+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 3, Issue 52, June 1, 2005. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 52 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: DREAMWEAVER. 05: EVALUATION & TESTING. 06: JAVASCRIPT. 07: MISCELLANEOUS. 08: NAVIGATION. 09: PHP. 10: SITES & BLOGS. 11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 12: TOOLS. 13: TYPOGRAPHY. 14: USABILITY. 15: XML. SECTION TWO: 16: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Multimedia: Enhancing Ability By Leonie Watson "Leonie Watson looks at the ways in which multimedia can be used to benefit people with cognitive and hearing impairments." http://www.skillsforaccess.org.uk/articles.php?id=152 Provide Text Equivalents For Audio In MAGpie By Skills for Access "Providing captions enables media that contains spoken or other audio information important to understanding the media's content (for example on- or off-screen dialogue, sound effects, or background music) to be accessible to anyone who has difficulty hearing, or is unable to hear, the media soundtrack. The task of creating an effective set of captions that are appropriately synchronized with the media clip to be captioned can be challenging and time-consuming, and this task can be made significantly easier when using authoring software such as MAGpie." http://www.skillsforaccess.org.uk/howto.php?id=132 Provide Text Equivalents For Graphics In HTML By Skills for Access "Alternative text for graphics presented in HTML content is essential to ensure understanding of content by anyone using a browsing device that does not show graphics. Most importantly, this includes screen readers and Braille display devices used by blind and visually impaired people, but also includes non-graphic browsers such as Lynx, and for people with low bandwidth internet connections, who may have turned off images to speed up browsing. Appropriate alternative text for graphics is also important for effective indexing of web pages by search engine indexing software." http://www.skillsforaccess.org.uk/howto.php?id=110 Avoid Specific Frequencies for Flickering Content By Skills for Access "While any online content viewed on a monitor where the display is generated by a cathode ray tube is, by its nature, flashing, refresh rates of the monitor itself should be imperceptible to the end user. However, for people who have photosensitive epilepsy, media content that flickers or flashes at specific frequencies, or rapidly moves between light and dark shades (strobe-style flashing) may trigger seizures, and steps must be taken to ensure that these people are not unexpectedly exposed to flashing content at these danger frequencies." http://www.skillsforaccess.org.uk/howto.php?id=99 Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) By Robert Nyman "When developing web sites, making them as accessible as possible is crucial, both to people with different kinds of disabilities as well as to all kinds of different devices, web browsers and screen readers etc. Why? Out of respect for the user, while making the web site available to as many users as possible." http://www.robertnyman.com/2005/04/21/wai/ The Simpsons For The Visually Impaired By Kirk Biglione "When explaining web accessibility to the uninitiated I find that it sometimes helps to apply the concept to other mediums. HereÕs an example I hadn't thought of before. Imagine trying to watch The Simpsons without actually watching The Simpsons. Each episode has a million little sight gags and visual clues that fly by so quickly that you practically need a TiVo to keep up. So how do visually impaired people watch The Simpsons?..." http://www.alttags.org/archives/2005/05/20/47/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Spring into HTML and CSS: Working with Color and Images Using CSS By Molly Holzschlag "This content is excerpted from Chapter 8 of the book, 'Spring Into HTML and CSS', authored by Molly Holzschlag..." http://www.webreference.com/programming/html_css/ More About Custom DTDs By W3C Quality Assurance Team "In a previous issue of A List Apart, Peter-Paul Koch discussed the addition to his markup of non-standard attributes to create JavaScript triggers. J. David Eisenberg noted that since the attributes were not part of XHTML, the W3C Markup Validator was likely to reject documents using these attributes, and wrote an article on the topic of Custom DTDs and validation. This article will follow up on these writings by discussing the need for custom DTDs: why making a custom DTD for the sole purpose of validation is a mistake, and in which cases it does make sense to create and use one. For these cases, this article will also present techniques for creating clean custom DTDs and avoiding hacks." