+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 4, Issue 04, July 21, 2005. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 04 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: NAVIGATION. 10: PHP. 11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 12: TOOLS. 13: USABILITY. 14: XML. SECTION TWO: 15: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Accessibility Only For Disabilities? By Tommy Olsson. "Recent discussions about what web accessibility really is has made me think. Is it limited to supporting assistive technologies; is it about providing access for everyone; or is it even that a page should render identically in all browsers? Another question that popped up in my thoughts was: Does it go without saying that anyone should be able to create web pages?" http://tinyurl.com/cr4er Constructing a POUR Website (Speaker's Outline) By Paul R. Bohman. Paul's outline for his POUR Website Webcast. http://www.webaim.org/events/2005/pour/outline.htm Is Blogging Accessible to People with Vision Loss? By The American Foundation for the Blind. "...Currently, a number of barriers exist that prevent blind individuals from benefiting fully from a mainstream blogging experience..." http://www.afb.org/Section.asp?SectionID=7&DocumentID=2753 How to Make Your Blog Accessible to Blind Readers By The American Foundation for the Blind. "Quick Tips for Bloggers: So you have a blog, and you're worried that it might not be accessible to people with disabilities? Don't worry! A few simple changes can increase your blog's potential readership." http://www.afb.org/Section.asp?SectionID=4&TopicID=167&DocumentID=2757 Communicating Error Messages Accessibly By Peter Krantz. "Errors in web applications be divided into two groups: 1. Server errors e.g. 404 Page not found and other HTTP protocol errors. 2. Application errors e.g. The 'Name' field can not be empty. and other errors that your web based application will present to the user. This article will deal with number 2: application errors..." http://tinyurl.com/9bzug +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Architecting CSS By Garrett Dimon. "With nearly ubiquitous standards support among modern browsers, we're turning to CSS to handle presentational heavy lifting more than ever. The more we rely upon CSS, the larger and more complex CSS files become. These files bring with them a few maintenance and organizational challenges..." http://www.digital-web.com/articles/architecting_css/ Strategies for CSS Switching (An excerpt from chapter 8 of Professional CSS) By Christopher Schmitt, Mark Trammell, Ethan Marcotte, Todd Dominey and Dunstan Orchard. "We wish we had some kung fuŠesque robes handy. This is the chapter where we tell our dear readers to forget all that we have taught them about CSS so far, to look beyond the surface of the pool and discover the truth within the truth...or something like that." http://www.digital-web.com/articles/strategies_for_css_switching/ Making the Jump to Tableless Design By Andy Budd. Andy's 'At Media 2005' presentation notes. http://www.andybudd.com/@media2005/ Scrolling Drop Shadows By Rob Mientjes. "The code behind it is very simple, but it requires two (2) divs. I started thinking about them..." http://zooibaai.nl/archives/2004/10/13/scrolling-drop-shadows/ Falling in Love With CSS By Vorsprung durch Webstandards. Inspired by Douglas Bowman's presentation 'The Beauty of CSS' at the 'at media' conference in London, we asked web developers and designers about their passion for CSS." http://vorsprungdurchwebstandards.de/falling-in-love-with-css/index.php +03: COLOR. Color On The Web By Ellen Marie Murphy. "This interactive tutorial will give participants a good understanding of the hexadecimal number system for expressing color on the web. Upon completion participants will have enough understanding to be able to calculate the hexadecimal code for any color they wish to use. The tutorial includes an interactive calculator at the end, in which participants can enter a six digit RGB code, select enter, and see a web-page background of that color." http://www.visibledreams.net/Web/color/color_1.html +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Survey Response Rates? Two Percent is Not Good Enough By Caroline Jarrett. This article addresses the topic of getting a reasonable response to your survey by designing it well. http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article2528.asp 5-Second Tests: Measuring Your Site's Content Pages By Christine Perfetti. "On your site, the content page is the user's most frequent final destination. This page contains the information the user came to the site to find. Sites often have hundreds, if not thousands (and in some cases, millions) of these critical pages." http://www.uie.com/events/uiconf/articles/five_second_test/ +05: EVENTS. IA (Information Architecture) Summit 2006 March 23-27, 2006. