+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 3, Issue 37, February 16, 2005. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 37 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: DREAMWEAVER. 05: EVALUATION & TESTING. 06: EVENTS. 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. Building Accessible Web Forms By Alejandro Gervasio "Your website might look absolutely beautiful, but what if your visitor is "seeing" it through a screen reader? Surprisingly, some simple, common design elements can confuse screen readers. Fortunately, the corrections are also very simple." http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/HTML/Building-Accessible-Web-Forms/ Web Accessibility Resource Planner (WARP) By WebAim "The Web Accessibility Resource Planner (WARP) is part of WebAIM's k-12 initiative. WebAIM's K-12 initiative is administered through a grant provided by accessibility the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS). Our goal is to improve to online learning opportunities for all people; in particular to improve accessibility for individuals with disabilities who currently may have a difficult time getting access to the general curriculum in K-12 educational settings." http://www.warp.webaim.org/ UK Banking Accessibility Review By Matthew Pennell Interesting accessibility analysis of the UK Financial sector. Better quality of analysis than SiteMorse. http://www.29digital.com/articles/uk-banking-accessibility-review.php Creating Accessible Bar Charts By standards-schmandards "Web site bar charts often consist of a fancy image exported from Microsoft Excel. If you are lucky someone wrote an alt-text explaining what the chart is about. It is time to stop doing that. In this article I show you how you can make an accessible bar chart without sacrificing visual pizzazz." http://tinyurl.com/4rg5p +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Advanced Selectors By Ross Shannon "Selectors are the way you reference the parts of your HTML documents with the styles you want to have applied to them. CSS2 and CSS3 brought with them a host of new selector specifications, designed to allow greater access to the elements and parts of those elements that make up each and every webpage. These new syntax rules allow greater flexibility and accuracy in defining exactly which parts of your page get styled..." http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/stylesheets/advancedselectors.html Cascading Style Sheets Made Easy By Taylor Anderson "HTML was originally intended to be used to define the content of a document using formatting tags. As browsers evolved, it became difficult to create Web sites which separated the content from the presentation layout. To solve the problem, Cascading Style Sheets were created. This article is a brief introduction to CSS and how it works." http://www.webreference.com/programming/easy_css/index.html MathML in CSS: Experimental Test Bed By Bruce R. Miller "The purpose of this test bed is to investigate the capabilities of Cascading StyleSheets for rendering mathematical material generally, and MathML specifically. " http://math.nist.gov/~BMiller/mathml-css/ +03: COLOR. CMYK (for Those Who Do RGB) By Dave Shea "Whether you just quit your job to pursue your dreams, or you've simply had a request from a long-time client, sooner or later you're going to have to design a set of business cards or letterheads or something else that ultimately forces a trip to the printing press." http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2005/02/11/cmyk_for_tho/index.php +04: DREAMWEAVER. JumpStart Venice: An Introduction By: Sheri German "Valentine's Day is one of my favorite holidays of the year. It's fanciful and lighthearted, and I don't feel the pressure of the big holidays like Christmas or Easter. I can daydream about a romantic rendezvous, such as a gondola journey through the canals of Venice on a moonlit night. Though I can't make that a reality, I can pretend while exploring the latest CMX JumpStart. CMX is proud to announce its sixth JumpStart, Venice, which includes both two and three column, fixed-width, rounded corner layouts in its home and form pages. Like all CMX JumpStarts, it is based on Web standards with valid CSS2 and XHTML 1.0 Transitional markup, and it passes WAI and 508 accessibility checkpoints." http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=D1DEB +05: EVALUATION & TESTING. Authentic Behavior in User Testing By Jakob Nielsen "Despite being an artificial situation, user testing generates realistic findings because people engage strongly with the tasks and suspend their disbelief." http://useit.com/alertbox/20050214.html Making Personas Sparkle Like Diamonds, Part 1 By Bryan Eisenberg "Early in our company's life, persona development was largely an intuitive process. We wanted to develop a process we could use to train clients and partners to duplicate the persona development process. To do this, we delved into literature and film to understand character development. We were fortunate to be introduced to a prominent Hollywood screenwriter and script evaluator, David Freeman. Freeman taught us about 'character diamonds'... Today we'll share what we learned." http://www.clickz.com/experts/crm/traffic/article.php/3461821 +06: EVENTS. 