+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 4, Issue 32, January 29, 2006. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 32 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: DREAMWEAVER. 05: EVALUATION & TESTING. 06: EVENTS. 07: JAVASCRIPT. 08: MISCELLANEOUS. 09: NAVIGATION. 10: PHP. 11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 12: TOOLS. 13: TYPOGRAPHY. 14: USABILITY. 15: XML. SECTION TWO: 16: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Does Your Website Overstate Its Accessibility? By Out-Law News. "Of the 500 sites, 40 (8%) had an accessibility statement or logo. However, when 20 of these sites were inspected further, only six were found to be accurately stating their accessibility." http://www.out-law.com/page-6529 Thoughts on the 'Joint Statement on OpenSource and OpenDocuments in Massachusetts' By Peter Korn. "The good folks at the Disability Policy Consortium and the Bay State Council of the blind have issued a Joint Statement on OpenSource & OpenDocuments in Massachusetts." http://tinyurl.com/cbgcw DeJa Vu All Over Again By Carroll Tech Blog. Carroll Center for the Blind discusses the Massachusetts decision to move to Open Document Format. http://blog.carrolltech.org/archives/51 CommonLook Review By Jon Whiting. "The CommonLook Section 508 PDF Plug-In is an Acrobat plug-in that can help you create more accessible PDF files. It guides you through a step-by-step evaluation and repair of a PDF file according to US Section 508 1194.22 standards. Jon Whiting has written a review of its strengths and weaknesses." http://www.webaim.org/techniques/acrobat/commonlook Defining Content Language By Karl Dawson. "...To maximize the universal accessibility of our pages we should always include language information in our pages. We can identify the natural language of the content by using the lang attribute and/or the xml:lang attribute for XHTML and must always include the XML namespace if using XHTML. Additionally, we can specify the primary language of the document using HTTP headers or the content-language meta tag..." http://www.thatstandardsguy.co.uk/2006/01/23/content-language/ One of Four Web Users are Disabled Users By Jesper Ronn-Jensen. "Did you know that up to 25% of all visitors on your website have some kind of accessibility problem. Some of your users may be blind, deaf, dyslectic, has learning disabilities or motor disabilities such as sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, etc. A so-called functional disability..." http://tinyurl.com/a2gvg +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Preparing For Internet Explorer 7 - Part One By Holly Bergevin and John Gallant. Internet Explorer 7 is coming, and there are going to be some interesting changes and improvements when it arrives. That's good news, but not if you have been using certain CSS hacks to make IE/Win correctly display your tableless designs! If that is the case, you may expect some or all of your pages to start breaking in IE7 when it begins to penetrate the market. We want to help you avoid pain and anguish later. So please join us now as we begin a series that will discuss the problem, offer solutions, and get you up to speed on the latest IE version testing methods. We'll also 'clean up' a real live CMX Jumpstart, all in easy stages. It's a bit like Y2K all over again, but we got through that and we can get through this too, with just a little effort. Trust us! http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=C6160 Introduction to CSS Table-Related Display Values By Zoe Gillenwater. "One of the hardest things for web designers new to CSS layout to get their heads around is that divs don't act like table cells, the traditional building blocks of page layouts. Table cells automatically expand to hold their content, match each other in height, and stack horizontally, but divs don't do these things, making CSS layouts that emulate table layouts tricky. However, there's an easy way to get your divs to act like table-cells: tell them to using the display property. This article will introduce the table-related values of the display property of CSS 2.1 that allow you to make any non-table HTML element act like any table element. In the article following this one, you'll then learn how to use these display values to create a pure CSS layout that emulates the behavior of a table layout." http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=53F70 Vector Graphics in CSS By Anne Van Kesteren. By now 'everyone' must have heard of SVG. The problem I have with SVG (besides actual problems in the specification) is that it is a presentational markup language..." http://annevankesteren.nl/2006/01/vector-graphics Beginners Guide to CSS and Standards By Emil Stenstrom. "As an operator of #CSS, a channel on EFnet, I get to talk to people on a daily basis that have never used CSS before, or are at the very beginning of learning it. This article teaches all the basics you need to make your first CSS powered website. It is