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada http://iasummit.org/ +06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Wire Frame Your Site By Matt Beach. "We've all heard it time and time again: "If you fail to plan, you plan to fail". In the world of designing and creating Websites, if you fail to plan, you plan to have a lot of headaches, late nights and missed deadlines while re-designing your site to fit the content." http://www.sitepoint.com/article/wire-frame-your-site +07: JAVASCRIPT. The JavaScript Manifesto By WaSP. "At the moment JavaScript suffers from outdated, uninformed, and inaccessible development methods which preclude it, and therefore web development in general, from attaining its full potential. The WaSP DOM Scripting Task Force proposes to solve this problem by the adoption of unobtrusive DOM scripting, a way of thinking based on modern, standards-compliant, accessible web development best practices. While both front end and back end developers will profit from this change of perspective, the most important benefits will accrue to our end users, whether they use the latest and greatest desktop browser, assistive programs like screen readers, or other devices." http://domscripting.webstandards.org/?page_id=2 DOM Scripting Task Force By WaSP. This is the main DOM Scripting web site. Essentially the mission is to bring DOM scripting up to parity with XHTML and CSS as a useful and necessary tool for building accessible, user-centric, standards-based web sites. Watch for this site to grow. http://domscripting.webstandards.org/ Standards Activists Target Scripts By Paul Festa. "...Scripting has generated renewed interest as Google, in particular, has found success creating highly functional Web-based applications like its Gmail and Google Maps sites. Those sites are created using what recently earned the moniker AJAX, or Asynchronous JavaScript + XML. Scripting also plays a prominent role outside the browser. Macromedia's Dreamweaver Web-authoring tool, for example, uses scripts within the application. Widgets in Apple Computer's Tiger operating system also use them. The renaissance in Web scripting has come at a cost to accessibility and adherence to Web standards, advocates warn. Many pages that rely heavily on scripts do not present their content in a way that blind people and others with disabilities can access them. And Web authors who are intent on using the latest scripting techniques may leave older browsers choking on their code. WaSP wants authors to provide scripts that 'gracefully degrade' with older browsers, providing some data and functionality, if not the full effect." http://tinyurl.com/b2474 Ajax Won't Cook You Breakfast By Frederico Oliveira. "Ever since the word about it got out, Ajax started to surface everywhere. From blog engines to content management systems, to general websites to everywhere (it seems). And most people still haven't realized Ajax won't cook you breakfast, it won't save the world, and more importantly, it will not fix all your problems. Ajax is good. Ajax allows you to process events without breaking the interaction chain with a page reload. However, the technology itself (it can't be stressed enough) is based on old concepts, that have been around for ages. It is not your new flash, even though most people seem to believe it could be..." http://www.webreakstuff.com/blog/2005/06/ajax-wont-cook-you-breakfast/ Life After Ajax? By Micah Dubinko. "Micah Dubinko says that the way Ajax technologies are presently deployed will eventually run into complexity barriers. It's time, he claims, for more declarative, markup-based alternative strategies." http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/06/29/deviant.html JavaScript 1, 2, and in between By Brendan Eich. "With DHTML and AJAX hot (or hot again; we've been here before, and I don't like either acronym), I am asked frequently these days about JavaScript, past and future. In spite of the fact that JS was misnamed (I will call it JS in the rest of this entry), standardized prematurely, then ignored and stagnated during most of its life, its primitives are strong enough that whole ecologies of toolkit and web-app code have emerged on top of it. (I don't agree with everything Doug Crockford writes at the last two links, but most of his arrows hit their targets.)" http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/008325.html script.aculo.us By Thomas Fuchs. "In an attempt to consolidate into one place all the scripts that happened to come into existence over the last few months, I've finally managed to come up with this site." http://script.aculo.us/ +08: MISCELLANEOUS. Ginny Redish By Clifford Anderson. "Ginny Redish has been called the 'mother' of usability. With 25-plus years of experience, honors from the ACM, IEEE and STC, and two groundbreaking books to her credit, she certainly deserves the title." http://tinyurl.com/bsc6r +09: NAVIGATION. The Two Fundamental Skills of Web Writing By Gerry McGovern. "Writing for how people search and writing quality links are the two fundamental skills of web writing. Think carefully about search behavior and make sure your links are always clear and logical. " http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2005/nt_2005_06_20-web-writing.htm +10: PHP. PHP 5.1's Killer Feature? By Kevin Yank. "At this stage, PHP 5.1 is not looking to be quite as spectacular. Some enhancements to Perl regular expressions, a few extra array functions... nothing to write home about. But there is one significant enhancement to PHP in 5.1: PHP Data Objects (PDO)." http://www.sitepoint.com/blog-post-view.php?id=274359 Easy-peasy PHP 2 By Jim Amos and Mike Papageorge "Easy-Peasy PHP was geared at being a simple introduction to using switches and includes in PHP. Several readers brought up some legitimate concerns in the comments, and others had some problems making the code work. This follow-up article proposes a better, more robust and secure method for getting started with using PHP on your Web site." http://www.digital-web.com/articles/easypeasy_php_2/ +11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Web Standards Project Announces the DOM Scripting Task Force By WaSP. "In an effort