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/customdtds2/ Rob Lab: CSS Layouts By Robert Nyman "By popular request, here you will find different examples of how to create column layouts with CSS instead of using a table. There are a myriad ways of doing this, but I think these are simple and efficient enough. I will only show-case the most common scenarios here. An element with the clear style is used to clear the floated elements." http://robertnyman.com/roblab/css-column-layouts.htm What Is Line Height? By Tommy Olsson "Today's excursion is in fact written on demand. A reader contacted me and suggested an article about the line-height CSS property..." http://www.autisticcuckoo.net/archive.php?id=2005/05/05/line-height Learn CSS, part 2: Units of Measurement By Michael Youssef "In this second article in a multi-part series covering Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), we will discuss units of measurement for establishing the size of certain elements in your Web page. You will learn the difference between absolute and relative units of measurement, and which ones are better to use for particular purposes." http://tinyurl.com/92hsx +03: COLOR. Avoid Colour Problems, General Advice By Skills for Access "There are many groups of people who may experience colour-related access barriers when trying to access multimedia content. People with a colour deficit (colour blindness) may be unable to distinguish between specific colour pairs, while people with no functional vision, and who are listening to content, will also be unable to detect information presented using colour alone. Colour combinations with insufficient contrast may result in material that is difficult to read for many people. The same problems may be experienced by anyone accessing the resource using a device that has limited (or no) capability to display colours." http://www.skillsforaccess.org.uk/howto.php?id=111 +04: DREAMWEAVER. Achieve Accessibility with Dreamweaver By Virginia DeBolt "I presented a program to the New Mexico Macromedia Users Group this week. The presentation is available now: Achieve Accessibility with Dreamweaver. A couple of points to keep in mind regarding the presentation: some of the demo pages were done in Dreamweaver and showed how to code something. The speaker's notes are not shown. I'm toying with the idea of adding the speaker's notes to the presentation, but it is fairly complete as is..." http://www.vdebolt.com/nmmug/ +05: EVALUATION & TESTING. Practical (and Cheap) Usability Testing By Chris Nagele "When building interactive Web sites or applications, the success of our work is not based solely on marketing strategy and design. The real challenge is providing Web customers with clarity, control and satisfaction." http://www.marketingprofs.com/5/nagele1.asp Building and Using Personas By Kevin Leitch "Personas are a great way to get your head in the right place to make life easy for the people who matter the most - the users of the website. In this article we go through the process of creating Personas and Scenarios and why these things are so important." http://www.kevinleitch.co.uk/projectnew/article.php?id=4 +06: JAVASCRIPT. Ajax Patterns By Michael Mahemoff "This is an in-progress collection of AJAX patterns, building on an initial draft at my blog. " http://www.ajaxpatterns.org/index.php?title=Main_Page Why Ajax Isn't Web 2 By Anne Van Kesteren "It has come to my attention that there are some people out there who think Ajax and its encapsulated technologies represent Web 2. I can assure that when you tell that to a random person at the company I work for - and other companies doing similar things, obviously - they will laugh you in the face. And when they donÕt; theyÕre either lazy or feel pity for you. (They may even invite other people to join their smirking at you.) Even the Ôofficial Ajax FAQÕ states that Ajax is nothing new and has been around for years. With the release of Internet Explorer 5.0 somewhere in March 1999 XMLHttpRequest was unleashed to the web through an ActiveX layer. From then on web developers were able to use its functionality for web applications. The recent outburst and joy about the technology is mostly thanks to Google; Gmail seems to have made people realize the possibilities of Ajax. Downside is that it totally goes against the idea of accessibility all Ôstandard gurusÕ adopted till. Apart from Mark Pilgrim most thought it was cool and went on with it..." http://annevankesteren.nl/archives/2005/05/ajax Ajax Mistakes By Alex Bosworth "Ajax is an awesome technology that is driving a new generation of web apps, from maps.google.com to colr.org to backpackit.com. But Ajax is also a dangerous technology for web developers, its power introduces a huge amount of UI problems as well as server side state problems and server load problems. I've compiled a list of the many mistakes developers using Ajax often make. Javascript itself is a dangerous UI technology, but I've tried to keep the list to problems particular to Ajax development..." http://sourcelabs.com/ajb/archives/2005/05/ajax_mistakes.html A Simpler Ajax Path By Matthew Eernisse "I began working with web applications back in the bad old days, when making an application behave like a desktop app meant wrestling