+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 4, Issue 37, March 5, 2006. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 37 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: FLASH. 06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 07: JAVASCRIPT. 08: MISCELLANEOUS. 09: NAVIGATION. 10: PHP. 11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 12: TYPOGRAPHY. 13: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 14: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Using Accessible Video and Audio to Enhance e-Learning for Disabled Students By Ross Little. "Audio and video can offer richness and increased inclusively in education but can present challenges to access for people with sensory impairments. Ross Little looks at how accessibility solutions can be quickly and effectively added to video content..." http://www.skillsforaccess.org.uk/articles.php?id=151 Provide Audio Descriptions for Video or Animated Content - General Advise By Skills For Access. "Video normally contains a significant amount of visual and audio information, and understanding of the content requires access to both these channels. But people who cannot see the visual content of the video may as a result be unable to fully understand the video if visual or audio events happen and are not detectable or their context explained by the video's soundtrack. For example, someone in a video may make a facial expression which adds an ironic or sarcastic tone to what they say, but this important cue is entirely visual so would be missed by anyone unable to see the video. The same goes for some aural events - for example, if a character fires a gun, the gunshot will be heard, but anyone unable to see the film would not know who fired the gun without an additional explanation. Thus, the provision of audio descriptions - additional spoken audio information explaining or describing events - is necessary to enable understanding..." http://www.skillsforaccess.org.uk/howto.php?id=104 What is Accessibility? By Robert Nyman. "But when making a web site accessible to people with disabilities, why wouldn't we at the same time make it accessible to people who aren't using Windows and Internet Explorer? It's a mindset and an attitude that go hand-in-hand for me. Surely, everyone wants to reach an audience as wide as possible, right? A thing that bothers me, though, is when accessibility advocates proclaim that we have to stay away from using JavaScript, Flash et al, all in the name of making it accessibility. Accessibility and using JavaScript, for example, aren't mutually exclusive. It's all about progressive enhancement. Build a common ground and then implement enriching features in an unobtrusive way that doesn't rule out accessibility. So, let's stop bickering about what we read into the word accessibility, and instead start focusing on reaching as many people as possible with this wonderful medium called the Internet!" http://www.robertnyman.com/2006/03/01/what-is-accessibility/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Bookend Lists: Using CSS to Float a Masthead By Andrew B. King. "Learn how to create that 'bookend' look with lists and CSS positioning. This CSS-layout technique saves a significant amount of XHTML code over tables." http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/bookend/ Progressive Enhancement By css-discuss Wiki. "The term 'Progressive Enhancement' has been used as the flip-side to 'Graceful Degradation'..." http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=ProgressiveEnhancement&version=23 +03: EVALUATION & TESTING. A Process for Incorporating Heuristic Evaluation into a Software Release By Marilyn Hollinger. "This paper describes a process for incorporating heuristic evaluations into a software product release. The goal of the paper is to provide enough detail and results to other design teams to assist them in developing their own process for this activity." http://gain.aiga.org/content.cfm?ContentAlias=_getfullarticle&aid=1472250 +04: EVENTS. KnowIT May 21-24, 2006. Gainesville, Florida U.S.A. http://www.knowitconference.com/ Edu Web Conference July 31-August, 2006. Baltimore, Maryland U.S.A. http://www.eduwebconference.com/ HighEdWebDev Conference October 22-25, 2006. Rochester, New York U.S.A. http://www.highedweb.org/2006/ +05: FLASH. Provide Audio Descriptions for Video or Animated Content - in Flash By Skills For Access. "Flash resources may contain a significant amount of both visual and audio information. Anyone unable to see the visual information is thus likely to miss out on information essential to understanding the Flash resource. To ensure that people who cannot see the visual content can understand the resource and achieve the experience intended to be provided by the resource, additional spoken audio information - audio descriptions - need to be