+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 4, Issue 23, November 28, 2005. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 23 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: EVALUATION & TESTING. 04: EVENTS. 05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 06: JAVASCRIPT. 07: MISCELLANEOUS. 08: PHP. 09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 10: TOOLS. 11: USABILITY. 12: XML. SECTION TWO: 13: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. The XHTML Role Access Module Still Flawed By John Foliot. "The following is a reprint of an Official Comment made to the Editors of the XHTMLŞ 2 Draft Recommendation. It is provided here in a more public forum to stimulate discussion and debate." http://www.wats.ca/articles/xhtmlroleaccessmodulestillflawed/80 The Trouble With Accesskeys By Ian Lloyd. "When I first heard about the accesskey attribute in HTML I thought 'Wow! What a great idea' and started to apply them willy-nilly to projects I was undertaking at work. Some time later, I started to read other articles that described problems with using accesskeys, problems that I would not discover by myself unless I were using a Screen Reader (something I'd do infrequently during testing cycles of sites at work) or some other assistive device. What's the problem?..." http://accessify.com/2005/11/trouble-with-accesskeys.php XHTML2 Draft Backtracks on Accesskeys By Mel Pedley. "...the XHTML 2 Working Group is now proposing to add the 'KEY' attribute to the ACCESS element - thus, once again, allowing content authors to dictate specific key bindings. In other words, ACCESSKEY by another name. The Working Group seem to feel that users need, or want, content authors to control key bindings. I have personally never encountered a single user who was in favour of author-defined key bindings - let alone felt that they were a user requirement. The users who I have spoken to feel that ACCESSKEY forces bindings upon users whether they want them or not and many users who could, in theory, benefit from single keystroke navigation, ignore accesskeys completely!" http://www.blackwidows.org.uk/wpress/?p=45 Implementing a Holistic Approach to E-learning Accessibility By Brian Kelly, Lawrie Phipps, and Caro Howell. "The importance of accessibility to digital e-learning resources is widely acknowledged. The W3C WAI has played a leading role in promoting the importance of accessibility and developing guidelines which can help when developing accessible Web resources. The accessibility of e-learning resources provides additional challenges. In this paper the authors describe a holistic framework for addressing e-learning accessibility which takes into account the usability of e-learning, pedagogic issues and student learning styles in addition to technical and resource issues and provide a case study which illustrates use of this holistic approach to e-learning." http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/alt-c-2005/html/ http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/alt-c-2005/press-release Cognitive Disabilities and Online Education By Ben Buchanan. "...Ultimately, the system should - theoretically - benefit the majority without unfairly disadvantaging any minority. The reality is that current technology at most universities has not reached perfection, or even anything close. None of the big commercial software apps are seriously standards-compliant. With that as a given - at least for the moment - there should be enough majority benefit to justify using the system, provided the minority can still access the material in order to complete their studies. In the meantime if the technology fails, then the people must step up and cover the shortfall. Which does involve some cooperation from the student - they have to communicate their needs and work with university staff who are trying to help them. There's an awful lot to be done in this area of web-delivered content." http://tinyurl.com/9ouhp UK Resources for Web Accessibility and the Law By Martin Sloan. "This page is intended to provide a comprehensive list of resources for those interested in the legal aspects of Web Accessibility in the UK. As well as providing links to Government legislation (primary and secondary), there are also links to other official documents as well as articles and presentations." http://www.web-accessibility.org.uk/ European Member of Parliament Sees Not Much Improvement in Accessibility By Christian Heilmann. Just got this as part of the e-government bulletin. Just another example as to how web accessibility has bigger issues than non-encoded ampersands. http://www.wait-till-i.com/index.php?p=183 Massachusetts, Open Document, and Accessibility By Peter Korn. "...In the medium and long term, this move is clearly a boon to the Massachusetts government and its citizens. By moving to an open standard for its files, it throws open the doors