+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 4, Issue 08, August 16, 2005. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 08 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: JAVASCRIPT. 07: MISCELLANEOUS. 08: NAVIGATION. 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. Label Positioning By Gez Lemon. "Correctly labeled form controls ensure that your forms are usable to the widest possible audience. Explicitly labeling form controls is beneficial for people using assistive technology, and correctly positioning form prompts can benefit visitors with mobility and cognitive difficulties. The HTML Techniques for WCAG 2.0 currently proposes a technique to ensure that the prompt for form controls is positioned appropriately, but there is a proposal to deprecate the technique. I think it would be a mistake to deprecate this technique, as correctly positioned form prompts help people who are not fortunate enough, or don't require assistive technology. " http://juicystudio.com/article/label-positioning.php Place Holding Text In Form Inputs By Mel Pedley. "...it has come to light that there is one group of users that still rely heavily upon place holding characters within forms inputs....Users of Braille readers. Unless a form text input contains at least one place holding character, Braille readers will not allow focus on that particular input. Which means that, if you do not include place holding characters within your online forms, Braille reader users will not be able to complete them. So, obviously, Checkpoints 10.4 cannot be ignored. But how can you implement it without causing problems for screen reader users? Rich Pedley of the Guild of Accessible Web Designers came up with a solution: a single white space character. http://www.blackwidows.org.uk/wpress/?p=34 Defining Acrobat PDF Accessibility By Paul Bohman. "The appropriate use of PDF files is a hotly debated topic, both inside and outside the field of Web accessibility. Some people would argue that there is no place for PDF files, while others suggest that appropriately prepared PDF's are basically as accessible as HTML. We think the truth lies somewhere in-between. PDF files do have their placeÑdisplaying documents that print exactly as the author intends..." http://www.webaim.org/techniques/acrobat/ Copying 508 vs. Raising the Bar By Matt May. "We as advocates of accessibility should be aware of the dynamic between software companies, their consumers, and the regulations set forth to benefit accessibility. IBM is calling for a worldwide baseline of Section 508. What they and other vendors really need is one unified, measurable standard applicable to all of their markets. And it is to everyone's advantage to work toward such a standard, provided it is as rigorous as necessary to fully meet the access needs of users with disabilities. Settling for the aging 508 is not a victory for international accessibility. For large companies like IBM, whose software already complies with 508, it merely enforces the status quo." http://www.accessify.com/2005/07/copying-508-vs-raising-bar.asp +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. How to Join Classes with CSS By Stu Nicholls. "If you've just started to learn CSS and have looked at multiple tutorials, bought the latest books, etc., you might not have realized that it's possible to join up your classes. You aren't limited to having a single class in a tag. In fact, you're not limited to having just an id!" http://www.webreference.com/programming/css_classes/index.html +03: COLOR. Color Theory for the Color Blind By Mario Parise. "Being color-blind can be a real obstacle for anyone involved in design. For Web designers, this does not need to be true...I'm going to give a brief overview of color theory and provide practical advice for the color-blind designer. But first, if you would indulge me, I'd like to brief you on what color blindness is..." http://digital-web.com/articles/color_theory_for_the_colorblind/ +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Usable Statistics By Jeff Sauro. Do you need to feel more confident about using statistics? Dismayed by overly complicated "introduction" courses that focus on theory and not application? Do the "basic" books assume you know where to look for your answer? The first module in this series is on using confidence intervals in usability testing. http://www.measuringusability.com/stats/ Confidence Interval Calculator for a Completion Rate By Jeff Sauro. "If you've wanted to provide a confidence interval around a small sample completion rate but just didn't have time to do the math, this calculator does the work for you." http://www.measuringusability.com/wald.htm SUM: Single Usability Metric (Presented at CHI 2005) By Jeff Sauro. SUM is a single usability metric that summarize the majority of variation in four common summative usability metrics. Download the calculator to convert raw metrics to a SUM score or read the CHI paper which explains the theoretical foundations. http://www.measuringusability.com/SUM/index.htm +05: EVENTS. i-Conference September 28-30, 2005. Pennsylvania State University, University Park Campus U.S.A. http://iconference.ist.psu.edu/content/view/12/40/ +06: JAVASCRIPT. JavaScript and Screenreaders By Derek Featherstone. "What do you get when you cross JavaScript with a screen reader? Exactly. We don't know..." http://domscripting.webstandards.org/?p=20 Accessible Event Pairs By Peter-Paul Koch. "In order to keep our pages accessible to non-mouse users, we must use non-mouse events like focus or keydown in addition to mouse events like mouseover and click. I created the new Event pairs page and related tests to study this problem. My conclusions are: Unfortunately we cannot create strict guidelines for pairing one mouse event with one non-mouse event. That said, these are the results of my test..." http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2005/07/accessible_even.html Presentation Slides with DOM and CSS By Chris Heilmann. "Eric MeyerÕs S5 standards based presentation slides system is used quite a lot by webstandardismos for their presentations. However, some of its functionality is great for presenters but can be quite hard to follow for web surfers who just want to see what someone has presented. My personal challenge was to come up with something that is as cool as EricÕs system, but much easier to use and more lightweight when it comes to creating your own slides. The outcome is called DOMSlides and is licensed under Creative Commons for you to use, change and copy." http://www.wait-till-i.com/index.php?p=123 