to boost the quality of scripting on the world wide web, the Web Standards Project (WaSP) today announced the formation of the WaSP DOM Scripting Task Force." http://webstandards.org/press/releases/archive/2005/07/18/ +12: TOOLS. Set Permissions for Dreamweaver MX 2004, V2.0.0 By jlondon. "This extension for Dreamweaver MX 2004, version 7.0.1, allows users to set remote file permissions via FTP. To use this extension, select the file(s) in the remote file list on which you wish to set permissions, then choose the 'Set Permissions...' menu item from the context menu." http://tinyurl.com/apttn Lynx Viewer By Yellow Pipe. "The Lynx Viewer allows webmasters to see what their pages will look like when viewed with Lynx, a text-mode web browser. It is also presumably, how search engines see your site." http://www.yellowpipe.com/yis/tools/lynx/lynx_viewer.php +13: USABILITY. Sites For Sore Eyes By The Guardian. "Universities are wasting a vital opportunity to win over new students, says Donald MacLeod." http://tinyurl.com/ag9tk Lazy, Stupid and Evil Design A Cautionary Interview with Jacob Nielsen ... By Jack Schofield. "Having a coffee and cake with Jakob Nielsen, the web usability expert from Nielsen Norman Group, I asked him what was holding up progress on the web. 'Three things, really: I call them lazy, stupid and evil design,' he replies..." http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1511967,00.html How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Relinquish Control By Peter Merholz. "Relinquishing control is a scary prospect because it diminishes certainty. With control comes predictable outcomes that you can bank on. But in this increasingly complex, messy, and option-filled world, we must acknowledge that our customers hold the reins. Attempts to control their experience will lead to abandonment for the less onerous alternative. What we can do is provide the best tools and content that they can fit into their lives, and their ways." http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000501.php The Rebooter's Children Go Rebootless By Jeffery Zeldman. "Once again this year it was my honor to be one of the judges of May 1st Reboot...There is more talent than originality out there. There are always more copiers than innovators, of course, even in a creative field like design. But freshness seemed in especially short supply this year....There was little content and even less user science. Many sites submitted had no concern for the user on the most basic levels. Rarely could you identify an idea or purpose behind the site, or name a possible user goal the site was intended to facilitate. There was no flow, no legibility, no usability. It wasn't so much that the designers had contempt for their users as that they seemed never to have been taught to think about users at all. One gets the feeling that the web design curriculum at too many colleges and universities consists of little more than tips on how to use Flash to imitate sites that won awards five years ago.Ó http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0605c.shtml Zeldman Wonders Where The Content and Usability Are By D. Keith Robinson. "Maybe some of us need to step away from design and take a more strategic, content and people focused tact. We can then team up with talented designers and make great things. And, as Zeldman alludes to, maybe some of use who care about, and know about, these things need to start teaching this stuff early on." http://tinyurl.com/c4qoz Checkboxes, Radio Buttons, and Drop Downs Garrett Dimon. "Incorrect usage of checkboxes, radio buttons, and drop downs is one of the most common mistakes I come across. They each have their advantages and disadvantages, and their usage should generally be governed by a few simple guidelines." http://tinyurl.com/dggta Delivering the Right Information is Hard By Jared M. Spool. "It seems that putting information on a site is easy. However, delivering the right information is much harder. When specifying the site's information architecture, designers need to look beyond the navigation and links, and think about how the user is going to use the information to accomplish their objectives." http://www.uie.com/events/uiconf/articles/the_right_information/ +14: XML. XHTML and Error Handling By Robert Nyman. "What I want to touch with this post is how errors are handled when XHTML is served the way it should be. LetÕs, for the sake of argument, say that we want to write and deliver XHTML (not wanting to turn this into a discussion whether we should write HTML or XHTML)....All flavors of XHTML 1.0...should be sent with the application/xhtml+xml MIME type, but may be sent as text/html when it conforms to Appendix C of the XHTML specification....Such a small thing as an unencoded ampersand (example: & instead of &) in a linkÕs href attribute will result in the page not being well-formed, thus not rendered. Given the low quality of the CMSs out there, terrible output from many WYSIWYG editors, the 'risk' (read:chance) of the code being valid and well-formed is smaller than of the code being incorrect. Many, many web sites out there donÕt deliver well-fomed code...So, conclusively, I have to ask: do you think XHTML sent as text/html is ok, when it follows the Appendix C of the XHTML specification? Do you agree with me that having a web site break and show nothing but an error if somethingÕs not well-formed isn't good business practice?..." http://www.robertnyman.com/2005/06/26/xhtml-and-error-handling/ [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.]