http://tinyurl.com/6lx2c +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Cross-Column Pull-Out Part II: Custom Silhouettes By Daniel M. Frommelt "The cross-column pull-out gave us a new technique for marking up a layout with a pull-out positioned between columns. Now we examine a variation of the technique for wrapping around the edges of a non-rectangular image positioned between columns." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/crosscolumn2/ Untold Mysteries of CSS By Molly Holzschlag "Three untold CSS mysteries you might not know about include the universal selector, !important keywords, and multi-classes. Molly Holzschlag looks behind the curtain to show you how these under-described aspects of CSS can be put to use to assist with diagnostics during development, savvy global styling, out-and-out hacks, better design flexibility, and accessibility." http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=358552 Most Common Browser Bugs By Andy Budd "As we all know there are a lot of buggy browsers out there. Some browsers are more buggy than others and some bugs are more prevalent than others..." http://tinyurl.com/3koxq Float Nightmares By Dave Hyatt "Sometimes trying to support the standards can be a real pain. While trying to improve our CSS2 compliance, I recently did a big cleanup of our block layout code, including the code for handling floats. I made what I believed to be a fairly innocuous correction to follow the CSS2 specification. Here's the scenario..." http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/2005_01.html#007252 Turning a List into a Navigation Bar By Roger Johansson "I've received a couple of requests for a description of how I created the navigation bar that is currently used on this site. The CSS used isn't all that advanced, and I hadn't really thought about describing it in detail, but after being asked about it I decided to do a write-up." http://tinyurl.com/4qkmy Block vs. Inline, Part 1 By Tommy Olsson "Today's topic is rectangles, and this article is the first in a series of three. Is there really that much to say about rectangles? Believe it or not, but the topic is virtually inexhaustible." http://tinyurl.com/6y2xx CSS Tooltips - Part Two By John Gallant, Holly Bergevin "The heart of the CSS tooltip method depends on the :hover pseudo-class. Most modern browsers now support this CSS 2 feature. Internet Explorer for Windows lags behind in this area, supporting the :hover pseudo-class only on link elements. However, IE5/Win and above can be made to support hovering on any element. In Part Two of our CSS Tooltips tutorial series we explain how to make this happen." http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=52428 +03: EVALUATION & TESTING. Checkpoints For Reviewing Usability Test Reports Based on the work of Julian Meltzoff Usability practitioners are called on, not only to conduct many research studies during their careers, but also to read, review, and advise on usability studies that have been conducted and reported by others. The ability to critically review the research of others, and to help stakeholders weigh up the merits or shortcomings of research data and conclusions, is an extremely valuable skill. These checkpoints will help you ensure your review covers the key issues." http://www.userfocus.co.uk/resources/researchquestions.html Accessibility Evaluation Practices - Survey Results By Dey Alexander "This is a summary of the results of an online survey on accessibility evaluation practices conducted in late 2004. Web accessibility practitioners were invited to participate in the survey via a posting to several key mailing lists. There were 98 respondents, with the majority from the IT&T and education sectors whose roles involve less than 50% accessibility-related work. Manual inspection was the most popular evaluation method used, and user testing the least popular. Most evaluations were based on the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)." http://deyalexander.com/papers/accessibility-evaluation-survey.html +04: EVENTS. @media 2005 June 9-10, 2005 London, England http://www.atmedia2005.co.uk/ Mobile HCI 05 7th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services September 19-22, 2005 Salzburg, Austria http://mobilehci.icts.sbg.ac.at/ +05: JAVASCRIPT. DevGuru JavaScript Quick Reference Guide By DevGuru "This is an extensive 214 page reference source that explains and gives comprehensive, working examples of code in a definitive manner for the JavaScript language (and hence, for the ECMAScript and JScript languages). All elements of the language are covered, including the events, functions, methods, objects, operators, properties, statements, and values." http://tinyurl.com/ugs6 +06: MISCELLANEOUS. Who created CSS? CSS Early History By Arve Bersvendsen "The question 'Who created CSS?' just showed up in my search logs. The very short and simple answer to this is: Hakon Wium Lie and Bert Bos authored the original CSS1 specification. There is more to this story, however..." http://www.virtuelvis.com/archives/2005/01/css-history +07: NAVIGATION. Internal Linking: Thinking Inside The Box By Wayne Hurlbert "As a website owner, you've thought about the ways that incoming links affect your ranking in the search engines. But have you considered how your own internal links might give you a boost? Wayne Hurlbert explains this often-overlooked potential source of popularity. When website owners think of linking, they are usually referring to inbound links from external websites. While adding more incoming links from pages in external sites is very important, itÍs very easy to forget the internal linkage factors at work in your own site..." http://tinyurl.com/4k557 +08: PHP. Why Choose PHP? By Zend "PHP is an open source web scripting environment. Along with the Apache Web Server and Linux Operating System, PHP is among the most widely deployed and used pieces