+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 3, Issue 36, February 11, 2005. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 36 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: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 06: JAVASCRIPT. 07: MISCELLANEOUS. 08: NAVIGATION. 09: PHP. 10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 11: TOOLS. 12: TYPOGRAPHY. 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. The Accessibility Challenge By Kassia Krozser "Basic HTML is easy, but most people think it's hard. Hard enough that they donŐt want to be bothered learning it. I see this every day. A WYSIWYG HTML editor works just fine for the average content creator. When you get to fun stuff like acronyms and abbreviations and the art of remembering what code works with which browser, you've lost your audience (heck, even if you get someone who has the time and energy to do the right thing, there will always be a few who pop out of the woodwork to argue the semantic differences between acronyms and abbreviations). Coding for accessibility is easy when you're looking at lightly formatted content. It's not easy, as evidenced by the various discussions on the WAI lists, when the requirements of the content move beyond the basics." http://www.alttags.org/archives/2005/02/02/41/ Thinking About Accessibility - Equivalent Content By Mike Davies "When there's an image on a page, our accessibility guidelines ask us to ensure that we provide equivalent alternatives to the image that coveys the same content. The alt attribute on the img element is one way of providing that equivalent content." http://tinyurl.com/52xwu SiteMorse gets nasty, accessibility is the victim By Mike Davies "The progress towards web accessibility took another step backwards with SiteMorse's publication of their report into the website performance of Accessibility compliance and Service Provision companies, published on the 19th January 2005. The press-release took a swipe at the DRC's public criticisms of SiteMorse testing, and responded by trying to humiliate the DRC's accessibility efforts." http://tinyurl.com/54a7b +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Cascading Style Sheets: Using Element Display For Layouts, Links and Lists By Miraz Jordan "Miraz Jordan introduces the concepts of block-level and inline elements and mentions padding, borders and margins along the way. You'll learn simple techniques using CSS to create accessible layouts, lists, links and navigation bars." http://www.wise-women.org/tutorials/cssmenu/ CSS Shorthand at a Glance By Alejandro Gervasio "What could be simpler and faster than using CSS to set up your website? Using CSS shorthand to set up your website. While not all browsers support all of CSS shorthand's features, enough of them are supported to allow you to write tighter code, and create a website that loads more quickly." http://tinyurl.com/6hrha Spacing of characters using CSS By Jukka 'Yucca' Korpela "In order to adjust spacing between individual letters in HTML documents, it is best to use margin properties for suitable elements. The letter-spacing property would seem to be more natural, but its meaning has been defined vaguely, and its effects on browsers are too different." http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www/letter-spacing.html Quick Tips to Fix a CSS Bug By Mike Rundle "I thought I'd share some of the ways I deal with bugs in my layout..." http://phark.typepad.com/phark/2005/02/quick_tips_to_f.html +03: EVALUATION & TESTING. Key Steps in Creating Your Reader Persona By Gerry McGovern "The first step in developing successful reader personas is to decide what readers you are not going to focus on. Good web management is often more about what you exclude than what you include." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2005/nt_2005_02_07_persona.htm +04: EVENTS. Vision Plus 11 July 7-9, 2005 Urania, Wien/Vienna, Austria http://www.iiid-visionplus.net/ +05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Pace, Timing and Rhythm in Information Architecture By Andrew Dillon "Scaling up the numerous devices and information architectures competing for my diminishing attentional resources makes me wish there were some way for us to talk at a more macro level when discussing information. But this is not just a matter of ubiquity or usability, this is really about the human rhythm of information use, the coupling of person and process." http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Dec-04/dillon.html +06: JAVASCRIPT. ECMAScript Menu System By Gez Lemon "There has been lots written about separating content from presentation, and most developers see the benefit of this approach (cleaner, leaner markup; faster download speeds; easier maintainability, etc). There is also a fair amount written about separating behavior from both content and presentation, but it tends to be practiced less than separation of content from presentation. HTML (or even XHTML) should be used for content, CSS for presentation, and ECMAScript for This tutorial goes through creating a dynamic menu, to illustrate using the behavioral layer." http://juicystudio.com/ecmascriptmenu.asp +07: MISCELLANEOUS. Meet the Master minds: Common Sense Web Design with Steve Krug By MCNews "Steve Krug, the author of Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, is a highly respected