+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 4, Issue 14, September 29, 2005. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 14 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: FLASH. 07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 08: JAVASCRIPT. 09: MISCELLANEOUS. 10: NAVIGATION. 11: PHP. 12: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 13: TOOLS. 14: TYPOGRAPHY. 15: USABILITY. 16: XML. SECTION TWO: 17: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Universality and Accessibility By Gez Lemon. "In a perfect world, just following web standards should be enough to ensure that content is available for everyone. Unfortunately, authors can inadvertently introduce accessibility barriers without realizing it. An accessibility barrier is anything that provides a barrier to people with disabilities. A simple example of an accessibility barrier might be where authors decide they don't like the dotted border around active links, and remove it with scripting..." http://juicystudio.com/article/universality-accessibility.php Speaking Form Labels - Summary By Bob Easton. "...The best practices are simple. Use the structural elements we've been given. Legends and labels are structural elements; highly recommended. Title attributes are very poor substitutes. The only reason to use them is as redundant information in the hopes that older screen readers will speak them. However, don't depend on titles alone. Group like items together with a fieldset and then use the fieldset's legend to add supplemental instruction for that group of controls. Use real labels on every control to insure their meaning is obvious. Just because the legend says, 'date month and year,' we shouldn't assume the first control is actually the month. Label it! Avoid hiding labels. Any innovative designer should be able to create a form that uses legends and labels with no need to hide either, and the W3C should ditch their example of hiding labels..." http://www.access-matters.com/2005/09/10/speaking-form-labels-summary/ IBM Systems Journal, (accessibility issue) By International Business Machines. "Making information technology accessible to the largest possible population of users has become a significant aspect of application and system development. Providing accessibility involves designing and modifying technology to make it accessible to users who would otherwise be unable to use it. This has become a growing element of the design process, due to government mandates as well as business considerations. Hardware and software assistive technologies have opened the Web to users with disabilities, though considerable work still needs to be done in order to achieve the goal of end-to-end accessibility for all users. This issue contains 13 papers on architectures, tools, applications, and assistive technologies designed to increase accessibility for diverse user groups." http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj44-3.html 'IBM Systems Journal' Accessibility Articles By Joe Clark. "Volume 44, N 3 of the IBM Systems Journal is an issue dedicated to accessibility of the Web and computer applications. I like nothing better than to sit of a morning with an espresso, a set of printouts of research papers, and my trusted green editing pen. (Red is so terribly passe, and the leads of a New YorkerÐstyle blue pencil tend to snap under impassioned jotting of marginalia.) Here, then, are my precis and comments." http://blog.fawny.org/2005/08/21/ibmsj/ Staying Positive About Tabindex By Joe Clark. "Mozilla and IBM are promoting a new method of keyboard accessibility that sets tabindex="-1" on items that you the author want to be manipulable by keyboard...Now, whose idea was a negative tabindex?...MicrosoftÕs. All this, of course, is illegal. HTML requires tabindex to be a number between 0 and 32767." http://blog.fawny.org/2005/08/22/tabindex/ Screen Readers Suck! By Dave Child. "Accessibility has now become a major issue in web design. One benchmark of an accessible site is that it works in common screen reading programs. However, screen readers are making the job of conscientious web designers harder than it should be." http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/design/screen-readers-suck/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Ten More CSS Tricks You May Not Know By Trenton Moss. "Our article, Ten CSS tricks you may not know has proven to be such a success that we decided it was time to offer you ten more CSS tricks that you may not know." http://tinyurl.com/7byzl Clearing Floats By Russ Weakley. Elements following a floated element will wrap around the floated element. If you do not want this to occur, you can apply the "clear" property to these following elements. The four options are "clear: left", "clear: right", "clear: both" or "clear: none". http://www.maxdesign.com.au/presentation/workshop/slide39.cfm How to Completely Enclose a Floated Element in CSS2 By Matt Brubeck. http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~mbrubeck/clear-after/ Rising Tide - A New CSS Technique By Maxine Sherrin. "Ever since I last reworked the Westciv site I've received a constant stream of emails asking how I achieve the transparency effect on the logo in the top left corner. I lost track long ago of how many people I promised a tutorial on the subject. Well, here it is. The added bonus for waiting so long is that here you won't just learn how I create the visual effect as the page scrolls. I've also written about how I made the background image into a link to the home page