+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 3, Issue 51, May 25, 2005.

An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. 

++ISSUE 51 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: EVALUATION & TESTING.
05: EVENTS.
06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
07: JAVASCRIPT.
08: MISCELLANEOUS.
09: NAVIGATION.
10: PHP.
11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
12: TOOLS.
13: TYPOGRAPHY.
14: USABILITY.

SECTION TWO: 
15: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site?

[Contents ends.]


++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Oops, Google Did it Again
By Carroll Tech
Google's visual captcha requirement means that blind bloggers can no longer
sign up for accounts without sighted assistance.
http://blog.carrolltech.org/archives/24

Google Accessibility Issue
By Bill Drew
"The article below was prepared by a colleague of mine, Joan Marie
Diggs of the Carroll Center for the Blind Technology Program. It clearly
explains an accessibility issue and makes recommendations on a course
of action for people to assist in advocacy."
http://tinyurl.com/a8cxz

Web Accessibility for Screen Magnifier Users
By Trenton Moss
"All-in-all, there are quite a few things that can be done to improve usability and accessibility for screen magnifier users. The good news though is that all of them improve usability for absolutely everyone."
http://tinyurl.com/cexk2

Speaking ALT Text
By Bob Easton
"Bob starts a collection of recording so we can actually hear how screen readers behave."
http://www.access-matters.com/2005/05/15/speaking-alt-text/

Unordered Lists: More Than Just Bullets
By Brian Huisman
"When marking up content which could be defined in some way as a list, you should consider using an unordered list (<ul>) for presentation. Not only does it improve the readability of your HTML code, it also applies meaning to content which would otherwise have none."
http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/unordered-lists

Designing Websites With Senior Citizens in Mind
By Emily Shartin
It's an area that a growing number of companies and organizations are paying attention to, and with good reason. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, roughly one quarter of all Americans age 65 and over use the Internet. Just over 40 percent of all wired seniors use the Internet to find financial information, and 15 percent use it to buy or sell stocks, bonds, or mutual funds."
http://tinyurl.com/8893c

More From Our Dear British Friends
By Joe Clark
"Two accessibility reports, only one of them recent..."
http://blog.fawny.org/2005/05/13/reports/

Don't Disable Your Site for Handicapped Users
Matt Bailey
"Are you designing web sites that are accessible to disabled users?  If not, you're overlooking a powerful market segment of millions of searchers and potential buyers..." (hat tip Henry Helgen)
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3506256


+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

How to Style a Definition List with CSS
By Stu Nicholls
Many tutorials on the styling of CSS lists for menus use unordered lists, but these can be difficult to understand since extra styling is needed to remove the bullets. This week, you'll learn how to style a Definition List, which is equally suitable for menus, but is a little easier to understand."
http://www.webreference.com/programming/css_style/index.html

And all that (CSS) Malarkey
By Andy (Malarkey) Clarke 
ŇCovering body attributes, attribute selectors and pseudo-elements. Scattered thoughts written during the design.Ó
http://tinyurl.com/8fywg

Specificity
By Patrick Griffiths
"If you have two (or more) conflicting CSS rules that point to the same element, there are some basic rules that a browser follows to determine which one is most specific and therefore wins out. It may not seem like something that important, and in most cases you won't come across any conflicts at all, but the larger and more complex your CSS files become, or the more CSS files you start to juggle with, the greater likelihood there is of conflicts turning up."
http://www.htmldog.com/guides/cssadvanced/specificity/

Learn CSS, part 1
By Michael Youssef
"This series of articles will give you everything you need to master CSS 2.1. I wrote the series for anyone who wants to learn CSS. I assume that you have a basic understanding of HTML, XHTML and XML, and you know the difference between these markup languages and creating Web pages. We will take a practical approach to discussing the concepts of CSS, with real-world examples, and we will cover some information about CSS 3.0 Specifications too. To help you keep track of the order of the articles, I will use the title of the series (Learn CSS), followed by the title of the article, followed by the article number. We begin with an introduction to CSS. We will choose the browsers that we will be working with through the code examples. After that, you will be introduced to basic CSS concepts such as rules, colors, data types, units, selectors and pseudo selectors. We will talk about inheritance and cascade; then we will discuss text and font properties, and concepts in detail with many examples."
http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/Web-Style-Sheets/Learn-CSS-part-1/