2005 Web Communications and Strategies Conference July 18-20, 2005 Salisbury, Maryland U.S.A. http://www.salisbury.edu/webconf/ +07: JAVASCRIPT. Sort Table: Make All Your Tables Sortable By Stuart Langridge "While the web design community gradually moves away from using tables to lay out the structure of a page, tables really do have a vital use, their original use; they're for laying out tabular data. For instance, imagine a table of employees." http://www.kryogenix.org/code/browser/sorttable/ Alter Table Row Background Colors Using JavaScript By Kennet Svanberg "Many sites that present tabular data use alternating background colors to increase the readability of that data. And as I developed a site, I realized I wanted to do that, too. The problem? In my case the table was not generated by a server side application or script of which you can find numerous examples on the Web." http://www.sitepoint.com/article/background-colors-javascript +08: MISCELLANEOUS. Getting Content From Clients By Vinnie Garcia "Well, the easiest way to get the content (and itÕs an approach that I'm experimenting with right now) is to do nothing. Let me clarify: Do no work until the content is delivered. No mockups, no sample pages, nothing. Why would I do such a thing? Well, how many times have you seen a site and said 'thatÕs from a template'? How could you tell? I bet that, more than anything, it was the fact that the content and the look of the site were an awkward fit. If you start building a site with no content, you run the risk of doing that as well. Think I'm wrong? How many layouts do you have sitting on your computer because you donÕt have a good site to put them on? The main focus of web design (and I use 'design' in the artistic sense here more than the functional sense) is to make the look of the site the best possible fit for the content contained in it. How can you do that if you donÕt know what the contentÕs going to be? If you can explain this approach to your client successfully, you just might get that content real soon." http://ibebloggin.com/oldstuff/2005/02/10/getting-content-from-clients/ 'Hire' the Right Clients By Jason Fried "Working with the right clients is absolutely critical. The trick is knowing when to say no. The wrong client can kill morale, force good employees out, and cost you big opportunities. Working with the right client isn't work at all - it's a pleasure" http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives/001053.php +09: NAVIGATION. Cascading Drop-Down Menus By Luke Wroblewski "A complex cascading menu system in a recent Web application design project had me revisit the pros and cons of 'fly-out' menus." http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?150 Thinking About Accessibility - Select Menus By Mike Davies "The select-based navigation menu is an often-used, and perhaps useful widget for visitors using assistive technology. Hopefully with this article we have provided a foundation where people have the confidence and knowledge to implement it in an accessible manner." http://tinyurl.com/3vvwc +10: PHP. Reconsidering PHP variables By Iulian Turnea "PHP helps you to quickly build big applications and many times, its easy to neglect the security matter. Its easy to believe that security breaches could not happen to your software. But what if it does happen? For this reason, security in your applications should be kept in consideration from the beginning. I have read in the past many scary things about PHP variables. Words like: be aware, take care or look again are still in my mind. And slowly, I have realized that it would be prudent to follow some steps when using PHP variables. I have tested many secure implementations and found no performance decrease when being processed by the PHP engine. Here is a short list of things you can do to better protect the security of your applications..." http://www.devshed.com/c/a/PHP/Reconsidering-PHP-variables/ +11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Opera to MS: Get real about interoperability, Mr Gates By Hakon Lie "...So, Mr. Gates, writes Hakon Lie, you say you believe in interoperability. Then why, pray tell, doesn't the web page of your interoperability communique conform to the HTML4 standard as it claims to? Why does the W3C validator diagnose 126 errors on your page? You say you believe in interoperability. Then why is your document served in different versions to different browsers? Why does your server sniff out the Opera browser and send it different style sheets from the ones you send to Microsoft's own Internet Explorer (Win IE)? As a result, Opera renders the page differently...So, why didn't you finish Win IE's CSS implementation? Why are significant parts of CSS2 still not supported? Why haven't you fixed a single CSS bug since 2001?...You say you believe in interoperability, Mr Gates. We'd like to believe you. But interoperability is