which will always be there no matter how far someone scrolls down the page." http://tinyurl.com/bxwa5 +03: DREAMWEAVER. Dreamweaver 8 First Impressions By Jared Smith (WebAim thread). "Dreamweaver 8 is now available. I thought I'd put together my first impressions regarding new accessibility features (or the lack thereof)..." http://www.webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread.php?thread=2534 +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Putting A/B Testing in Its Place By Jakob Nielsen. "Measuring the live impact of design changes on key business metrics is valuable, but often creates a focus on short-term improvements. This near-term view neglects bigger issues that only qualitative studies can find." http://useit.com/alertbox/20050815.html +05: EVENTS. XML Conference and Exposition 2005 November 14-18, 2005. Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A. http://2005.xmlconference.org/ Web Foundations November 22-23, 2005. Gijon, Spain http://www.fundamentosweb.org/ An Event Apart "The idea behind An Event Apart is simple: take two globally recognized web authorities and put them on the road. Moving from city to city, they set up shop for an entire day and dig deep into what they've been working on, what changes they expect in the next year, and how it all comes together. Rather than stand at a podium in front of a few hundred people with only a few minutes to answer two or three questions, they sit in a room with a few dozen people and interact all day long. That, in a nutshell, makes this An Event Apart." December 5, 2005. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. http://www.aneventapart.com/ +06: FLASH. Speeding Up Web Browsing By Jeff Atwood. "In order to speed up my web browsing experience, I disable Flash in Internet Explorer. I've got nothing personal against Flash, mind you, but it's generally chrome. It's visually (and sometimes audibly) distracting, and it adds download time to each page view." http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000384.html +07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. An Introduction to User Journeys By Jason Hobbs. "Designing a websiteÕs structure around customer needs creates trustÑtrust in the web as a valuable space to interact with a brand, product, or service. Such a website provides your customers with a valuable first point of contact. User journeys are a method for conceptualizing and structuring a websiteÕs content and functionality. These journeys allow us to shift away from thinking about structure in terms of hierarchies or a technical build..." http://tinyurl.com/c65no +08: JAVASCRIPT. addEvent() Recoding Contest By Peter-Paul Koch. "My recent entry addEvent() considered harmful generated many interesting comments and technical pointers. It's clear that the original addEvent() function doesn't quite cut the cake any more, and it's equally clear that we badly need a function such as this to keep our scripts simple. Hence I'd like to take the opportunity to launch an addEvent() recoding contest. Write your own version of addEvent() and removeEvent(), submit it by adding a comment to this page, and win JavaScript fame." http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2005/09/addevent_recodi.html Validators: Introducing Struts Validator Framework By A.P.Rajshekhar. "It was in such a situation that the Validator framework came to the forefront. So, what is the Validator framework and how can it be used to simplify input validations -- both the client as well as the server-side? I will be discussing these aspects in this part of tutorial." http://tinyurl.com/9t5fw JavaScript Logging By David F. Miller. "Debugging got you down? Weep no more. David F. Miller introduces fvlogger, a script library that brings simple logging functionality to JavaScript and the browser and makes your life easier and more fun." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/jslogging What is Greasemonkey? By Mark Pilgrim. "Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows you to write scripts that alter the web pages you visit. You can use it to make a website more readable or more usable. You can fix bugs that the site owner can't be bothered to fix themselves. You can alter pages so they work better with assistive technologies that speak to a web page aloud or convert it to Braille. You can even automatically retrieve data from other sites to make two sites more interconnected." http://tinyurl.com/bx6nu The Hows and Whys of Degradable Ajax By Ryan Campbell. "The strategy here is to start by creating a page that works like a normal site--processing information on page loads and refreshes. Then, if JavaScript is enabled, we have our scripts bypass this normal functionality and replace it with sweet Ajax functionality. Now, creating a degradable Ajax site is a bit different from a creating a site with unlimited Ajax potential. Here are some strategies I've come up with to help you build a degradable Ajax page." http://particletree.com/features/the-hows-and-whys-of-degradable-ajax Survey of AJAX/JavaScript Libraries By wiki.osafoundation.org. "A new wiki has appeared that contains a great list of AJAX/JavaScript Libraries. Each library is contains a section for details, pros, cons and of course a link to the library's download page." http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Projects/AjaxLibraries +09: MISCELLANEOUS. Answers to Usability Questions: Interview with Kimberly Krause Berg By Jim Hedger. "For the end user, usability is the ability to successfully, comfortably and