+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 4, Issue 25, December 7, 2005. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 25 CONTENTS. ANNOUNCEMENT: Open Position. The following position with the Department of Information Technology Systems and Services at the University of Minnesota Duluth is open and accepting applications. Please feel free to forward this URL to interested colleagues. http://www1.umn.edu/ohr/employment/openings/job133948.html 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: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 07: JAVASCRIPT. 08: NAVIGATION. 09: PHP. 10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 11: TOOLS. 12: TYPOGRAPHY. 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. Benefits of an Accessible Website - part 1: Increase in Reach By Trenton Moss. "The DDA (Disability Discrimination Act) states that service providers must not discriminate against disabled people. A website is regarded as a service and therefore falls under this law, and as such must be made accessible to everyone." http://tinyurl.com/8bkff Benefits of an Accessible Website - part 2: The Business Case By Trenton Moss. "Some organisations are making accessibility improvements to their websites, but many are seemingly not making the accessibility adjustments. Disabled people don't access their website, they say, so why should they care?" http://tinyurl.com/8yjfq eAccessibility of Public Sector Services in the European Union By Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB), AbilityNet, Dublin City University and Socitm Insight. "This study is unique in its coverage of web accessibility across the EU's public sector at the national and EU levels, i.e. central government and European institutions. The results of the policy survey indicated that, whilst there is considerable strategic support for eAccessibility, there is significant diversity in approach and in many instances, little in the way of incentives, training or accreditation. Given the cultural and governmental diversity across EU Member States, this comes as no surprise, but there is much that governments can learn from each other due the variety of approaches taken." http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/e-government/resources/eaccessibility/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Pandora's Box (Model) of CSS Hacks And Other Good Intentions By Tantek Celik. Tantek talks discusses the history of CSS hacks, challenges that browser developers face when dealing with hacks, the impact hacks can cause, and some advice about the future. http://tantek.com/log/2005/11.html#d26t1820 Implement CSS 2.1 By Anne Van Kesteren. "On hacks, filters and what browsers should do." http://annevankesteren.nl/2005/11/css21 History, But No News By Ben Buchanan. "...I think Tantek's patience is greater than mine - 7 years is past the stage of asking the waiter where you food is..." http://weblog.200ok.com.au/2005/11/history-but-no-news.html CSS Layout Starting Points By Rachel Andrew. "Rachel Andrew discusses an approach to rapid and reliable CSS development. Save hours of layout work and testing on your next CSS build - time that could be better spent roasting chestnuts or baiting children." http://24ways.org/advent/css-layout-starting-points +03: DREAMWEAVER. The Dreamweaver 8 Toggle Displaying CSS Styles By Virginia DeBolt. "I recently updated a page for the first time since moving to Dreamweaver 8 and noticed some changes in the way Dreamweaver 8 deals with absolutely positioned layers in Design View..." http://tinyurl.com/9376s +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Enticing Users with Content By Christine Perfetti. "By observing users in usability tests, we've seen that there is a specific moment where designers have the best chance of enticing a user to pay attention to a promotion or advertisement: the seducible moment." http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2005/11/29/enticing-users-with-content/ Release of (free) Intranet Review Toolkit By James Robertson. "Step Two Designs, in conjunction with the IA Institute, have just released the Intranet Review Toolkit. This toolkit provides intranet managers and designers with an easy-to-use method to assess the strengths and weaknesses of their intranets. It contains a substantial set of heuristics, allowing a detailed intranet review to be conducted that focuses on a wide range of functionality, design and strategy..." http://www.steptwo.com.au/columntwo/archives/001935.html#001935 Talking-Head Video Is Boring Online By Jakob Nielsen. "Eyetracking data show that users are easily distracted when watching video on websites, especially when the video shows a talking head and is optimized for broadcast rather than online viewing." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/video.html +05: EVENTS. php|tek 2006 April 26-28, 2006. Orlando, Florida U.S.A. http://www.phparch.com/tek/index.php +06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. The Blooming of Information Architecture at Google: A Close Look at Facets, Tags & Categories in GoogleBase By Rashmi Sinha. "I just spent some time with GoogleBase and was amazed at just how deeply Google has embraced standard information architecture concepts and trends. We have categories, facets, tags. I kid you not. Google of the simple search box with a go button has come a long way indeed." http://tinyurl.com/9bjo6 +07: JAVASCRIPT. Ajax in Action David Crane and Eric Pascarello with Darren James. This is an excerpt from chapter one of the book "Ajax in Action". http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/ajax_excerpt.php3 Easy Ajax with Prototype By Drew McLellan. "There's little more impressive on the web today than a appropriate touch of Ajax. Used well, Ajax brings a web interface much closer to the experience of a desktop app, and can turn a bear of an task into a pleasurable activity..." http://24ways.org/advent/easy-ajax-with-prototype/ 10 Places You Must Use Ajax By Adam Bosworth. "...Here are places Ajax should now be required in a web application..." http://tinyurl.com/9qxpp Top 10 Custom JavaScript Functions of All Time By Dustin Diaz. "If there was ever a universal common.js shared among the entire develosphere, you'd fine these ten (plus one bonus) functions. It would be the swiss army knife no developer would go into production without. They have no doubt been tested tried and true and have proven usefulness and helpfulness to all those who've used them. So without further ado, here are what I believe to the top ten greatest custom JavaScript functions in use today." http://www.dustindiaz.com/top-ten-javascript/ Object-Oriented JavaScript: An Introduction to Core Concepts By Alejandro Gervasio. "JavaScript is a powerful object-oriented language whose capability has frequently been underestimated when compared with other OO languages. This article, the first of several parts, should help you gain a better understanding of JavaScript's true value. It will show you the basics of creating custom objects and defining their methods and properties. You will also learn some advanced concepts such as Inheritance. Plenty of real-world examples will be included." http://tinyurl.com/dfwdc +08: NAVIGATION. The Eight Types of Navigation Pages By Jared Spool. "...As we've watched users search for their desired content, we've realized there are patterns to the pages we see. We've started to catalogue these patterns and have concluded there are essentially 8 types of pages a user can run into, when searching content-rich sites. These different page types turned out to be important as we discovered users behave differently as they encounter each one. If the design of a given type doesn't support the user's behavior, then the user is less likely to succeed in finding their target content. Often, pages fail because designers don't realize they were designing for the wrong type..." http://tinyurl.com/88p93 Our Current Thinking on Search By Jared Spool. "n '97, we wrote the infamous article, 'Why On-Site Searching Stinks.' How are we feeling on this topic seven years later? Jared shares our current thinking." http://tinyurl.com/97pwc +09: PHP. PHP Code Generation with Elisp By Zachary Kessin. "There's plenty of near-repetition in software development; writing very similar code over and over again. Stop copying, pasting, and modifying, and start automating the process! Zachary Kessin shows how to use Emacs Lisp to generate useful and reusable database-access code for PHP." http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/php/2005/11/23/php_elisp.html +10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Semantic Typography: Bridging the XHTML Gap By Mark Boulton. In the Web Standards community we hear the words 'Semantic Markup' thrown around a lot as a concept-the right thing to do- but I know a lot of designers who are trying to learn this stuff are being confused by the whole 'semantic thing'. http://tinyurl.com/cksw9 Golden's Rules: The Real Story Behind the Massachusetts ODF Flap By Bernard Golden. "You've probably been exposed to the brouhaha going on regarding Massachusetts' decision to mandate use of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) as a file storage mechanism for documents created by all state agencies...standardized file formats like ODF will enable applications and services we can't predict. With massive amounts of information available with a structure that enables easy trawling by an enormous number of applications, who knows what will come about? We do know, however, that restricting ourselves to a single vendor solution limits us to the imagination of that vendor rather than the shared imagination of the entire world." http://tinyurl.com/7pc9x Why Won't Microsoft Join Existing Standards Efforts? By Peter Korn. "Microsoft has stated on numerous occasions that they believe in and support open standards. But from my experience, they do this not by joining existing open standards efforts, but instead by creating entirely new, parallel (and arguably redundant) 'open standards' efforts around their own technologies. And often it seems these new standards efforts are around new, untested, and immature technologies that began life as proprietary to Microsoft - introduced into the standards process when a pre-existing open standards effort already exists, and exists around proven and shipping technologies which were developed in the open with lots of input from a variety of expert stakeholders." http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/korn?entry=why_won_t_microsoft_join +11: