+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 4, Issue 10, August 31, 2005. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 10 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. SECTION TWO: 14: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Testing Invalid Content with Accessibility Validators By Gez Lemon. "I've created a document with over 33 obvious priority 1 and priority 2 errors according to WCAG 1.0, and ran them through the leading accessibility validators, and the W3C's markup validation service. None of them successfully found any of the errors, with one of them reporting an error that didn't exist." http://tinyurl.com/dsx98 An Exploding Myth By James W. Thatcher. "Gez Lemon of Juicy Studios has written an article, Testing Invalid Content with Accessibility Validators, about accessibility testing tools and what they can do - well more accurately, what they can't do. Joe Clark characterizes this article as "Exploding the myth of automated accessibility checking" on the Web Accessibility Imitative Interest Group mailing list. The mailing lists I normally watch are buzzing with comments about Joe's assertion and about Gez' article." http://jimthatcher.com/news.htm#myth Don't Use the Statistics Defense as a Reason to Exclude People From Your Content By Jim Byrne. "I was recently involved in a discussion about whether website designers should be expected to accommodate Netscape 4 users. The case against accommodating Netscape 4 users is invariably backed up with statistics about how few people now use this, admittedly flawed, browser. I've heard 'the statistics defense' (as I will call it) so often over the years that this latest evocation prompted me to think about why I don't agree with this approach." http://www.gawds.org/show.php?contentid=107 A Beginners Introduction to Standard Markup and Accessibility By Jim Byrne. "There have been many different versions of HTML since the World Wide Web was invented in the early 90s by Tim Berners-Lee. The 'rules' for using each version are encapsulated in the standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The standards dictate the tags publishers are allowed to use (and in what order), and how those tags should be interpreted by browsers and 'user agents'. For example, text within header tags are interpreted as headings, text within paragraph tags are interpreted as paragraphs. How else would your web browser know the

tag around a particular piece of text means, 'display this as a headings', if it didn't have a set of rules to follow? ..." http://www.gawds.org/show.php?contentid=104 +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Alternate Approaches to Styling a 'You are Here' Button By Michael Meadhra. "I once ran across an article that prompted me to reconsider the approach I had been using to styling a "You Are Here" button. The result is that I now have two viable techniques to choose from, and I can use whichever one is easier to implement in a given situation. Let's look at how these two techniques compare and when you might want to use each one." http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-5810530.html +03: COLOR. Color Theory By Meryl Evans. "Common sense doesn't always prevail in working with colors on a Web site especially since we don't all see color exactly the same way. Even two monitors don't show identical colors no matter how hard a person tries to adjust the settings to get them to look the same. So what do you do? First, accept that a Web site won't look the same on all computers and monitors." http://www.informit.com/guides/content.asp?g=webdesign&seqNum=216&rl=1 +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Usability Testing for e-Learning By Shailesh Shilwant and Amy Haggarty. "Usability testing has long been a part of the software and product design world. Jakob Nielsen brought the concept of usability to the Web, making Web pages simple to navigate and intuitively organized so that users can easily find the information they're looking for. While this definition may be considered sufficient in the world of software, the definition of usability in the e-learning world should encompass a few more components than simply good user interface design." http://tinyurl.com/7cg96 Usability Testing with Morae By Joel Spolsky. "The great thing about usability tests is with a day of usability testing and handful of subjects, even if you're as senile as I am, you can find the biggest areas where you didn't realize where the program's behavior diverges from the user's expected behavior." http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/UsabilityTestingwithMorae.html Making Use of User Research By Gretchen Anderson. "Designing or redesigning a product often feels like a risky proposition, especially in today's business climate. Those responsible for defining the product offering and marketing want reliable, measurable data to define success both incrementally and overall." http://tinyurl.com/cj7jp +05: EVENTS. EDUCAUSE 2005 Annual Conference October 18-21, 2005. Orlando, Florida U.S.A. http://www.educause.edu/e05 About, With, and For advancing the practice of user-centered design research October 28-29, 2005. Chicago Illinois, U.S.A. http://www.id.iit.edu/events/awf/ +06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Balancing