+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 3, Issue 40, March 9, 2005. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 40 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: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. 02: EVALUATION & TESTING. 03: EVENTS. 04: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 05: JAVASCRIPT. 06: MISCELLANEOUS. 07: NAVIGATION. 08: PHP. 09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 10: USABILITY. 11: XML. SECTION TWO: 12: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Efficient CSS with Shorthand Properties By Roger Johansson "I get a lot of questions about CSS from people who aren't crazy enough to have spent the thousands of hours working with CSS that I have. Sometimes I'm asked to take a look at something they're working on to see if I can figure out why it doesn't work as expected. When I look at their CSS I often find that itÕs both bloated and unorganized." http://tinyurl.com/3tam3 Introduction to CSS Positioning Properties Part 1 By Alejandro Gervasio "Web designers gained a great deal from the CSS2 specification, especially when it comes to increased flexibility to position HTML elements exactly where they want them within Web pages." http://tinyurl.com/4l262 Simple Clearing of Floats By Alex Walker A new method for solving the CSS float clearing problem. By applying overflow:auto to the CSS rules for a parent div that contains a floated element, the parent div will expand to completely contain the floated element. http://www.sitepoint.com/blog-post-view?id=238086 CSS Help Pile By R. Marie Cox "Links and Discussion About the Best CSS Resources Available on the Web." http://www.artypapers.com/csshelppile/ Handheld Stylesheets By css-discuss wiki "This document describes some of the issues concerning the use of CSS for handheld devices (using the media type 'handheld')" http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=HandheldStylesheets&version=19 +02: EVALUATION & TESTING. One Facilitator Good, Four Facilitators Better? By Caroline Jarrett "But the other day an intriguing question came up. Someone had joined an organization where there is big pressure for numbers and short time-scales. So they had been conducting tests with three or four facilitators, 35 participants Š and then spending an hour together to combine results. She thought that wasn't a great way to do it and was looking for advice on something better. Now thatÕs way outside my experience (35 participants? Heck, I'm lucky to get 8) so for once I didn't pipe up with advice. But Carolyn Snyder did, and her advice struck me as so helpful that I asked her if I could base this monthÕs Corner on it. So here we go, over to Carolyn..." http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article2268.asp +03: EVENTS. 2nd International Cross-Disciplinary Workshop on Web Accessibility (W4A 2005) Engineering Accessible Design at the Fourteenth International World Wide Web Conference May 10, 2005 Chiba, Japan http://www.w4a.info Webmaster World's Search Conference June 21-23, 2005 New Orleans, Louisiana U.S.A. http://www.webmasterworld.com/conference/ O'Reilly Open Source Convention 2005 August 1-5, 2005 Portland, Oregon U.S.A. http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2005/ +04: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. The Information Architecture Institute The Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture has renamed to simply The Information Architecture Institute. http://www.iainstitute.org/ +05: JAVASCRIPT. This is Not Another XMLHttpRequest Article By Cameron Adams "Market forces aside, from an accessible Internet perspective Google Maps perhaps lies on the border between acceptable JavaScript exclusion and unacceptable. On one side of this border I like to place archetypal, everyday web pages ? non-interactive (in a data sense), essentially text, linkable, crawlable, holders of public information. On the other side we have web applications ? interactive, self-contained systems, used to complete a task. Ever since the Internet began these lines have grown increasingly blurred. Forms allow data to be exchanged between the user and the server, logins allow users to save their data, cookies allow sites to be tailored to a users' preferences. But I still see web applications as essentially different from web pages...What does this mean? It doesn't mean that Google Maps is junk, or a failure. Far from it. It is merely a perfect example of why JavaScript is brilliant for presenting content in web applications, but inadvisable for presenting content on web pages. It'll still let you do cool things? really useful things? but it shouldn't change the way that websites are built or used, because 99% of the Internet is not an application." http://www.themaninblue.com/writing/perspective/2005/03/02/ +06: MISCELLANEOUS. Is Communications Up to Running Intranet? By Gerry McGovern "The natural home of the intranet is in communications. However, intranet management requires particular skills that many traditional communications departments don't have." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2005/nt_2005_02_28_communications.htm Stop the Pendulum: I Want to Get Off By Louis Rosenfeld "Although Gerry McGovern makes good points in his latest article and elsewhere, I'm really uncomfortable with this statement: 'The natural home of the intranet is in communications'." http://louisrosenfeld.com/home/bloug_archive/000340.html Designers Online: Todd Dominey By Tom Dolan "There are a number of interesting trends to watch in the online space in the next few years. Personal bets include Google offering a full desktop solution that doesn't involve Microsoft, Firefox becoming the most popular browser on the web, Flash video overtaking Real, Windows, and QuickTime in market share penetration, and Apple achieving ten percent (or more) of the desktop market. I think it'll also be interesting to see how much larger the blog phenomenon will become. With a little work and luck, it wouldn't surprise me at all to see some of them overtaking big-media ventures in traffic, eyeballs, and social influence. Design wise, I'm sure we'll see the death of 800x600 resolution layouts, a deeper connection between television and interactive media, heavier web pages, and an even-larger glut of freely syndicated news and data. I hope a couple of years from now the typical 'blog look' evolves into something more personal and sophisticated, but we'll have to wait and see. I can only hope to still be around to see it." http://www.aigalosangeles.org/features/archives/000916.php Use-Cases Part II: Taming Scope By Norm Carr and Tim Meehan "When web projects go wrong, the cause can often be traced to misunderstanding and miscommunication about scope: what you thought your client wanted and what they thought they were getting doesn't match. The later in a project this is discovered, the costlier for someone it can become." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/tamingscope/ +07: NAVIGATION. Skip Navigation Links are Important By John S. Britsios "Providing links that allow the user to skip directly to content, bypassing the navigation, enhances the accessibility of your web site. This is recommended for blind or visually impaired users, people who use screen readers, and also for text-browsers, mobile phones and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants). These links are common on most US, UK, Irish, and other government websites, as well as many universities and private organizations." http://www.webnauts.net/skip-navigation.html Un-finding and Web Navigation By Luke Wroblewski "Sometimes the process of un-finding or backing out of a browse or search path is how relevant items are actually found. But many finding systems donÕt allow users to easily relax constraints. Instead users have to start over or worse yet end up needlessly limited to a constraint unknown to them (resulting in few or no matches to their query)...In our information-saturated cyber lives, a day may come when the process of un-finding (navigating out from specific results) becomes as crucial as finding (navigating to specific results)." http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?158 +08: PHP. PHP Application Development Part One By David Fells "Settling for the 'quick and dirty' solution often costs far more time than it saves. This is as true of PHP coding practices as anything else. In this first article in the series, you will learn practices that will save you time and headaches in the long run, and help you write better PHP code." http://www.devshed.com/c/a/PHP/PHP-Application-Development-Part-One/ +09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Why Colleges Should Stop Teaching Fireworks as a Primary Web Design Tool By Virginia DeBolt "Classes should teach HTML, CSS, and then how to apply that knowledge with a tool like Dreamweaver. Fireworks does have its place: to create graphics. It should be taught as a graphics design tool, not as a web design tool." http://www.webteacher.ws/2005/03/why-colleges-should-stop-teaching.html Standards Compliant Websites Directory By seoed.com "Quality not Quantity" http://compliant-websites.seoed.com/ +10: USABILITY. Intranets: Strategy First, Usability Second By Gerry McGovern "More and more intranet teams are buying into the need for usability. However, usability is not a strategy, and without a clear strategy, usability can become a pointless, wasteful and counter-productive exercise." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2005/nt_2005_03_07_intranets.htm Again, a newspaper PDF experiment is fatally flawed By Adrian Holovaty "I started a long list detailing why I don't like EmPRINT, but I scrapped it. Instead of taking the easy way out by raising standard PDF criticisms -- no permalinks to articles, bad accessibility, nonstandard browsing, etc. -- I'll just say this: EmPRINT is fundamentally flawed because its presentation is fundamentally tied to print newspapers. That is, it's static. Flat. Rigid. It looks the same and acts the same no matter what you do to it." http://www.holovaty.com/blog/archive/2005/03/02/0041 Guidelines For An Uncomplicated Web By D. Keith Robinson "...Another example of how 'features' can have an adverse effect on the user-experience: Macromedia Dreamweaver (at least on OSX) has so many 'features' is almost too slow for me to use. It didn't used to be like that, in fact, while I never have used it much, I seem to remember it being much faster and easier a few versions ago...Features donÕt always add much of value to most software and Web applications, designers and developers need to be really careful about adding features. My favorite applications and Web sites do a few things very well. The more you add to something, the more opportunity you have for something to break...Here are some guidelines to remember when designing, architecting, building and writing for the Web..." http://tinyurl.com/6bnsf +11: XML. What Next, XML? By Micah Dubinko "You won't get far into any XML discussion without somebody mentioning the roots of XML. XML is cleaned up, stripped down version of SGML that keeps most of the good stuff and gets rid of most of the parts that make coffee. Such thoughts naturally lead to the question of what comes after XML." http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/02/16/deviant.html [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +12: 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.]