confidently learn or complete a task. For the web site designer or application developer, it's the mechanics of designing and building a web site or Internet-based application so that it can be understood and easy to accomplish any task..." http://news.stepforth.com/2005-news/Kim-Krause-Berg-interview.shtml Dan Cederholm Interview By Ethan Marcotte. "...The goal is simply to get people thinking more about 'What happens if...?' What happens if a low-vision user bumps the text size up a notch or two? What happens when there are three sentences in this box, rather than the two that were originally planned?..." http://digital-web.com/articles/dan_cederholm/ +10: NAVIGATION. Search Engine Optimization -- Titles By D. Keith Robinson. "One of the best things you can do for your site is learn how to write good titles for your pages. This not only helps Google (and any other search engines) find your site and provide searchers with relevant results, but helps your users and other sites that would like to link to you." http://tinyurl.com/dsblt Analyzing User Behaviour: A Case Study By Chris Kutler and Ray Devaney. "...The initial analysis concentrated on determining the frequency of keywords per search. The underlying basis of the approach was a commonly held view that users have tended to restrict their searches to one or two words. However, it was also suspected that when users become more comfortable with the technology or more familiar with the database's contents, they may start to construct more sophisticated search phrases..." http://www.freepint.com/issues/080905.htm#tips +11: PHP. PHP 101 (part 3): Looping The Loop Basic control structures explained. By Vikram Vaswani. "If you've been paying attention, you remember that, last time, I gave you a quick crash course in PHP's basic control structures and operators. I also showed you how PHP can be used to process the data entered into a Web form. In this tutorial, I'm going to delve deeper into PHP's operators and control structures, showing you two new operators, an alternative to the if-else() family of conditional statements, and some of PHP's more interesting loops. So keep reading... this is just about to get interesting!..." http://www.zend.com/php/beginners/php101-3.php PHP 101 (part 4): The Food Factor Arrays, PHP array functions, and what it all means. By Vikram Vaswani. "Having spent lots of time traveling around the outer landscape of PHP - learning all about control structures, operators and variables - you're probably bored. You might even be thinking of dropping out right now, and instead spending your time more constructively (or so you think) in front of the idiot box. That would be a big mistake. And when I say big, I mean humongous. You see, if you forego this segment of the tutorial ... you're going to miss out on one of PHP's coolest variable types. It's a little thing called an array, and I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that once you're on speaking terms with it, you're never going to look at a PHP script the same way again. But hey, don't take my word for it... toss that remote aside and come see for yourself!" http://www.zend.com/php/beginners/php101-4.php PHP Login System with Admin Features By jpmaster77. This article "describes a complete PHP Login System with full Administrative Features that uses a MySQL database and can be easily integrated into any PHP/MySQL website." http://evolt.org/PHP-Login-System-with-Admin-Features Database Abstraction in PHP Ian Gilfillan. "In a previous job when I was responsible for hiring PHP developers, I always used to ask questions about database abstraction in my interviews. It's amazing how often candidates with the best-looking CV's, and impressive looking project lists, were tripped up by their lack of knowledge of what a database abstraction layer is, and were unfamiliar with any of the main database abstraction layers." http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/ian_gilfillan20050906.php3 +12: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. The Meaning of Web Standards By Derek Featherstone. "Web standards means different things to different people. Make sure you know what it means to the people you're talking to..." http://tinyurl.com/9srmg Basic Webstandards Workshop By Russ Weakley and the folks at maxdesign. Presentation Slides. http://www.maxdesign.com.au/presentation/workshop/ Semantics: The Red-Headed Step-Child of Markup By Garrett Dimon. "Semantic markup is readable markup. ItÕs that simple. ItÕs more readable for people and, more importantly, provides a sort of metadata to machines. Different tags imply different meanings, and if thereÕs a tag appropriate to your content, you should make every effort to use it." http://tinyurl.com/af2o7 IE7 Will Not Support W3 Standards Bynet4now. "Microsoft's admission that IE7 will not support leading and well established standards such as CSS is shameful and undermines accessibility efforts. While accessibility may well not be a mission critical element like security, this is a moral issue - saying it's not a priority sets a callous example, and thousands of businesses will follow suit. Microsoft needs to lead by example and be at the cutting edge." http://www.net4now.com/isp_news/news_article.asp?News_ID=3163 FEMA Locks Mac Users from Hurricane Relief By Jonny Evans. "Mac and Linux-using hurricane survivors are unable to use Federal disaster relief claim form services online. This is because the much-criticized US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has created a service that only works