with byzantine table-based layouts nested five and six levels deep, and horrid, hackish frame sets within frame sets within frame sets. Those were the days. Things have steadily improved for web developers with the advent of standards-compliant browsers, CSS, DHTML, and the DOM. Pervasive broadband access has made web apps feel a lot snappier. Now something called the XMLHttpRequest object makes it even easier to develop full-blown, superinteractive applications to deploy in the browser. While not exactly new, the XMLHttpRequest object is receiving more attention lately as the linchpin in a new approach to web app development, most recently dubbed Ajax (asynchronous JavaScript and XML), which powers the cool features found on sites like Flickr, Amazon's A9.com, and the new poster children for whizzy web-based interactivity, Google Maps and Google Suggest. The snazzy Ajax moniker seems to be getting some momentum--it's popping up in all sorts of places, including the Ajaxian weblog and the recent Ajax Summit put together by O'Reilly Media and Adaptive Path..." http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/05/19/xmlhttprequest.html +07: MISCELLANEOUS. Why You Must Lead or Follow Scott Berkun "...being a leader rarely means taking forceful control over people, things or decisions. Instead it means a willingness to listen to others, and treat them with respect. Their opinions should contribute to your thinking for how best to apply your influence. The value of a leader is their positive effect on a team, not the force and power they have at their disposal. Focusing on the former is going to make good things happen. But someone that focuses on the later (force and power) is an empire builder, who is basically in an arms race with everyone else, and probably has no idea what to use those arms for should they ever win their political and power wars..." http://www.scottberkun.com/essays/essay42.htm Interview with Kelly Goto By Carolyn Wood "Kelly Goto is the principal and founder of gotomedia, an award-winning strategic consultancy specializing in user experience and branding for technology and product focused companies. Gotomedia has created or redesigned sites and web based projects for companies including Adobe, Macromedia, Verizon, and the FDIC. A popular speaker at web design conferences, Kelly Goto has just released the second edition of her highly-regarded book 'Web Redesign 2.0: Workflow that Works'." http://www.wise-women.org/features/kelly_goto/ +08: NAVIGATION. Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata By Adam Mathes "This paper examines user-generated metadata as implemented and applied in two web services designed to share and organize digital media to better understand grassroots classification..." http://tinyurl.com/4vrc7 Folksonomies? How about Metadata Ecologies? By Louis Rosenfeld "Lately, you can't surf information architecture blogs for five minutes without stumbling on a discussion of folksonomies (there; it happened again!). As sites like Flickr and del.icio.us successfully utilize informal tags developed by communities of users, it's easy to say that the social networkers have figured out what the librarians haven't: a way to make metadata work in widely distributed and heretofore disconnected content collections. Easy, but wrong: folksonomies are clearly compelling, supporting a serendipitous form of browsing that can be quite useful. But they don't support searching and other types of browsing nearly as well as tags from controlled vocabularies applied by professionals. Folksonomies aren't likely to organically arrive at preferred terms for concepts, or even evolve synonymous clusters. They're highly unlikely to develop beyond flat lists and accrue the broader and narrower term relationships that we see in thesauri." http://louisrosenfeld.com/home/bloug_archive/000330.html Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags By Clay Shirky "This piece is based on two talks I gave in the spring of 2005 -- one at the O'Reilly ETech conference in March, entitled "Ontology Is OverRated", and one at the IMCExpo in April entitled "Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification." The written version is a heavily edited concatenation of those two talks." http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html +09: PHP. A PHP Function and Extension Primer By builder.com "The flexibility of PHP makes it a popular choice for parsing and manipulating HTML and URLs. This flexibility also accounts for the programming languages extensibility." http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-5687077.html +10: SITES & BLOGS. Skills for Access "The aim of the project is simple - to create an online resource providing informed, practical and pragmatic advice and information on multimedia, accessibility and learning. This is supported by a series of general articles by experts in the field and case studies documenting real life experiences in creating multimedia to enhance the accessibility of