aimed at people that knows a little HTML, and maybe has made a few websites themselves. Let's get started." http://friendlybit.com/css/beginners-guide-to-css-and-standards/ +03: COLOR. Color Theory for Digital Displays: A Quick Reference: Part I By Pabini Gabriel-Petit. "Computer monitors display information using the RGB (Red-Green-Blue) color model. An RGB monitor synthesizes colors additively by selectively illuminating each of its pixel's red, green, and blue phosphor dots at varying levels of intensity. The light from a pixel's three phosphor dots blends together to synthesize a single color. In additive color synthesis, all hues of the visible spectrum of light are mixtures of various proportions of one, two, or three of the primary colors of light: red, green, and blue." http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000069.php Color Theory for Digital Displays: A Quick Reference: Part II By Pabini Gabriel-Petit. "Our perception of hues, values, and chroma levels depends upon their interaction with adjacent hues, values, and chromas, which can result in color-contrast, value-contrast, and chroma-contrast effects, respectively." http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000070.php +04: DREAMWEAVER. Common Questions About Dreamweaver 8 By Abobe formerly Macromedia. "This article answers some of the common questions received by Macromedia Technical Support." http://tinyurl.com/dszpn Problems With Pages Containing Absolute Links in Dreamweaver By Abobe formerly Macromedia. "...There are two workarounds..." http://tinyurl.com/eyyah Understanding the Template Updating Option in Dreamweaver 8.0.1 By Abobe formerly Macromedia. "After installing the Macromedia Dreamweaver 8.0.1 updater, users will see a new Templates category added to the Site Definition dialog box. This category just has one checkbox: 'Template Updating: Don't rewrite document relative paths.'" http://tinyurl.com/8klvr Resolved Issues With Dreamweaver 8 Update (8.0.1) By Abobe formerly Macromedia. "The 8.0.1 updater fixes bugs in Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 on both the Macintosh and Windows platforms. Please see the Dreamweaver 8 Release Notes for additional information on the 8.0.1 release and to view an overview of important issues resolved with the Dreamweaver 8.0.1 update. This TechNote provides a detailed list of issues resolved with this release." http://tinyurl.com/cegcl Dreamweaver 8 Application Server and Database FAQ By Abobe formerly Macromedia. "This article answers some of the common questions received by Macromedia Technical Support related to ColdFusion, PHP, ASP, ASP.NET, JSP and databases." http://tinyurl.com/cwo6y +05: EVALUATION & TESTING. Customer Focus: Getting to Truly Know Your Customers By Gerry McGovern. "There are two key lessons to be learnt from these studies: 1.) We can't necessarily find out what people want by asking them directly. We therefore need to do a lot of observation. 2.) Simply giving people lots and lots of choice is not necessarily the right approach." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2006/nt-2006-01-23-customer-focus.htm Improving Customer Experience: Usability Testing Is Not Enough By Bonny Brown. "With the right data in hand, both marketers and designers can do their jobs better and work together more effectively to design products and services their customers value and ensure satisfaction with the customer experience. Integrated customer experience research methods are a critical tool every business needs to win high-value customers and keep them coming back." http://tinyurl.com/aqpb3 Evaluating the Usability of Search Forms Using Eyetracking: A Practical Approach By Matteo Penzo. "In this article, I'll present findings from eyetracking tests we did to evaluate the best solutions for label placement in Web forms. Today, forms are the primary-often the only-way users have of sending data to Web sites. Web 2.0 makes extensive use of forms. For example, on Flickr, Del.icio.us, and Writeboard - which, by the way, I used when writing this article-users provide all of their tags, comments, and other information using forms. Users submit queries to search engines using forms. E-commerce sites also rely heavily on forms that let visitors find and purchase products. (I've never browsed for book on Amazon. I always search for them.) http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000068.php +06: EVENTS. WWW 2006 May 23-26, 2006. Edinburgh, Scotland http://www2006.org/ @media 2006 June 15-16, 2006. London, United Kingdom http://www.vivabit.com/atmedia2006/ +07: JAVASCRIPT. The JavaScript Diaries: Part 12 - Multiple Array Types By Lee Underwood. "This week we look at what happens with multidimensional and associative arrays. As you look at these you will start to understand where you can use JavaScript when building your Web sites." http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/diaries/12/index.html JavaScript Tip number 1: Speed Up Object Detection By Dean