to competition which will lower the price of office software...While the move to ODF seems to offer clear benefits to the Massachusetts government and citizens in general, a move to ODF and a change in office application has significant accessibility implications for people with disabilities..." http://tinyurl.com/e36dl This is Accessible? By Gez Lemon. WCAG 2.0 has a concept of a baseline to cater for the fact that the web is continually evolving, and has to remain technology agnostic to remain useful. I don't have a problem with the concept of a baseline; I think it's a good idea. I will write more about the baseline concept at a later date. The following is a conformance claim, along with the script and markup referenced by the conformance claim. Would you consider this accessible? http://juicystudio.com/article/this-is-accessible.php WCAG 2.0 Baseline Concept By Gez Lemon. "In order to encourage vendors of non-W3C technologies to include accessibility features in their technologies, and in recognition of emerging technologies that are beneficial for the Web, WCAG 2.0 is technology neutral. Rather than list each technology that the guidelines cover, WCAG 2.0 introduces the concept of a baseline. This post attempts to explain what is meant by this baseline concept." http://juicystudio.com/article/wcag-baseline-concept.php The Question of Baseline By Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 Working Group. "The WCAG Working Group continues to wrestle with the challenge of defining the roles and responsibilities of authors and user agents, respectively, in making Web content accessible. In WCAG 1.0, we identified shortcomings in user agents and created guidelines that contained phrases like, 'until user agents...' Many of the same issues exist today, but we are looking for a more effective mechanism to address them than creating "temporary bridge" guidelines designed to make up for the shortcomings of user agents. The Working Group is well aware that there is intense interest in our approach to the challenge of defining "baseline" assumptions about the technologies available to users. This Working Draft of WCAG 2.0 represents a continued evolution of that approach, and the Working Group welcomes comments and suggestions from the community." http://tinyurl.com/bmhpq Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 - comments on the 'Baseline Technology Assumption' By Tina Holmboe. "I would like to express my concern that this concept has even made it into a document such as the WCAG 2.0 WD. The idea that a baseline technology - aka. 'lowest common denominator' - can be defined goes against the very platform and client independence that the World Wide Web is meant to incorporate..." http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-comments-wcag20/2004Dec/0001.html +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. CSS Is Not Hard To Learn - If You Recognize It For What It Is By Christian Heilmann. "On almost any mailing list or forum you still encounter developers venting their frustration as to how buggy CSS is and how hard it is to switch from table layouts to CSS layouts. A lot of this frustration is not based on bad browsers or missing elements and concepts in CSS, it is based on an old school view of web design. Web design was never easy, but it can be if we start embracing the complexity of our development environment and be flexible enough to develop for it." http://www.wait-till-i.com/index.php?p=172 Simple CSS Image Switcher By Andy Rutledge. "This is a pure CSS image switcher that is lightweight and standards-compliant. It could be used for a gallery or any similar function. Any number of list selection options can be used so long as the width can accommodate them. The CSS does not utilize any hacks, as this page uses Dean Edwards' IE7 JavaScript." http://www.andyrutledge.com/cssslides.html +03: EVALUATION & TESTING. Putting Perfect Participants in Every Session By Jared Spool. "When putting together a design study, whether it is usability testing, field research, or focus group activity, it turns out that the most critical activity is recruiting the right participants. Over the past few years, we've interviewed several dozen user experience professionals, looking at the practices they use to conduct their research. As we dissected every activity involved in producing a successful study, we came to the conclusion that recruiting participants is the lynchpin that holds the study together." http://tinyurl.com/82fxg Find Out What Your Customer Really Needs From Your Website By Gerry McGovern. "Find out what your customer really needs from your website by putting yourself in their shoes. Never ever design a website without thoroughly testing it with your target customers. Every day-every single day-you should be thinking about, talking to, listening to, observing your customers. There is simply no other part of your