+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 3, Issue 43, March 30, 2005. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 43 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: EVALUATION & TESTING. 05: EVENTS. 06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 07: JAVASCRIPT. 08: MISCELLANEOUS. 09: PHP. 10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 11: TOOLS. 12: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 13: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Triple A By Dave Shea "The Italian web developer community is abuzz -- the css Zen Garden is not AAA compliant!" http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2005/03/22/triple_a/index.php +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. CSS Support Could Be Internet Explorer's Weakest Link By Mary Jo Foley and Ryan Naraine "The company (Microsoft) will continue to drag its feet by refusing to provide full support for the CSS2 (Cascading Style Sheets Level 2) W3C (Worldwide Web Consortium) standard, Microsoft partners say. Sources claiming familiarity with Microsoft's IE 7.0 plans said the company will add some additional CSS2 support to its new standalone browser." http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,1995,1776935,00.asp Nifty Corners: rounded corners without images By Alessandro Fulciniti "Rounded Corners with CSS are a hot topic in web design: I think that there are hundreds of articles on them. This page is intended to present the solution I came up, that doesn't requires images, extra markup nor CSS. Let's start..." http://pro.html.it/esempio/nifty/ Inheritance vs Cascade By Tommy Olsson "Inheritance and cascade are two of the most important concepts in CSS, but now and then the terms get mixed up. Even by the very best." http://tinyurl.com/4tu9f CSS and Round Corners: Build Boxes with Curves By Trenton Moss "Are you sick of the straight and narrow? Turn the corner - gently - with CSS! Trenton explains a neat, compact way to integrate curves into your next design, with the help of some tricky CSS." http://www.sitepoint.com/article/css-round-corners-boxes-curves South by Southwest Panel Notes By Dave Shea "Another great year of South by Southwest has come and gone. More great people, more great conversations, and more great barbecue." http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2005/03/17/sxsw_panel_n/index.php +03: DREAMWEAVER. Validator does not catch certain types of invalid XHTML markup By Macromedia Dreamweaver TechNote "When validating a page for valid XHTML 1.0 Strict markup (File > Check Page Validate Markup > XHTML 1.0 Strict), Macromedia Dreamweaver fails to validate against all the rules as documented in the W3C XHTML specification. Specific XHTML rules that Dreamweaver does not check for include: Documents must contain an XML namespace (xmlns) in the tag declaration; There must be an XHTML DOCTYPE that references one of the three XHTML DTDs (XHTML Strict, XHTML Transitional, or XHTML Frameset); All image tags must have alt, height and width attributes; Attribute values must always be quoted." http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=tn_19462 +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Welcome to Eyetrack III By Steve Outing and Laura Ruel "How much do we really know about how people read news websites? We can track their behavior clicking through a site visit. We can collect personal information. We can ask them questions. But that presents a small part of the full picture. To get the rest, we need to climb inside their heads and look through their eyes as they view online news sites -- to peer into their minds and see patterns that even they don't consciously see." http://www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/about.htm Eyes top left - what web authors learn from Eyetrack III By Rachel McAlpine "Where do your eyes go when you read articles on the Web? What do you notice, and what do you miss? The upper left quarter of the screen gets the most attention, according to the Eyetrack III research of The Poynter Institute, the Estlow Center for Journalism & New Media, and Eyetools." http://www.webpagecontent.com/arc_archive/176/5/ +05: EVENTS. UIST 2005 Eighteenth Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology October 23-26, 2005 Seattle, Washington U.S.A. http://www.acm.org/uist/ +06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. The IA of Things: Twenty Years Of Lessons Learned IA Summit 2005 Presentation By James Leftwich "It's the dawn of an age where interactive functionality and information is available and intertwined everywhere. The past two decades have been a pre-dawn period where products, software, environments, functionality, and interaction with information have gradually converged. What lessons have been learned within a single consulting design career during this period, pursuing from the beginning, convergence in these areas?" http://orbitnet.com/iasummit2005/ +07: JAVASCRIPT. Call an Apple an Apple By Ian Hickson "It's psychotic! People keep creating new ways to refer to existing technologies. The worst of it is it's really confusing to those of us who develop these technologies!" http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1111339822&count=1 Will AJAX help Google clean up? By Paul Festa "In the race to build the Web of the future, some developers are reaching back to the past. Start-ups and industry giants such as Microsoft continue to devise newfangled systems for delivering desktop-like applications over the Web. But search giant Google has taken a different path, using older technology to build its newest applications such as Google Maps and Gmail." http://tinyurl.com/7yh3b +08: MISCELLANEOUS. Interviews: Cameron Moll By Meryl K. Evans "This week's issue of Digital Web Magazine Meryl K. Evans returns to interview one of the great web designers of today; Cameron Moll. I had the opportunity to meet Cameron in Austin and I was seriously impressed by his ability to not only teach but to inspire. It is very clear that Cameron an in-depth understand of web design that goes far beyond what he articulates on his blog, Authentic Boredom. I highly recommend you not only read this interview, but book mark his blog and subscribe to his RSS feed, because if something brilliant is going to surface in the design world Cameron will have his finger on it." http://www.digital-web.com/articles/cameron_moll/ +09: PHP. PHP Application Development Part Two By David Fells "Building on what we learned in part one, this article discusses data storage, system configuration, error handling and logging. Read on to find out how practicing the proper use of these concepts can simplify application maintenance and testing, and accelerate system debugging." http://www.devshed.com/c/a/PHP/PHP-Application-Development-Part-Two/ +10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Opera's Acid 2 challenge to Microsoft By Hakon Wium Lie "Last month, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates made two announcements that are important for the future of the Web. First, he embraced interoperability between software from Microsoft and that from other vendors. Then he announced that a new version of Microsoft's Web browser--Internet Explorer 7--is coming. Does this mean IE 7 will be interoperable with other browsers? Does it mean IE 7 will take Web standards seriously? Don't get your hopes up..." http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-5620423.html +11: TOOLS. Selenium By Jason Huggins, Paul Gross and Jie Tina Wang "Selenium is a test tool for web applications. Selenium tests run directly in a browsers, just as real users do. And they run in Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Firefox on Windows, Linux and Macintosh." http://selenium.thoughtworks.com/index.html +12: USABILITY. Usability 101: Satisfaction By Tristan Louis "Today, we continue the Usability 101 series by exploring the concept of satisfaction." http://www.tnl.net/blog/entry/Usability_101:_Satisfaction Userism By Jeffrey Zeldman "Designers with cutting-edge skills are suddenly more interested in creating great user experiences than in pushing the technology for its own sake." http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0305d.shtml [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.]