usability consultant, and he has worked with companies like Apple, Netscape, AOL, BarnesandNoble.com, Excite@Home, and Circle.com. Krug's book is packed with practical techniques for developing a highly usable web site. Before you create or redesign your web site, make sure your designer has read Krug's book. MCNews asked Krug to answer some questions about designing web sites that communicate effectively and are easy to use." http://www.managementconsultingnews.com/krug_interview.php +08: NAVIGATION. Site Navigation Strategies: Consistency Or Flow? By Robin Good "There is no need to link to all sections from each and every page on a site. We should limit pervasive navigation to five or six basic features and let people go back to the front page, if they want to start from the top. Instead, we should focus on getting users to what they want and provide useful links to related content. Organizing a site into sections and subsections does not by itself create a good user experience." http://tinyurl.com/6ab5l +09: PHP. PHP 101 (part 12): Bugging Out By Vikram Vaswani "Even the best developers make mistakes sometimes. That's why most programming languages - including PHP - come with built-in capabilities to catch errors and take remedial action. This action can be as simple as displaying an error message, or as complex as sending the site administrator an email with a complete stack trace. To make it easier to do this, PHP comes with a full-featured error handling API that can be used to trap and resolve errors. In addition to deciding which types of errors a user sees, you can also replace the built-in error handling mechanism with your own custom (and usually more creative) functions. If you're using PHP 5, you get a bonus: a spanking-new exception model, which lets you wrap your code in Java-like try-catch() blocks for more efficient error handling. In this edition of PHP 101, I'm going to discuss all these things, giving you a crash course in how to add error-handling to your PHP application. Keep reading - this is pretty cool stuff!" http://www.zend.com/php5/abs/php101-12.php +10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Redesign Watch By Eric A. Meyer "A listing of notable standards-oriented redesigns. Note that I don't insist on perfect validation to include a site; demonstration of significant intent is generally enough." http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/redesignwatch/ +11: TOOLS. JavaScript Crunchinator By Mike Hall "This utility can be used to reduce the size of JavaScript source code in a file. It uses some simple parsing and regular expressions to remove comments and unnecessary white space in the script code. Depending on your style of coding, it can produce significant savings in terms of file size." http://www.brainjar.com/js/crunch/ +12: TYPOGRAPHY. Why Bigger is Better By Garrett Dimon "A couple of years ago, I started noticing that the sites I preferred using were generally the sites that used larger fonts and widgets than average. At the time, I thought to myself, big is going to be the wave the future on the internet. Now I'm not talking huge like 30 point fonts or anything, but bumping things up can definitely help." http://tinyurl.com/5yne2 +13: USABILITY. Mouse Sensitivity challenges Scope of Fitts' Law By Christian Lagerkvist "The mouse is a superior input device, and will be for many years to come. But as computer screens grow larger and larger, targets become increasingly difficult to hit." http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article2070.asp The Biggest Web Design Mistakes of 2004 By Vincent Flanders "Nobody cares about you or your site. Really. What visitors care about is getting their problems solved." http://tinyurl.com/45jtg +14: XML. XML In the Crystal Ball: XForms and the Revitalized Client By Kurt Cagle "Of these, I think that XForms is quite possibly the most revolutionary and groundbreaking...XForms will be getting a huge boost this year, because it will become a core part of the Mozilla trunk builds by late spring, through the combined efforts of both IBM and Novell. This means that this forms technology will be resident in the next public iteration of Firefox by late next year, and will be in beta builds far earlier. This won't necessarily make that big a difference when it comes to the web adoption of XForms (that process will take a much longer time), but it will mean that application developers who see Firefox as being a powerful tool for building rich intranet applications will have a forms tool (think Visual Basic here, not IRS forms) which can be easily deployed throughout that Intranet, can be updated on the fly, and that can work with an increasingly XML oriented world. (Mozilla's not the only one playing with this exciting technology - later this year, I hope to tell you more...)" http://www.understandingxml.com/archives/2005/01/xml_in_the_crys_3.html XForms Accessibility Features By Rich Schwerdtfeger "I have been asked a number of times about XForms and accessibility. During the course of the blog I will highlight the accessibility features of XForms. The first benefit, which I will discuss today, is less JavaScript and more information as to the available actions that can be performed on a form." http://tinyurl.com/4n6hr [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). 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.]