job that is remotely as important." http://tinyurl.com/9utlc +04: EVENTS. Gel (Good Experience Live) 2006 May 4-5, 2006. New York, New York U.S.A. http://www.gelconference.com/c/gel06.php +05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Getting Involvement With Prototype Interfaces By Donna Maurer. There is a funny piece of rhetoric from the user-centred design world - it says that when showing prototype interfaces for the first time they should be hand-drawn and rough, not computer-drawn and tidy. The theory says that people are more likely to tell you what they think when things are still rough." http://www.maadmob.net/donna/blog/archives/000662.html +06: JAVASCRIPT. Inline JavaScript: What's the Problem? By David Lindquist. "So then, what is the problem with using inline JavaScript in moderation? After all, it is simply a name="value" attribute pair like all the others. Why is class="someclass" acceptable and onclick="dosomething(this)" is not?" http://web-graphics.com/ Inline JavaScript: What's the Problem? (comments) http://web-graphics.com/mtarchive/001670.php#subheadcomments Questioning Unobtrusive JavaScript By Jeremy Keith. "...Unobtrusive, good; inline, bad. That said, it's not the worst thing in the world to have inline event handlers. It's more a matter of best practices. If you styled your pages using inline styles, there wouldn't be anything technically wrong with that. It's just that, from a maintenance and readability standpoint, it can make your own life more difficult. It's much the same with adding behaviour inline. You can do it, but you'd be much better off keeping all your behaviour externalized." http://domscripting.com/blog/display/32 +07: MISCELLANEOUS. Interview with Andy Clarke (AKA Accessibility, the Gloves Come Off) By Ian Lloyd. "...Those people still delivering nested table layout, spacer gifs or ignoring accessibility can no longer call themselves web professionals...There are now so many web sites, blogs or publications devoted to helping people learn standards and accessible techniques that there are now no excuses not to work with semantic code or CSS..." http://accessify.com/2005/11/interview-with-andy-clarke-aka.php Meet the Life Hackers By Clive Thompson. How important is screen size? Meet the Life Hackers, looks at people who are trying to re-engineer high-tech work distractions, discusses a study where participants were given a 42-inch screen vs. a 15-inch one. One veteran researcher claimed he has 'never seen a single tweak to a computer system so significantly improve a user's productivity.' On the bigger screen, people completed the tasks at least 10 percent more quickly - and some as much as 44 percent more quickly. http://tinyurl.com/cftzk +08: PHP. Track Browser Resizing in Your Database Using AJAX - part 1 By Tom Muck. "AJAX gives a web developer a valuable tool that allows the server to communicate with the browser in real time based on client-side events (such as resizing). I wrote a little script that I can insert on a page to track the resizing made by a user in relation to his screen resolution. After getting this information from a variety of users, I can run queries on the data and get some insight into browsing habits and adjust my page designs accordingly (or have them adjusted by a designer, in my case.) The code will be presented for ColdFusion and PHP." http://www.communitymx.com/blog/index.cfm?newsid=621 Track Browser Resizing in Your Database Using AJAX - part 2 By Tom Muck. "Part 1 of this post showed the server-side code for a browser resize tracker. This part will show the client-side script. This can go on any type of page -- php, coldfusion, html, etc. The scripts consist of several functions..." http://www.communitymx.com/blog/index.cfm?newsid=622 +09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. AT&T: One Full Year With Web Standards By Joe D'Andrea. "I'm incredibly pleased - and proud - to have helped www.att.com and others at AT&T evolve from a hodgepodge of largely nutritionless mid '90s-era markup to their current leaner, healthier state." http://www.joesapt.net/archive/2005/11/14/22.43.36/ Web Standards and The New Professionalism By Molly E. Holzschlag. "...Whatever we call it - Web 2.0, evangelism, religion, or simply the best way to do our jobs, I can't agree more with the strong yet very clear message that real-world Web professionals are sharing. No doubt that getting to a highly skilled level isn't that easy. Believe me, I understand. I've been at it for the majority of my career and as the old adage goes, the more I learn, the less I realize I know...Today, I want to express that I believe that this new professionalism means taking responsibility for the education of ourselves and each other, and ensuring that reversions like Disney Store UK never happen again." http://www.molly.com/2005/11/14/web-standards-and-the-new-professionalism/ Design Sites and Web