Modular CSS
By Mike Stenhouse
"This isn't a new idea but looking at people's code it doesn't seem to be a particularly widely used practice: modular CSS. That's a poncy name for the very simple idea of grouping related styles into separate stylesheets. The same set of tasks turn up on project after project and a little careful thought can save hours of foundation work, allowing you to get on with the serious business of turning a flat design into a web page far more quickly. The broad groups that I use are: typography, forms, layout, navigation and color..."
http://www.contentwithstyle.co.uk/index.php?id=12&s=Articles


+03: DREAMWEAVER.

Open Source Alternatives to Dreamweaver Templating
By Mark Stosberg
"If you have at least two pages on a website you maintain, you can benefit from a tool to help manage the design and content independently. The best tool I've seen for this is Macromedia's commercial Dreamweaver software, available for Macintosh and Windows. The key thing that Dreamweaver gets right is its use of templates. As an open source enthusiast and Linux desktop user, I went in search of a free, open source alternative. This article explains the value of Dreamweaver's template system, and presents the results of my search."
http://osdir.com/slash3344.html


+04: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Why Listening to Users Can Damage Your Website
By David Unsworth
"The problems for usability testing are all too clear. Any approach is flawed if entrenched in the assumption that the user is consciously aware of their decision-making strategies and that we can discover the rationale either by questionnaire, interview or observation. All of which leaves us with the question of how to study usability without resorting to the hetero-phenomenology of the user's own perception, and, in pursuit of this, only approaches based on observation of actual user behaviour appear to offer hope."
http://tinyurl.com/7lgfl


+05: EVENTS.

Designing for User Experiences (DUX) 2005
November 3-5, 2005
San Francisco, California  U.S.A.
http://www.dux2005.org/


+06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

What Is Information Architecture?
By Iain Barker
"This article provides an introduction to information architecture, discusses the evolution of the discipline and provides a 9-step guide for how to create an effective information architecture. It also discusses the relationship between information architecture and usability, in the context of real-world projects."
http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_whatisinfoarch/index.html


+07: JAVASCRIPT.

The JavaScript Diaries: Part 3
By Lee Underwood
"This week we take a look at JavaScript operators, which are used to accomplish many different tasks. Some of the topics covered are mathematical operators, comparison operators, assignment operators, logical (boolean) operators and much more."
http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/diaries/3/

Form Validation with JavaScript Regular Expressions (Part 1)
By Dan Wellman
"Forms are one of the most useful ways to collect information online from customers and potential customers who visit your website. But that information is just a waste of electrons if it is not correct. How can you validate it? This article explains some of the building blocks you can use in JavaScript to at least ascertain that information entered into a form is in the expected format."
http://tinyurl.com/ad8fq

Form Validation with JavaScript Regular Expressions (Part 2)
By Dan Wellman
"In this second article in a two-part series, you will use the JavaScript regular expressions you learned in the first article to put together a script that will validate a range of form inputs."
http://tinyurl.com/bgf9l

Errors and AJAX
By Joshua Gitlin
"In case you haven't heard by now, the hottest buzzword in the realm of web technology is AJAX as coined in an Adaptive Path essay. The crux of the AJAX framework is the XMLHttpRequest JavaScript object which allows client-side developers to send and receive XML documents over HTTP without interrupting the user, and without hacking around with hidden frames. Now, some might shudder at the notion of allowing client-side developers who might be more used to validating forms and animating rollover images to suddenly be responsible for traversing XML documents and negotiating HTTP headers, but without risk, there is no reward. And just to soothe any lingering trepidation, I will demonstrate how to use XMLHttpRequest to not only add previously impossible or infeasible features, but also to reduce errors and improve quality."
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/05/11/ajax-error.html

O'Reilly and Adaptive Path Team Up for Ajax Summit
By Quinn Norton
"Ajax breaks the interaction model of the Web. It faces the unique user interface problem of blending the expectations users have of a website with the behavior of a desktop application. This is the consequence of giving the user desktop app powers within their trusty browser."
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2005/05/12/ajaxsummit.html