Edwards. "Welcome to the first of what I hope will be a regular series of JavaScript tips..." http://dean.edwards.name/weblog/2005/12/js-tip1/ Escaping Regular Expression Characters in JavaScript By Simon Willison. "JavaScript's support for regular expressions is generally pretty good, but there is one notable omission: an escaping mechanism for literal strings. Say for example you need to create a regular expression that removes a specific string from the end of a string. If you know the string you want to remove when you write the script this is easy..." http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2006/01/20/escape +08: MISCELLANEOUS. Meetings Considered Harmful By David Heinemeier. "Researchers in organizational psychology have confirmed that meetings are, well, evil. A study conducted by the University of Minnesota found that the amount and length of meetings correlate with 'negative effects' (burnout, anxiety, and depression) on its participants..." http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/meetings_considered_harmful.php You Still Want Meetings. Here's How to Make Them Useful By Ryan Singer. "Though meetings are harmful, you sometimes need to get together and work a problem out. Here are some tips to make sure nobody wastes their time." http://tinyurl.com/d4tuv +09: NAVIGATION. What's Your Link Reputation? By Gord Collins. "'Hi Gord, Google updated our newly developed Website's Pagerank. On the toolbar, we're now a 5, but we're not seeing good rankings or Google referrals. I can't figure Google out. What do they want?'...This article describes in simplified terms an information retrieval process that is very complex. However, that complexity isn't going to stop us from attempting to gain some kind of understanding. No one outside Google really knows the intimate details of each of Google's algorithm components. There's a lot of speculation. You don't need a degree in information science or artificial intelligence to understand what search engines like Google are trying to achieve. They want to study the relationships between documents to distinguish legitimate links from the billions of spam links they crawl every day. What we want to know: how does Google analyze links?" http://www.sitepoint.com/article/whats-your-link-reputation Determining Link Order on Intranet Portals By Jared Spool. "Several folks have asked what techniques we've used to determine the ideal order of links. We've had good success on intranets with a rating system. Using the use cases/tasks associated with each link, we ask users to rate them on two scales..." http://tinyurl.com/9svcr +10: PHP. PHP Security: Basic PHP Security By Dennis Pallett. "Security in PHP has become one of the most popular topics in the PHP community lately, especially with an increased number of exploits and security problems. In this day and age, you must make sure your PHP scripts are airtight, and that they don't have any security problems." http://www.phpit.net/article/php-security-basic/ Error Handling in PHP: Coding Defensively By Alejandro Gervasio. "As with any programming language, when you code in PHP, it helps immensely if you set up your applications to handle errors gracefully. This article explores some of the most common error checking methods available in PHP, and provides hands-on examples that use different error handling methods." http://www.devshed.com/c/a/PHP/Error-Handling-in-PHP-Coding-Defensively/ Error Handling in PHP: Introducing Exceptions in PHP 5 By Alejandro Gervasio. "Welcome to the last part of the series 'Error Handling in PHP.' In two parts, this series introduces the basics of error handling in PHP. It demonstrates some of the most common methods for manipulating errors in PHP 4, and explains the implementation of exceptions in PHP 5, particularly in object-oriented environments." http://tinyurl.com/adjhw +11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Web Presentation Patterns By Jonathan Snook. "...The trick is not to implement as many design patterns as you can, but to choose the design pattern that is most appropriate when you see the need for abstraction...." http://www.digital-web.com/articles/web_presentation_patterns/ The Elements of a Design Pattern By Jared M. Spool. "Design teams are discovering that a well-built design pattern library makes the user interface development process substantially easier. A quality library means team members have the information they need at their fingertips. Choosing usable components that work smoothly for users becomes the developer's path of least resistance. Innovation, while not prohibited, is reserved for those times when it's really necessary, allowing the team to leverage the work already done by others." http://tinyurl.com/az9t9 Another Failed Redesign: IEEE By Kimberly Blessing. Oh the irony -- that a standards body should ignore standards in creating their new Web site! As a member of the IEEE, I couldn't help but laugh when I saw that the new IEEE Web site redesign was announced