+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 3, Issue 46, April 20, 2005. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 46 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: EVENTS. 05: FLASH. 06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 07: JAVASCRIPT. 08: MISCELLANEOUS. 09: PHP. 10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 11: TOOLS. 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. Writing Effective ALT Text For Images By Trenton Moss "Anyone who knows anything about web accessibility knows that images need alternative, or ALT, text assigned to them. This is because screen readers can't understand images, but rather read aloud the alternative text assigned to them. In Internet Explorer we can see this ALT text, simply by mousing over the image and looking at the yellow tooltip that appears. Other browsers (correctly) don't do this..." http://tinyurl.com/46xod The Importance of Degrading Gracefully By Shelley Powers "What does degrade, gracefully, mean? It means that a technology such as Javascript or DHTML cannot be used for critical functionality; not unless thereÕs an easy to access alternative." http://tinyurl.com/47gnd +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Getting Into Good Coding Habits By Adrian Senior "In this article we will look at what I would consider to be good coding practices when laying out a CSS design and building your style sheet. We will look at how we can make our style sheets more manageable through the use of comments and see how we can use our style sheets to their greatest effect." http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=FAF76 Customizing Styles: User-Controlled Style Sheets, part 1 By Alejandro Gervasio "Giving your visitors more control over how they see your website makes for a very user-friendly experience. If you get a lot of visually impaired Web surfers, you might want to set up a "switcher" to allow them to switch between the default version and a high-contrast version of your website. In this first of a three-part article series, Alejandro Gervasio explains a couple of simple ways to set this up." http://tinyurl.com/47l5a +03: COLOR. ColorCombos.com By Gremillion Consulting This site was built to help web developers quickly select and test color combinations." http://www.colorcombos.com/ +04: EVENTS. Accessibility University May 13-14, 2005 Austin, Texas U.S.A. http://www.knowbility.org/conference/ Extreme Markup 2005 August 1-5, 2005 Montreal, Quebec, Canada http://www.extrememarkup.com/extreme/ +05: FLASH. Lessig Preaches Openness to Flash Faithful By Paul Festa "But the technology itself remains under Macromedia's proprietary control. And unlike HTML, which lets anyone inspect a Web page's underlying source code, Flash movies keep that information under wraps. On that note, Lessig said Macromedia should study the explosive growth of HTML, which created a vast community of Web developers by allowing them to "steal" from one another and expand on each other's work, as compared with the less spectacular growth of Apple Computer's AppleScript scripting language, which hides its code." http://tinyurl.com/63jq9 +06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. The IA of Things: Twenty Years of Lessons Learned 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. Updated: Open Firefox JavaScript Console in a Sidebar By Jim Rutherford "Yesterday I posted a tip on how to add the Firefox JavaScript Console to the sidebar panel. The one problem with the method, is that you can only expand the panel to a certain width, and even at that width, important debugging information ? like the line number of the error and the page of the error, is cut off. There is a solution and it involves adding two CSS declarations to your userContent.css file. With that being said, here are the updated instructions to placing the JS Console in your sidebar." http://tinyurl.com/4ukgp JavaScript is Not the Devil's Plaything By Cameron Adams "In many respects, JavaScript is where CSS was about two years ago. Only a handful of people have a handle on its true capabilities, and everyone else is sitting around skeptically judging it with their tainted knowledge, circa 1998. Everything coming out of Google's stable helps to raise the profile of JavaScript, but I think that the natural complexity of a programming language (compared to a simple layout language like CSS) and the usual amounts of obfuscation that appear in Google's code prevent their applications from helping to re-educate developers about JavaScript's capabilities." http://www.themaninblue.com/writing/perspective/2005/04/12/ JavaScript Tutorial By Manish Sharma "A JavaScript tutorial with over 30 lessons. Each lesson contain lecture, assignments with available answers which appear in a different window, and online workspace." http://www.webdevelopersnotes.com/tutorials/javascript/index.php3 +08: MISCELLANEOUS. Joe Gillespie Interview By Dave Linabury "I'm a conceptualist, not a stylist. I think that styles can be progressive looking, technologies can be progressive but the thinking behind it is fairly timeless. I would much rather see a well-executed, simple ideaÑa visual pun or mentally provocative imageÑthan all the cliched Japanese visual pyrotechnics." http://digital-web.com/articles/joe_gillespie/ +09: PHP. Five Things You Didn't Know You Could Do with PHP By Larry Ullman "When I began programming with PHP back in 1999, I felt that I'd discovered the perfect tool for quickly developing dynamic Web sites. At that time, the language's features and list of functions were both relatively modest. Over the years, the language itself, the extensions it supports, and its overall popularity have all dramatically increased. Unfortunately, it's also become more and more difficult for even the most attentive programmer to keep up. So, if you haven't caught all the new additions or discovered every useful function, start by checking out this list of the Five Things You Didn't Know You Could Do with PHP!" http://www.devsource.com/article2/0,1759,1778106,00.asp +10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. The Acid2 Browser Test By WaSP "Acid2 is a test page, written to help browser vendors ensure proper support for web standards in their products." It is a pretty crafty HTML+CSS test designed to ensure that browsers are properly implementing support for those standards. Every browser fails it spectacularly. http://webstandards.org/act/acid2/ +11: TOOLS. Combo Tester By Gremillion Consulting A tool "that allows web developers to see how different color combinations work together on the screen." http://www.colorcombos.com/combotester.html +12: USABILITY. Evangelizing Usability: Medical Usability, How to Kill Patients Through Bad Design By Jakob Neilson "A field study identified twenty-two ways that automated hospital systems can result in the wrong medication being dispensed to patients. Most of these flaws are classic usability problems that have been understood for decades...The fact that academic websites are so miserable to use is surely a contributing factor to the isolating and narrowing effect of current research practices. If outsiders could more easily connect with research results in other disciplines -- where they don't know the scientists personally -- we might see more cross-fertilization and growth in our shared knowledge base. Indeed, a unified, worldwide hypertext system was the Web's founding motivation." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20050411.html Long Forms: Scroll or Tab? By Caroline Jarrett "As some of you will know, I'm pretty much a diehard forms obsessive and thereÕs nothing I like more than a question about forms Ð especially if I have some experience or data to support my answer. So I thought I'd devote this monthÕs Corner to one that comes up quite often..." http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article2352.asp Standards for Online Content Authors By Rachel McAlpine "The standards on this page include non-technical standards relevant to all web authors and technical standards relevant to some web authors." http://www.qwc.co.nz/arc_archive/177/5/ +13: XML. Using Stylesheet Schemas By Bob DuCharme "Last month I promised to eventually discuss the use of schemas with XSLT 2.0 - that is, XSLT 2.0's ability to read a W3C schema to discover additional information about a source tree, result tree, or interim temporary tree, and to use that information when processing a document. This month I'll talk about the use of schemas with XSLT, but not schemas for the documents you're processing." http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/04/06/tr-xml.html [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.]