Ajax, Ajax Everywhere
By Derek Powazek
Derek Powazek has written a article on Ajax focusing on the user experience."
http://www.powazek.com/2005/05/000520.html

AJAX and Interface Design
By Luke Wroblewski
"When any new technology undergoes fast and widespread adoption, thereŐs always an opportunity for unintended misuse. So itŐs no surprise that the World Wide Web has seen its fair share of mishandled technologies..."
http://www.lukew.com/resources/articles/ajax_design.asp

Ajax Is The New Flash
By Paul Scrivens
Ajax (let's not argue about naming) represents the next cool technology for web designers. Yes it has been available for years, but not until Google started using it has it gotten this much attention and been spread so rapidly amongst the community. However, just like Flash this creates a lot of issues for users of the web.
http://9rules.com/whitespace/ajax_is_the_new_flash.php

Ajax: 99 Percent Bad
By Johnnie Manzari
"What is Ajax? Ajax was coined by Mr Garrett of Adaptive Path in his essay Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications. This was on February 18, 2005, and even though it's only been under three months, the term has spread quickly..."
http://www.johnniemanzari.com/archives/2005/05/ajax_99_bad.html


+08: MISCELLANEOUS.

Ten Questions for Jason Santa Maria
By Russ Weakley
"Jason Santa Maria, talks about revamping blogs, web standards influences, awards, learning new skills, sketchbooks, grey boxes, design trends and more."
http://webstandardsgroup.org/features/jason-santa-maria.cfm

Ten Questions for Joe Clark
By Russ Weakley
"Joe Clark talks about fonts, 'more' links, opening new windows, skip links,
source order, titles, accessible PDFs, forms, data tables and more."
http://webstandardsgroup.org/features/joe-clark.cfm

8 Questions for Dean Edwards
By Dante Evans
"A short interview with the man behind IE7, Dean Edwards."
http://www.dantecubed.com/publications/dean-edwards-interview/

Ten Questions for Derek Featherstone
By Russ Weakley
"Derek Featherstone talks about accessibility, semantically correct mark-up,
tabindex, skip links, link styles, the link element and accessibility myths."
http://webstandardsgroup.org/features/derek-featherstone.cfm

Successful Web Development Methodolgies
By Martin Bauer
"Commercial Web development has been around for more than 10 years. As an industry, this one's still fairly young when you consider others that have been around for centuries. But relative youth as an industry is no excuse for not doing better."
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/successful-development


+09: NAVIGATION.

Tags Are Not Folksonomies
By Clay Shirky
"Tags are labels attached to things. This procedure is absolutely orthogonal to whether professionals or amateurs are doing the tagging. Professionals often think tags are covalent with folksonomies because their minds have been poisoned by the false dream of ontology, but also because tagging looks too easy (in the same way the Web looked too easy to theoreticians of hypertext.) Not only are tags amenable to being used as controlled vocabularies, itŐs happening today, where groups are agreeing about how to tag things so as to produce streams of e.g. business research. More importantly, tags are not the same as flat name spaces."
http://tinyurl.com/8v4n6

Folksonomy
By D. Keith Robinson
"A very, very simple overview of Folksonomies."
http://www.7nights.com/asterisk/archive/2005/02/folksonomy

Emergent i18n Effects in Folksonomies
By Peter Van Dijck
"Folksonomies are taxonomies created by users who add tags to things. Folksonomies are messy and have a lot of problems, but their great merit is that theyŐre scalable and they use the usersŐ terminology by definition, a serious problem with more classic taxonomies that are created by information architects or librarians."
http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2005/01/15/2419/


+10: PHP.