with Windows and Internet Explorer 6. This acts to the frustration of survivors lucky enough to be able to access a Mac or Linux computer, and to the reported consternation of disaster relief teams on the ground." http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=12557&Page=1&pagePos=2 Why Mozilla Shouldn't Implement SVG (or at least not too much of it), and What We Should Do Instead By David Baron. "...I think the presence of SVG on the Web would generally harm users. The fundamental difference is this: HTML and CSS are based on the idea that the user has a default font size and that text should wrap when it doesn't fit, depending on the width of the document; SVG is based on the idea that the author determines the size of text relative to the size of the image and that all the text scales depending on the width of the document. If SVG were designed primarily to replace what is currently done using images (things like figures, graphs, and logos), that would be fine, and it would probably improve the user's Web experience. However, SVG is being designed to do much more than that and being promoted to replace what is currently done using HTML and CSS, to be a language for Web applications and their user interface. If it's used that way, I believe it will be more harmful to the user experience than helpful, since it will lead to Web pages being worse at adapting to different font sizes and browser window sizes and it will make the mechanisms the browser can use to overcome those problems (such as text zoom, which violates Web standards to improve the experience for users) less useful..." http://dbaron.org/log/2005-09#e20050908a +13: TOOLS. Web Accessibility Tools Consortium. "The Web Accessibility Tools Consortium [WAT-C] provides a collection of free tools to assist both developers and designers in the development and testing of accessible web content. The consortium is a collaboration of some of the world's leading accessibility practitioners, founded by Accessible Information Solutions (Australia), Infoaxia (Japan), The Paciello Group (USA), Wrong HTML (Japan), and Juicy Studio (UK). Our goals are to develop new tools, improve current tools and expand the range of browsers, operating systems and languages in which our tools are available." http://www.wat-c.org/ W3C Tool Kit 1.2 By bonAveo. "A nifty little Widget with fast access to the W3C Markup and CSS Validator as well as their Link Checker." http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/19203 + 14: TYPOGRAPHY. Text/Typographical Layout By Paul Bohman. "WebAIM continues to provide excerpts from its comprehensive 'WebAIM Guide to Web Accessibility Techniques and Concepts' with the release of this tutorial on laying out text in an accessible format on the web." http://www.webaim.org/techniques/textlayout/ +15: USABILITY. Simplicity and Goovite By Mark Hurst. "I occasionally get asked why this newsletter is in plain text, with no HTML or other decoration. HTML is a nice idea for e-mail, but plain ASCII text does the job just fine - with no downsides (like compatibility differences) and plenty of upsides (like portability and quick download). But there's a more accurate reason why I choose plaintext, and it's an idea I cling to with almost religious fervor in my work: Always try to use the simplest tool to do the job..." http://www.goodexperience.com/blog/archives/2005_08.php Open Source Usability: The Birth of a Movement By Rashmi Sinha. "The last few months have been an exciting time for open source usability. Here is a first hand story of what has been happening, some photographs and reflections." http://www.rashmisinha.com/archives/05_04/open-source.html Usability vs. Learnability By Jeff Atwood. "You should certainly try to put the most important information at the top of whatever it is you're writing, be it a website, a program, an email, a resume, etc. Believe me, I've learned this the hard way; you're lucky if they read anything, much less the first paragraph. But to claim that users don't scroll is downright ridiculous, even for 1996. Let's say you had a user who didn't know how to scroll a web page. How long would it take this user, however timid they may be, to learn that they needed to scroll when browsing the web? A user who can't learn to scroll within a few hours certainly won't be using the internet for very long." http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000376.html Write Clear Titles By D. Keith Robinson. "One of the easiest and best things you can do when publishing on the Web is to write clear, meaningful titles for your posts, pages and articles. Then, once you've written that title, put it into your title tag." http://tinyurl.com/9tyn8 +16: XML. Agile XML By Micah Dubinko. "Micah Dubinko catches up with the XML-developer community with an examination of the Agile XML manifesto." http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/08/31/agile-xml.html?CMP=OTC-TY3388567169 Writing Semantic Markup By Joshua Porter and Richard MacManus. "The biggest and most welcome change on the Web in the last five years has been the astronomical growth of Web feeds: XML files containing a snapshot of a Web siteÕs newest content that saves readers a tremendous amount of time. In 2000, there was only a handful of feeds. In 2005, there are millions." http://digital-web.com/articles/writing_semantic_markup/ RSS 2.0 Specification By Harvard Law. Detailed explanation of the RSS 2.0 Specification http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +17: 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.]