Fidelity in Prototyping By Henrik Olsen. "Deceived by their ideas of what clients will accept, many web development teams build prototypes that are too costly and doesn't serve the purpose prototypes are supposed to. To exploit the full potential of prototyping, it's critical to choose the appropriate level of fidelity." http://www.guuui.com/issues/03_05.php +07: JAVASCRIPT. nerd.newburyportion By Jeff Watkins. Ajax blog. http://metrocat.org/nerd/ +08: MISCELLANEOUS. An Interview with Ludicorp's Eric Costello By Jesse James Garrett. "At User Experience Week, August 22-25 in Washington, D.C., Eric Costello of Ludicorp will join us for a talk on the evolution of Flickr, the wildly successful photo sharing site that has become one of the most talked-about examples of the next generation of Web applications. Adaptive Path's Jesse James Garrett recently talked with Eric about Flickr's past, present, and future." http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000519.php Christopher Schmitt Interview By Krista Stevens. "...Digital Web Magazine sits down for coffee with Christopher Schmitt, the lead author and project manager of Professional CSS. Draw up a chair and join our conversation as Christopher talks about Professional CSS, online collaboration and what it might take to get the tables 'n' spacer .gif crowd to change their heathen ways." http://www.digital-web.com/articles/christopher_schmitt_2/ Tim Berners-Lee On the Read/Write Web By Mark Lawson. "In August 1991, Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the first website. Fourteen years on, he tells BBC Newsnight's Mark Lawson how blogging is closer to his original idea about a read/write web." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4132752.stm +09: NAVIGATION. Improper Link Text By Julian Rickards. "One of the tenets of semantic HTML is that link text describes, even if only briefly, the destination of the link. You would expect that the link text tenet would take you to a page that, in some way, is related to the word tenet (in this case, it is). Unfortunately, this principle has been broken many timesÑI am not referring to the Click Here syndromeÑby people who should know better; leaders and visionaries in the field of semantic HTML, accessibility and usability." http://pen-and-ink.ca/?p=31 +10: PHP. PHP 5 and Design Patterns: An Introduction By Matt Zandstra. "This article is intended for experienced PHP programmers with at least a basic understanding of objects, classes and inheritance. The typical reader will want to learn more about techniques for deploying components in object-oriented systems." http://www.zend.com/php/design/patterns1.php PHP 5 and Design Patterns: The Observer By Matt Zandstra. "The Observer pattern is perhaps most often encountered in traditional graphical user interface desktop applications. It is an excellent way of ensuring that disparate display components reflect changes at a system's core. As we shall see, though, it remains a powerful technique in a Web-oriented environment. In this article I show you how to use the Observer pattern to build a flexible broadcast-style relationship between a central component and the objects that care about it. First though, in preparation for a running example, I take a look at object mocking - a great technique for test-driving code. " http://www.zend.com/php/design/patterns2.php +11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. @Media 2005: Lunch with Douglas Bowman By Frank Ates. "After Douglas Bowman's first presentation at @media 2005 ended, I was left with the feeling that something was missing. I slowly approached him at his presentation booth while trying to put words to this. What followed was a series of events with a very interesting lunch with Mr. Bowman." http://kurafire.net/log/archive/2005/08/06/atmedia-lunch-with-bowman +12: TOOLS. Accessibility Color Wheel By Giacomo Mazzocato. "This is a tool I realized for personal use which might help in the choice of a color pair, for instance to write a web page. For the sake of accessibility the text and background color of a site should be clear also to people who have not a perfect vision. The page with this tool helps to achieve that by analyzing the contrast of a color pair and showing how color-blind people see it. It simulates three kinds of vision deficiencies. One of them, tritanopia, is anyway very rare. If the contrast between the colors is good, a big OK! appears. It's also possible to analyze whether the colors are good in single cases." http://gmazzocato.altervista.org/colorwheel/wheel.php +13: USABILITY. Fitts at 50: For Link Design, Size Does Matter By William Hudson. "I missed the 50th anniversary of Paul FittsÕ paper "The information capacity of the human motor system in controlling the amplitude of movements". I wasn't exactly expecting street parties, but June 2004 slipped by without even a celebratory cup of tea. The title of the paper may not mean much on its own, but I end up discussing FittsÕ law with interaction designers at least once a week, so I would count it as one of the more robust works in our field. The conversations usually go something like this..." http://www.syntagm.co.uk/design/articles/fitts50.htm [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.]