e-learning." http://www.skillsforaccess.org.uk +11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Semantics By Robert Nyman "I have sinned. I confess. I've had the div-itis. But now I'm cured (I hope)!..." http://www.robertnyman.com/2005/04/18/semantics/ Clean Compliant HTML Code vs Cost of Non Compliant HTML Code By S. R. Emerson "Have you encountered a website that causes your browser or computer to crash? Most times this happens because the web page contains coding errors or the page author has used non compliant or browser specific code..." http://www.htmlbasictutor.ca/clean-compliant-html-code.htm +12: TOOLS. Web Accessibility Inspector By Fujitsu "Web Accessibility Inspector can (help) check the accessibility of a website automatically and efficiently on W3C WCAG1.0 and Fujitsu Web Accessibility Guidelines." http://design.fujitsu.com/en/universal/assistance/webinspector/ Color Selector By Fujitsu "Color Selector can check the background-color and character-color combination by people with cataracts or color blindness." http://design.fujitsu.com/en/universal/assistance/colorselector/ Color Doctor By Fujitsu "Color Doctor is a tool that checks accessibility from the aspect of color. It converts any images displayed on screen such as browsers or Microsoft PowerPoint presentations into gray scale or colors that persons with color vision deficiency can see...for Windows XP only." http://design.fujitsu.com/en/universal/assistance/colordoctor/ +13: TYPOGRAPHY. Five Simple Steps to Better Typography By Mark Boulton "Typography, I find, is still a bit of mystery to a lot of designers. The kind of typography I'm talking about is not your typical 'What font should I use?' typography but rather your 'knowing your hanging punctuation from your em-dash' typography. Call me a little bit purist but this bothers me." http://tinyurl.com/9l4w6 +14: USABILITY. Four Ideas For Better Forms By Caroline Jarrett "Do you have an uneasy feeling that your forms aren't working as well as they should? Or are you simply looking for ways to make them even better? In this month's article, Caroline Jarrett presents four ideas for better forms." http://www.userfocus.co.uk/articles/forms.html Better Web Forms By Paul Scrivens "Forms have to be one of the most annoying things that a user has to interact with on a website. When I am creating forms on my websites I try to make them so that the user can get through them as quick as possible. I also like to know that users are putting in the information quickly and accurately, which can save me a lot of hassle in the long run. Here are some tips that I have come up with to hopefully make your user's experience a bit easier." http://9rules.com/whitespace/better_web_forms.php Ensure Consistency of Display, General Advice By Skills for Access "The need to preserve consistency as far as possible throughout the design of a web or multimedia resource is essential for accessibility and usability purposes. A design that preserves consistency in screen location of objects such as navigation bars, colours and terminology will improve usability by helping to reduce the cognitive load placed on users." http://www.skillsforaccess.org.uk/howto.php?id=105 +15: XML. Questions on XHTML2 By Anne Van Kesteren "A list of questions on XHTML2 and XForms." http://annevankesteren.nl/archives/2005/05/xhtml2-questions Provide Audio Descriptions for Video or Animated Content With Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) By Skills for Access "Providing audio descriptions enables media that contains visual or aural information important to understanding the media's content, to be accessible to anyone who is blind or visually impaired and unable to see the video's content. SMIL is an open standard created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - and therefore in theory media player or format-independent - for creating accessible media through combining caption and audio description files with media files and providing information on their synchronization and display." http://www.skillsforaccess.org.uk/howto.php?id=130 Captioning with QuickTime SMIL By Patrick H. Lauke "First, some background information on this project: in September 2004 the Web Essentials 04 conference took place in Sydney, Australia. Among the highlights of this conference was a keynote speech by renowned web designer Jeffrey Zeldman. As he was unable to attend in person, the keynote was delivered as a pre-recorded video presentation. In November 2004, Zeldman made this video available on his company's site. After announcing the availability of the video on various mailing lists, I received a reply from a deaf user asking for a transcript. As I had experimented with small video captioning examples in the past, I decided to take this opportunity to apply some of my findings to a real-world problem." http://www.skillsforaccess.org.uk/casestudies.php?id=162 [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +16: 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.]