Standards By Roger Johansson. "Judging from some of those comments and bits and pieces I have seen in other design-oriented forums, there is clearly a wide-spread misunderstanding among purely visual designers that accessibility is just about blind people. Good accessibility practices make browsing the web easier for everybody. And, after looking around at some of the design portals in Joe's list of tested sites, I wonder what makes the designers of many of those sites use such incredibly small text and stuff their content in little scrolling boxes. What is the point of that? I just don't get it." http://tinyurl.com/c696o Guess What? Your Clients Have Learned About Web Standards D. Keith Robinson. "If the folks writing the checks are on the standards clue train, don't you think it's time to stop debating the merits of standards-based design?..." http://www.publish.com/article2/0,1895,1883624,00.asp WebPatterns and WebSemantics By John Allsopp. "Over the last few years, we've seen a growing awareness of the importance of semantics in HTML. Perhaps Dan Cederholm's rightly lauded Simplequiz was the coming of age of this idea, which while there at the very beginning of HTML, had been overlooked for a long time by the great majority of web developers. We could consider this "first generation semantics" or, in current parlance "WebSemantics 1.0"...." http://westciv.typepad.com/dog_or_higher/2005/11/webpatterns_and.html +10: TOOLS. Sim Daltonism By Michel Fortin. "Sim Daltonism is a color blindness simulator for Mac OS X. It filters in real-time the area around the mouse pointer and display the result in a floating palette." http://www.michelf.com/projects/sim-daltonism/ W3C Feed Validation Service By W3C. "This is the W3C Feed Validation Service, a free service that checks the syntax of Atom or RSS feeds. The Markup Validation Service is also available if you wish to validate regular Web pages." http://validator.w3.org/feed/ +11: USABILITY. Clean, Cutting-Edge UI Design Cuts McAfee's Support Calls By 90% By Bruce Hadley. "...The bottom line, as far as Ries is concerned, is straightforward: Focusing on the design of the product had a significant impact on the cost of supporting the product..." http://www.softwareceo.com/com070604.php Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign By Cameron Moll. "The difference between redesigns that make you look busy and give your stakeholders something else to argue about, and strategic overhauls that reposition your brand and help you set and reach business goals." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/redesignrealign Realigning Design By D. Keith Robinson. "The problem for many designers, as I see it, is not that we see ourselves as full-time 'redesigners'. It's more that everyone else sees us that way. How many of you have worked on a project where you wanted to (and probably did) do some real thinking, only to have it trumped by some aesthetic preference of your client? It's in here that the battle between usability and 'graphic design' is often created. I know I've worked on quite a few sites like this. Where you've got to compromise your well thought-out and purpose driven design to make sure you're addressing your client's vision of art." http://www.7nights.com/asterisk/archives05/2005/10/realigning-design Attack of the Zombie Copy By Erin Kissane. "You've seen them around the web, these zombie sentences--syntax slack and drooling, clauses empty of everything except a terrible hunger for human brains. Here's how to fight back." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/zombiecopy Accessibility Is Not Enough By Jakob Nielsen. "A strict focus on accessibility as a scorecard item doesn't help users with disabilities. To help these users accomplish critical tasks, you must adopt a usability perspective." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/accessibility.html Non-Usable Accessibility By Matt Bailey. "Jacob Neilson's latest Alertbox article, 'Accessibility is Not Enough'...is a very short, but succinct article in warning people to be wary of software or applications that are sold as accessible, yet do not take user behavior into account. Accessibility is best applied with usability. " http://www.accessibilityblog.com/2005/11/21/non-usable-accessibility/ +12: XML. Migrating from HTML to XHTML and XML By Char James-Tanny. "This is the first part of a two-part article describing a detailed methodology for migrating HTML files to the structure and flexibility of XHTML and/or XML. By using XHTML to add structure and separate content from presentation, you'll be better positioned for a move to XML. Even if you never move to XML, your XHTML files will be easier to create and maintain, and will be more accessible." http://www.winwriters.com/articles/migrate/index.html [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +13: 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.]