in an e-mail newsletter... along with another entry titled "Let's Not Overlook Standards". http://www.webstandards.org/buzz/archive/2006_01.html#a000600 Bloody Web Standards AGAIN By Kay Smoljak. "...I have a theory about programmers (and not just ColdFusion programmers). They learn HTML in five seconds flat - it's easy right? Compared to actual programming languages, it is. They never bother to learn it properly because it's not considered important. Experienced programmers scoff at obvious newbie mistakes, like the misuse of pound signs in CFML, yet these same programmers think nothing of huge tracts of CSS with identical redundant font declarations on every rule. Misuse of HTML can make it very difficult to change the look and feel of applications - I see this all the time in otherwise brilliant open source applications and community code. If more programmers realized how simple and powerful plain HTML with presentational information separated out into CSS files can be - applying the same principals that work so well in application code -the world would be a better place. And really, people who can master CFML or OO or SQL or write CMSs or whatever can surely learn to apply a little intelligence to their web application's output." http://kay.smoljak.com/archives/?bloody-web-standards-again +12: TOOLS. Colour Blindness Simulator By etre. "One in twenty people have some form of colour vision deficiency. Upload an image to experience it as colour blind users may." http://www.etre.com/tools/colourblindsimulator/ +13: TYPOGRAPHY. 25 Best License-Free Quality Fonts By Vitaly Friedman. "...I've decided to create the Top 20 Best License-Free Official Fonts, which are likely to be used rather for official, serious presentations (such as business sites) than a colorful teenager's homepage. Most fonts presented below are absolutely license-free which means that you can use them for both private, personal and commercial purposes without any limitations whatsoever..." http://www.alvit.de/blog/article/20-best-license-free-official-fonts 15 Best License-Free Pixel Fonts By Vitaly Friedman. "...working on my last project..., I needed something serious, official, good-looking and readable. The results can be found below..." http://www.alvit.de/blog/article/25-best-license-free-pixelfonts +14: USABILITY. Ten Best Intranets of 2006 By Jakob Nielsen. "This year, we saw increased use of multimedia, e-learning, internal blogs, and mobile access. Winning companies also encouraged consistent design by emphasizing training for content contributors." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/intranet_design.html First Impressions Count in Website Design By Andy King. "...This research shows that reliable decisions about your site can be made in as little as 1/20th of a second. This emotional judgment can color subsequent judgments made after further reflection. Even though your site may have superior products, services, or usability, an initial negative impression from a poor or slow design can steer customers towards your competition. You only get one chance to create a good first impression, make it count. A clean, professional, and fast-loading site can ensure that your first impression will be a good one." http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/blink/ The Beauty of Simplicity By Linda Tischler. "Marissa Mayer, who keeps Google's home page pure, understands that less is more. Other tech companies are starting to get it, too. Here's why making things simple is the new competitive advantage." http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/100/beauty-of-simplicity.html Above the Fold is Obsolete (and digibuy is a good company) By Darrel Austin. "...'Above the fold' is obsolete. In their study, they found that people are more than willing to scroll to find the information they want. This goes against the marketing departments favorite mantra 'EVERYTHING must be above the fold!'..." http://tinyurl.com/btofs +15: XML. A Survey of XML Standards: Part 1 By Uche Ogbuji. "In the first article in this series, I focus on core XML technologies." http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-stand1.html A Survey of XML Standards: Part 2 By Uche Ogbuji. "In my second article, I cover standards relating to XML processing by developers. http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-stand2.html A Survey of XML Standards: Part 3 By Uche Ogbuji. "In the third, I present a selection of the most important XML applications (less precisely known as vocabularies)." http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-stand3.html A Survey of XML Standards: Part 4 By Uche Ogbuji. "This final article provides a detailed cross-reference of all the standards covered in this series. I think the sum encompasses all of the most important XML standards." http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-stand4/ [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +16: 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.]