AJAX and Accessibility By Faruk Ates. "With DOM Scripting and Remote Scripting making their way into standards-compliant web development, people are beginning to wonder what the effect of these techniques is in screenreaders and other assistive technologies..." http://kurafire.net/log/archive/2005/08/01/ajax-and-accessibility Rasmus' 30 second AJAX Tutorial By Rasmus Lerdorf. "I find a lot of this AJAX stuff a bit of a hype. Lots of people have been using similar things long before it became 'AJAX'. And it really isn't as complicated as a lot of people make it out to be. Here is a simple example from one of my apps..." http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=php-general&m=112198633625636&w=2 The Power of Javascript: Operators concluded By Michael Youssef. "This is the last article in "The Power of Javascript" series covering operators. In this part, we discuss the logical operators, the operator typof, the void operator, the ternary operator :?, and operators' precedence and Associativity. You may not realize the power and usefulness of operators yet, but when we discuss how you can control your script flow of execution with if/else statements and loop statements, you will realize what operators can do for you, especially the logical operators and the comparison operators." http://tinyurl.com/ao3l8 +07: MISCELLANEOUS. WaSP Interviews Daniel Frommelt By WaSP. "Back in October 2003, Daniel Frommelt and his team of students presented the re-tooling of Slashdot in XHTML 1.0 at WebdevShare, scoring a wave of interest across the Web community, a two-part series on the process then further articles on A List Apart. How did it all begin? Where did it lead? In this interview, Daniel fills us in on the backstory." http://webstandards.org/act/campaign/edutf/interviews/frommelt.html +08: NAVIGATION. Dealing With Complex Navigation By Paul Boag. "How many levels of navigation do you build into your website? Its a fairly fundamental question. Almost all sites have at least two. The main sites sections and then the sub sections underneath. But is that enough? Probably not and yet many web designers fail to consider how content deeper in the site is going to be shown. But how deep do you go? Three levels, four?" http://www.boagworld.com/archives/2004/07/dealing_with_co.html +09: PHP. 17 Useful Functions for Manipulating Arrays in PHP By builder.com. "Like arrays in other languages, PHP arrays allow you to store multiple values in a single variable and operate on them as a set. PHP offers an extensive array manipulation toolkitÑover 60 functionsÑthat lets you process arrays in almost any way imaginable including reversing them, extracting subsets, comparing and sorting, recursively processing, and searching them for specific values. This document outlines some of the more useful functions in the PHP array toolkit, with explanations and usage examples..." http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-5792851.html The Practicality of OO PHP By David Day. "There seems to be a common pitfall among some PHP developers--especially those just beginning PHP programming--and that is their lack of object-oriented (OO) PHP use. This article's purpose is to inform developers about the practicality of OO PHP; fully understanding the benefits of using OO PHP should be a requirement in the PHP learning process." http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/php/2005/07/28/oo_php.html +10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. IE7 Wicked Clearing House By Shaun Inman. "Just a short Wicked post to try to keep track of developments about the recently released IE7 beta. Feel free to add links to commentary and reviews..." http://www.shauninman.com/plete/2005/07/ie7 +11: TOOLS. Flickering and Photosensitive Epilepsy Online Tool By Renzo Giust; Translated by Roberto Castaldo. A tool for checking flicker rates in animated gifs. http://www.webaccessibile.org/test/check.aspx +12: USABILITY. Sentence or Title Case for Labels? By Caroline Jarrett. "For those few of us who are deeply interested in forms, thereÕs nothing so fascinating as a subtle detail. Like, for example, the question that appeared in my email in-box earlier this month. THE QUESTION: Martin McGuire wrote to me to ask 'How labels/captions for forms should be formatted'." http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article2594.asp A Study of Blogs and Usability By John Franklin. "Our analysis sheds light on a variety of heretofore neglected, user-experience related design challenges associated with blogs' potential to become a mainstream medium for Internet users." http://www.catalystgroupdesign.com/cofactors/?p=111 16 Things that Really Annoy Most Web Users By Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS). "2432 US consumers were asked what they think the most annoying things on the web are. Over a third cited sites which open unrequested new windows (popup ads, etc). Next came mandatory site registration and installation of new software to view the site, each cited by about one consumer in six. 'Slow loading pages' was named by about 10%. But it's interesting to check out the annoyances which polled under 5%... dead links, mystery-meat navigation, outdated content, no contact info, and then down at 2% we see 'music blaring', "can't search site"... and beneath that was "animation and splash screens", at about 1.5%." http://www.realtechnews.com/posts/1572 Web Content Management is Not Data Management By Gerry McGovern. "...I have worked with many organizations over the years who have significantly reduced the size of their websites and saw much greater success because of it. The wrong content gets in the way of the right content. For every 100 documents of content your organization produces, chances are that 95 of them are data that needs storing, with 5 of them having the potential to be killer web content. If you can develop the skill to identify those five killer web documents, polish them until they shine, and publish them separately from the other 95, you have a very bright future in front of you." http://www.uie.com/events/uiconf/articles/web_content_management +13: XML. Fixing (RSS/Atom) Newsfeed Subscription By D. Keith Robinson. "There has been a whole bunch of talk about how unusable the blogging subscription/syndication model is. The problem is that it?s not an easy thing to explain, and many developers and designers have gone and made it harder by spreading around terms and conventions that don?t really work." http://tinyurl.com/9ec6p [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.]