TOOLS. Firefox 1.5 Accessible Widgets By Gez Lemon. "Firefox 1.5 supports dynamic web content accessibility to help the advancement of Rich Internet Web Applications. To help illustrate how this, I've developed a simple keyboard accessible colour selection widget. The widget only works with Firefox 1.5 with scripting enabled, as the purpose is to demonstrate the accessibility features of Firefox 1.5." http://juicystudio.com/article/firefox-accessible-widgets.php Keyboard Accessible Colour Selection Widget By Gez Lemon. http://juicystudio.com/experiments/colour.php +12: TYPOGRAPHY. The Many Uses of the Malleable em By Zoe Gillenwater. "Most people first encounter the em unit as a way to size text using CSS. This article will show you how to do just that. But, there's more to the em unit than just font sizing. It can be used as a length unit on any property that takes a length. You'll learn how to use the em unit as length for margin and padding to create pages that scale more gracefully." http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=C0410 An Explanation of Ems By Richard Rutter. Richard Rutter offers an insight into that oft-misunderstood unit of measure; the em. Do you know your ems from your elbow? Dazzle your dinner guests with scintillating silver talk of CSS." http://24ways.org/advent/an-explanation-of-ems +13: USABILITY. Don't Make Me Think, Second Edition: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability By Steve Krug. Chapter 11 (Accessibility, Cascading Style Sheets, and you) of 'Don't Make Me Think', Second Edition: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability" http://www.webreference.com/programming/usability/index.html Galleries: The Hardest Working Page on Your Site By Jared M. Spool. "Galleries are very important to user success, yet we are only now beginning to understand what they need to work well. Designing to eliminate pogosticking is still a new concept for many folks and that is reflected in many of the designs we see today. Understanding how order and layout of the links affect the user's behavior is critical. As time goes on, we suspect we'll see many novel design approaches that help users choose where to go next, all with greater and greater success." http://uie.com/events/roadshow/articles/galleries/ Prioritizing Design Time: A Long Tail Approach By Joshua Porter. "Do you find that you spend an inordinate amount of time fretting over your homepage? Is it the one page that gets the most attention from your design team? How about other parts of your company? Does it get attention even from people who aren't on the design team?" http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2005/12/01/prioritizing-design-time/ How Google Manages Its Homepage By Gerry McGovern. "An average person can deal with only 7-10 choices on a webpage, according to Google research. That's why it's so hard to get a link on the Google homepage." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2005/nt-2005-12-05-google.htm +14: XML. XHTML and CSS Code Commenting By Ben Buchanan. "Good programming habits make good markup habits too. A few well-placed XHTML and CSS comments can save you a lot of time later on and help your coworkers pick up where you left off... just as it does for programmers!" http://weblog.200ok.com.au/2005/12/xhtml-and-css-code-commenting.html XHTML Anatomy: A Document Deconstructed By Molly E. Holzschlag. Some things start small and grow big. That's exactly what's happened with an idea I have. I want to put together a human-readable glossary or lookup chart for commonly used terms within XHTML and CSS. I'm a known nomenclature fanatic. I love words and I believe that improving our use of proper terminology helps us communicate more effectively. What's more, I've been technical editor on several upcoming books and it continues to disturb me that many very bright, skilled and knowledgeable leaders in our industry get terminology wrong, or are inconsistent in their descriptions. http://www.molly.com/anatomy-of-a-document/ XHTML is not for Beginners By Lachlan Hunt. "...XHTML is not for beginners. We must start with HTML and have a clear learning path towards the future with XHTML. It has been argued, that since the future lies with XHTML (although that is yet to be seen), we should be teaching XHTML from the ground up. That sounds nice in theory, but the reality is that we're still teaching in a predominately text/html environment, and the fact is: trying to teach XHTML under HTML (tag-soup) conditions is like trying to teach a child to swim by throwing them in the deep end and not realizing they're drowning until it's too late. When it comes to XHTML: there is far too much for a beginner to learn, not to mention the significant issues of browser support, that we must simply accept that they're not ready and teach them HTML instead. XHTML is not merely HTML 4 in XML syntax, it comes packaged with all the XML handling requirements as well...The sheer number of tag-soup pages claiming to be XHTML are a direct result of pushing it upon newcomers while leaving out all the extremely important details, most of which they won't understand yet anyway, but do actually need to learn before using it...." http://lachy.id.au/log/2005/12/xhtml-beginners [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.]