A Case Study in Dynamic Web Design	
By Mark A. McBride
"Looks at the issues faced when designing web pages strictly with HTML. Considers an alternative approach using PHP, XSLT, XML, and CSS."
http://www.omninerd.com/articles/articles.php?aid=8

Writing Secure PHP
By Dave Child
"PHP is a very easy language to learn, and many people without any sort of background in programming learn it as a way to add interactivity to their web sites. Unfortunately, that often means PHP programmers, especially those newer to web development, are unaware of the potential security risks their web applications can contain. Here are a few of the more common security problems and how to avoid them."
http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/php/writing-secure-php/


+11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

Web Browser Standards, 2005
By Taran Rampersad
"The truth of the matter is that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has done and continues to create great standards for the web. The problem is that browser manufacturers - most notably Microsoft - aren't creating browsers that aren't completely compatible with these standards..."
http://www.digitaldivide.net/blog/Taran/view?PostID=3242

Semantic Markup and Templates
By Kevin Leitch
"In this last article of Issue 2 we take a look at how to use semantic markup when building your XHTML style-free templates and pages. We go through what semantic coding is, why its important and what sort of benefits we can expect to get from using it."
http://www.kevinleitch.co.uk/projectnew/article.php?id=10

IBM Backs Firefox In-House
By Martin LaMonica
"IBM is encouraging its employees to use Firefox, aiding the open-source Web browser's quest to chip away at Microsoft's Internet Explorer...By supporting Firefox internally, IBM is also furthering its commitment to open-source products based on industry standards, said Brian Truskowski, chief information officer at IBM...'This is a real good example of walking the talk when it comes it comes to open standards and open source,'Truskowski said...Because Firefox is based on industry standards--as opposed to proprietary technology--IBM has some "comfort" that it will interoperate well with third-party products, Truskowski said. By contrast, Microsoft's Internet Explorer uses some proprietary technology, such as ActiveX for running programs within a browser. 'What I will avoid is anything that is proprietary in nature,' Truskowski said..."
http://news.com.com/IBM+backs+Firefox+in-house/2100-7344_3-5704750.html

Web Standards Presentation
By Mike Brown
http://govis.signify.co.nz


+12: TOOLS.

Nvu 1.0 Preview Release
By Daniel Glazman
"Finally! A complete Web Authoring System for Linux Desktop users as well as Microsoft Windows and Macintosh users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver. Nvu (pronounced N-view, for a "new view") makes managing a web site a snap. Now anyone can create web pages and manage a website with no technical expertise or knowledge of HTML." This open source collaborative project effectively is a re-engineering of the composer element of the old Netscape. NvuDev.org is the main site for developers who want to get the latest version of Nvu as well as for those who want to contribute to the project.
http://www.nvu.com/

Colours and Contrast
By Tommy Olsson
"This tool computes the colour brightness difference and the colour difference between a background colour and a foreground colour."
http://www.autisticcuckoo.net/tools/web/colours-contrast.php

CLC-4-TTS and Fire Vox
By Charles L. Chen
"CLC-4-TTS is a collection of JavaScript functions that can be used for transforming Firefox into a self-voicing browser. This software is open source and is licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL"
https://webspace.utexas.edu/chencl1/clc-4-tts/index.html

LinkChecker - Firefox Extension
By Kevin Freitas
"Check webpage links at a glance with simple color coding. Ditch those massive listings of bad links that provide no context and add LinkChecker to your arsenal of web development tools today."
http://www.kevinfreitas.net/extensions/linkchecker/


+13: TYPOGRAPHY.

Using Colour And Type Effectively
By Kevin Leitch
"There are lots of different mediums that good colour and typography should be used - magazines, books, posters, signage and (most applicable for us) screens. How we use colours and fonts (and just as importantly, how we use the spaces in between them) is the most telling aspect of web design - these things more than any other are what attract us to a website and also what repulse us too."
http://www.kevinleitch.co.uk/projectnew/article.php?id=12


+14: USABILITY.

Contingency Design
By Kevin Leitch
"Contingency design refers to the process of identifying possible weak points where a user could possibly break the system. In this article we go through how to identify weak areas and what the main types of possible error are and how to handle them"
http://www.kevinleitch.co.uk/projectnew/article.php?id=9

The Canonical Intranet Homepage
By Jakob Nielsen
"In recent years, intranet homepages have become very similar in their basic layout. Intranets that look the same can nonetheless differ drastically in usability due to different features and content."
http://useit.com/alertbox/20050523.html

Web Content Management Is Not Data Management
By Gerry McGovern
"Web content management and data/document management require very different approaches. Data management is about storage; web content management is about using content to make the sale, deliver the service, and build the brand."
http://tinyurl.com/7twpb


[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.]