of open source software. PHP, according to NetCraft, has surpassed Microsoft ASP, making it the most popular web scripting language and is being utilized on over 15 million websites today." http://www.zend.com/why-php.php Zend Unveils PHP Enterprise Platform By Sean Michael Kerner "Enterprise PHP developers have a new platform that will help them manage their efforts, thanks to Zend Technologies the corporate backer of the open source scripting language." http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3456771 Zend Platform By Jon Udell "Today's screencast features Zend Platform, a new management solution for PHP-based sites. The other voices you'll hear on the screencast (or the companion podcast) are those of Pamela Roussos, marketing VP for Zend, and Andi Gutmans, co-founder and technology VP. Gutmans and Zend's other co-founder, Zeev Suraski, are the authors of PHP's core engine, known as the Zend Engine. The new product, announced today, exploits their expertise with PHP internals to surface to the site administrator what Gutmans calls PHP intelligence." http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/01/10.html#a1148 +09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. The Standards War By Kevin Wu The web is a mess. 99.27% of webpages are obsolete and it's not getting better very quickly. Even in this day and age, our teachers still perpetrate inaccessible, future-incompatible and contorted webpage creation techniques. Praise is given to laziness, and pride is taken from ignorance. We are spiraling into a web of noise, segregation, anarchy and chaos. And even our web developers-the people in the driver's seat-have no idea of what the problem is." http://www.exclipy.com/webstandards/ Soup to Nuts (Excerpt) by Nate Steiner "A few years ago, it seemed we were almost to the point where anyone could make a web site. "What you see is what you get" (wysiwyg) web tools that require no knowledge of html were becoming as ubiquitous as word processors and spreadsheet software. The problem: they were all based on a lie, or rather, a massive shortcut..." http://designinflight.com/issues/jan/articles/06.html Macworld Expo and Web Standards: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly By Dori Smith "Apple's newly-announced Pages application looks like a wonderful little lightweight page layout program? and a terrible disaster as a HTML editor." http://www.webstandards.org/buzz/archive/2005_01.html#a000478 +10: TOOLS. Web Accessibility PodGuide By Dey Alexander "The web accessibility podGuide is an iPod-ready version of the current web-related accessibility standards." http://deyalexander.com/resources/podguide/ +11: USABILITY. What Makes a Design Seem Intuitive? By Jared M. Spool "Once you understand how 'intuitive' works-what makes someone perceive a design to be intuitive-it becomes easier to make the decision as to whether an intuitive design is worth the extra effort. The knowledge your users have when they arrive at the design (current knowledge), what knowledge they'll need to complete their tasks (target knowledge), and what the design needs to do to help them complete the task (the gap) are the key ingredients for making an interface that seems 'intuitive' to your users." http://uie.com/articles/design_intuitive/ Beware of Opening Links in a New Window By Neil Turner "Think very long and very hard before you open links in a new window. Most of the time, opening links in the current window is by far the best solution. If you do need to open links in a new window, at least warn users beforehand -- unless, of course, you want your site visitors to get a rather unwelcome surprise!" http://www.sitepoint.com/article/beware-opening-links-new-window What is the Role of the User as Part of the Design Team By Don Norman "Everyday people are not very good designers. They don't know what is good for them -- or bad. Their opinions are, well, opinions. The designs they produce are apt to be klutsy, confused, crowded. I prefer design by experts - by people who know what they re doing." http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/what_is_the_role_of_.html Web Design for All the Senses By Dirk Knemeyer In this week's issue of Digital Web Magazine columnist Dirk Knemeyer returns with another thought-provoking look at the Web, this time sparking ideas for how professionals can create a holistic user experience addressing each of the five senses. http://digital-web.com/articles/web_design_for_all_the_senses/ Web Content is a Hidden Asset By Gerry McGovern "This is for all you true content management professionals; you writers and editors. Stand firm. Stand up for well-written content. Go for quality over quantity every time. Spend time to get rid of the out-of-date content. Spend time to truly understand who your reader is. Your time is coming because web content will in time be seen as one of the most valuable assets of the modern economy." http://tinyurl.com/3prg2 http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2005/nt_2005_01_17_web_content.htm +12: XML. DevGuru XHTML Quick Reference Guide By DevGuru "This is a handy 180 page reference source that defines and explains all of the tags, events, and associated attributes that compose XHTML (eXtensible Hyper Text Markup Language, version 1.0. This Quick Reference also includes useful, real world, working examples of code for each tag. In addition, there are write-ups, with code examples, for the 17 events and another 7 attributes that are commonly available to many tags." http://www.devguru.com/Technologies/xhtml/quickref/xhtml_intro.html [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). As a navigation aid for screen readers we do our best to conform to the accessible Text Email Newsletter (TEN) guidelines. Please let me know if there is anything else we can do to make navigation easier. For TEN guideline 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.]