hard work...Writing the occasional email praising interoperability simply isn't enough. And your track record doesn't support your proclaimed beliefs. If you truly believe in interoperability, Mr Gates, here are some ways you can prove it...Convince us. Deliver on your promises." http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/11/hakon_on_ms_interroperability/ The Dollars and Sense of Building to Standards By Alan K'necht "Ultimately, the push for standards-compliant code should come from the coding ranks. We need to enlighten all levels of management to the savings they can achieve by embracing Web standards. If the people on the front lines donÕt take on the job of promoting standards to management and management learns of these savings first, you'll be faced with a tougher challengeÑwhy didn't you know to use and push for standards-compliant code?" http://digital-web.com/articles/building_to_standards/ Web Standards vs. Search Friendly Sites: Can You Have Both? By Bill Hunt "Though the divide between design and optimization will continue, this session (at the Search Engine Strategies conference) went a long way to help close the gap and hopefully lead to faster loading sites and a wider adoption of accessibility functionality across the web." http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3482116 +12: TOOLS. Web Design Tools are Skeuomorphs of Print Design Tools, And This Is a Bad Thing. By Matt Patterson "In short, Web 'pages' are not print 'pages' now, they never were, and they're drifting further and further away from each other. Anything, and especially a 'design' tool, which doesn't recognize this is doing web design harm...One of the most interesting areas where visual design tools for the web have real problems because of their print assumptions is when the web diverges most completely from the print page analogy, with dynamic content. When the same 'page' is different, for different people, and at different times of day, then you know you're not in Kansas anymore. It's a shame no-one told the tool makers...Visual web design tools and print design tools are both 'design tools', but at the level of infrastructure - the tracks - the two things are not the same. Visual web design tools are skeuomorphs of print design tools, but they are orthogonal to web design itself, running off on their dangerous tangent and causing more problems than they'll ever solve." http://tinyurl.com/5h75b +13: USABILITY. Usability or Donkey Design? (Or, Why do you love usability?) By John S. Rhodes "The summary is that you probably care about the results of usability not usability itself. Some people love math for the sake of math. It is an object of desire. It is a standard. It is a way of thinking. But, most of us like math because it gets the job done. It is a tool. Usability is no different. It is one path but it isn't the only path." http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/viewtopic.php?t=21488 Usability: Subliminal U-Turns By Michael Nutely "Usability has always been a term guaranteed to provoke a reaction among Web designers. Even now, when the return-on-investment argument in favor of usability has become widely accepted, some sites still fly in the face of usable design. Navigation is unclear, language appears on-screen straight from the brief, forms can't be filled in. So it might seem a strange time to start talking about making sites less usable; but that's one of the ideas starting to emerge from the financial services sector. The argument runs that some sites, particularly online banking sites, have become so easy to use that customers simply zip through them on auto-pilot, conducting their transactions with the minimum involvement possible before logging out. While this is ideal for busy consumers, it's bad for the banks, which are losing the chance to sell more products to exactly those people who should be their hottest prospects? their existing customers." http://www.nmk.co.uk/article/2005/02/04/usability-design-advertising A Rant (Mostly) About Web Content D. Keith Robinson "Content won't magically appear. Most 'Web designers' can't create it for you. It's important, usually should be priority #1 on a Web project. It takes work, lots of work. It needs a plan, and a process. In many cases creating, editing and managing the content for a Web site of any size is a full time job. For a real person. A content management system won?t do anything on it's own, and your better of not wasting your money if you can't properly implement it." http://tinyurl.com/5wnmr +14: XML. The Perils of Using XHTML Properly By Roger Johansson "I've been using XHTML for a couple of years now, but it wasn't until last summer that I started looking at using it properly, that is by serving it with the application/xhtml+xml MIME type. I knew about some of the problems I was going to run into, but far from all of them. As you're about to find out, there are plenty of seemingly small issues that can make life difficult when you start using real XHTML." http://tinyurl.com/5y9nj [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.]