+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 3, Issue 42, March 23, 2005. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 42 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: DREAMWEAVER. 04: EVENTS. 05: FLASH. 06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 07: JAVASCRIPT. 08: NAVIGATION. 09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 10: TOOLS. 11: TYPOGRAPHY. 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. How to Incorporate Stunning Multimedia Into Your Accessible Site By Joe Clark Liveblogging a panel at South by Southwest 2005 with Michael Jordan and Bob Regan. http://blog.fawny.org/2005/03/13/sxsw2005-13d/ How to Use Accessibility Guidelines, Standards and Testing By Joe Clark Liveblogging a panel at South by Southwest 2005 with Sharron Rush, Wendy Chisholm, Matt May, Michael Cooper. http://blog.fawny.org/2005/03/13/sxsw2005-13c/ Accessibility: Can't We All Just Get Along? By Joe Clark Liveblogging a panel at South by Southwest 2005 with James Craig, Derek Featherstone, Ian Lloyd, Glenda Sims. http://blog.fawny.org/2005/03/13/sxsw2005-13a/ Tools of Inspiration By Ann Light "Accessibility tools are not the most glamorous of playthings. More often than not, you make do with a toolbar across your browser; a set of guidelines, or, at best, heuristics; and, if you are lucky, a screen-reader. To the uninitiated, they appear highly technical and unwelcoming. Someone said to me recently it took working alongside a person with very little sight for a couple of hours to transform the meaning of the great wad of guidance she'd been handed about making websites accessible. Suddenly it seemed like an important venture, rather than a test of patience..." http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article2266.asp +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. CSS Negative Margins - Part One By Zoe Gillenwater "Of all the pieces of the CSS box model, margins are probably the easiest to grasp. But did you know that margin is one of the few CSS properties that can have negative values? This article explains how negative margins work, as well as why you would even want to use negative margins in the first place! You'll see some of the cool visual effects that negative margining can help you add to your web pages. This article will also prepare you for an upcoming piece describing how to use negative margins to create cross-browser, CSS columnar layouts." http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=B0029 How to Use CSS for Flickerless Image Replacement By Stu Nicholls "One of the main uses for CSS is the styling of unordered lists used to hold menu links. In this article I explain how to remove the unordered list items and replace them with images and, using two images per link, have a hover state that is flicker free." http://www.webreference.com/programming/css_flicker/index.html How To Bluff Your Way In CSS By Andy Budd and Jeremy Keith Slides from Andy Budd and Jeremy Keith's South by Southwest presentation. http://www.andybudd.com/sxsw05/ How to be Beautiful: More Hi-Fi Design With CSS By Joe Clark Liveblogging a panel at South by Southwest 2005 with Christopher Schmitt, Molly Holzschlag, Douglas Bowman, Dan Cederholm, Dave Shea. http://blog.fawny.org/2005/03/13/sxsw2005-13b/ +03: DREAMWEAVER. The X(HTML) Files: Coding Standards Using XHTML By Dan Short "It seems these days that every cool new technology has an X in the name somewhere. And for some reason this X inspires fear and dread when combined with the Internet: XML, XSL, XPATH, XFORM and, yes, even XHTML. But Extensible HyperText Markup Language shouldn't cause you to lose any sleep at night, especially when you've got the XHTML capabilities of Dreamweaver MX on your side. With these new features the only thing you'll need to worry about when coding to this new standard is what attributes you can and can't use. I'm going to cover several topics in this article, including how XHTML differs from standard HTML, how Dreamweaver MX handles XHTML coding, the difference between Strict and Transitional Document Type Definitions (DTDs) and finally validating your code inside Dreamweaver." http://tinyurl.com/56nst +04: EVENTS. PHP West June 11, 2005 Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada http://tinyurl.com/5yrk6 +05: FLASH. Flash vs. HTML Game Show By Joe Clark Liveblogging a panel at South by Southwest 2005 with Jane Wells, Chris Wetherell, Dunstan Orchard, Eris Free, Kevin Conboy, Jaxon Repp, Vera. http://blog.fawny.org/2005/03/14/sxsw2005-14c/ +06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Underused IA Tools By Peter Van Dijck "Us IA's have a lot of tools at our disposal (personas, sitemaps, task analysis, É), most of them taken and adapted from other disciplines. But I have the feeling we're somehow selective in which tools we appropriate. Here are some tools that we donŐt seem to use much, even though they can be extremely useful." http://tinyurl.com/4l4ux +07: JAVASCRIPT. The Return of JavaScript By Molly E. Holzschlag "Is JavaScript the New Black? Now that we're cleaning up our document and presentation layers, a return to the DOM and behavior layer is back, with a new twist." http://www.molly.com/2005/03/14/the-return-of-javascript/ +08: NAVIGATION. Task Maps By Garrett Dimon "As of late, when designing applications, we have started taking the approach of organizing not by 'site maps', but instead by "task maps". With information-oriented sites, site maps are ok, because the main task is information-seeking, and site maps enable that. Naturally, if all users have to do is find information, then how that information is organized is extremely important. In the case of an application though, information-seeking is often only one of many tasks that users need to accomplish, and a site map is not enough." http://www.yourtotalsite.com/archives/usability/task_maps/Default.aspx Search Optimization, Not Search Engine Optimization By Gerry McGovern "Search optimization focuses on how people search. Search engine optimization focuses on how search engines work. Search optimization sees quality web content as its foundation stone." http://tinyurl.com/5m43p +09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Emergent Semantics By Eric A. Meyer Slides from Eric's South by Southwest presentation. http://complexspiral.com/events/archive/2005/sxsw/ +10: TOOLS. HTML Validator for Firefox and Mozilla (based on Tidy) By Marc Gueury "HTML Validator is an Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation to Firefox and Mozilla. The number of errors of a HTML page is seen on the form of an icon in the status bar when browsing. The details of the errors are seen when looking the HTML source of the page." http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/index.html + 11: TYPOGRAPHY. The Next Big Thing in Online Type By Anne Van Wagener "Beginning in 2006, Microsoft says it will ship with its operating system and other software products six brand new typefaces created especially for extended on-screen reading." http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=78683 +12: USABILITY. Lower-Literacy Users Jakob Nielsen "Lower-literacy users exhibit very different reading behaviors than higher-literacy users: they plow text rather than scan it, and they miss page elements due to a narrower field of view." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20050314.html Avoid Forcing Links to Open in a New Window By John S. Britsios "Actually you should avoid forcing links to open in a new window or pop ups (such as with the "target" attribute or with JavaScript)..." http://www.webnauts.net/new-window.html +13: XML. XForms By Anne Van Kesteren "Yesterday I played with XForms. I have not yet taken the time to read the specification. Instead, I used some examples I found at Bugzilla and the Mozilla XForms project site..." http://annevankesteren.nl/archives/2005/02/xforms Elements of Meaningful XHTML By Tantek Celik Slides from Tantek's South by Southwest presentation. http://tantek.com/presentations/2005/03/elementsofxhtml/ [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). 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.]