provided." http://www.skillsforaccess.org.uk/howto.php?id=147 Provide Text Equivalents for Audio - in Flash By Skills For Access. "The flexibility of Flash as a multimedia technology offers several options for providing alternatives to audio content. Sound alerts could be replicated by visual cues, such as obvious changes to the appearance of the resource, while spoken information provided as a soundtrack that plays could be replicated by the provision of on-screen text." http://www.skillsforaccess.org.uk/howto.php?id=137 Provide Text Equivalents for Graphics - in Flash By Skills For Access. "Graphical information presented in a Flash movie will be inaccessible to anyone who cannot see the content of the movie, unless an equivalent text alternative is provided. This is particularly so for anyone who is blind or visually impaired, and relies on a screen reader and/or a Braille display device to access on-screen content. Steps need to be taken to ensure that suitable text alternatives are provided for all information presented in graphical form." http://www.skillsforaccess.org.uk/howto.php?id=101 U.S. Grants Patent For Broad Range Of Internet Rich Applications By Eric Chabrow. "The patent--issued on Valentine's Day--covers all rich-media technology implementations, including Flash, Flex, Java, Ajax, and XAML, when the rich-media application is accessed on any device over the Internet, according to the patent holders..." http://tinyurl.com/eqd47 + 06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Competitive Analysis: Understanding the Market Context By Jason Withrow. "Just when you thought you fully understood the three circles of information architecture, your assumptions are being challenged again. Withrow comes around with an argument for looking at the context circle differently." http://tinyurl.com/p3j6b Prototyping With PowerPoint By Jensen Harris. "A couple of weeks ago when I talked about The Feature Bob Invented, I mentioned that we use PowerPoint as an easy way to prototype UI, especially in the early stages of design. A number of people have asked me for more details, and so today I thought I'd go through it step-by-step." http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/02/20/535444.aspx Interface in Form: Paper and Product Prototyping for Feedback and Fun By Bruce Hanington. "Sketching and modeling are integral features of the design process, critical for both the generation of ideas, and the communication of concepts to others for discussion and evaluation, particularly in the context of human-centered design. While these methods are a natural component of the designer's education and professional tool kit, there is immense value in exposing other professions involved in the development of products and interfaces to at least a limited set of these same basic tools." http://tinyurl.com/s2279 +07: JAVASCRIPT. JSON for the Masses By Dustin Diaz. "For many years JavaScript has been portrayed as a very ugly language. It's been abused, misunderstood, and kicked around like the poor step-child as known in fairytales. That's all going to end this year. As many know, Stuart Langridge proclaimed that 2005 would be the year of the DOM. He was in fact correct. 2006 will be the year of Object Notation." http://www.dustindiaz.com/json-for-the-masses/ There is Nothing More Permanent than a Temporary Hack By Aaron Straup Cope. "I still don't like JSON. It works and working code always win but its arrival as the next Best Thing Evar on the Intarweb only confirms that it's a hack. I don't have any problem with lightweight and simple data structures but I just can't get excited about them as an exchange mechanism between disparate services..." http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2006/02/12/bacon/#flickrtags Roaming Through XMLDOM: An AJAX Prerequisite By Jayaram Krishnaswamy. "The twin tasks of the XMLHttp are handling the HTTP request, and then processing the XML response. The first one is easily done by writing the appropriate syntax for creating this object. This is what is accomplished in AJAX by invoking the new constructor for XMLHTTP object. This is but one of the objects of the XMLDOM -XML Document Object Model. In this article, we look at XMLDOM in some detail before calling the XML document in an AJAX rendition in a future article..." http://tinyurl.com/guwxz XML Responses and AJAX By Jayaram Krishnaswamy. "...This tutorial will focus on the responseXML accessor." http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/XML/XML-Responses-and-AJAX/ An in Depth Discussion of JavaScript Arrays By Jagadish Chaterjee. "This series of articles mainly concentrates on working with JavaScript arrays. We shall start with the basics of JavaScript arrays and finally conclude with complex object based arrays in JavaScript." http://tinyurl.com/qefz7 +08: MISCELLANEOUS. Derek Featherstone Interview By Carolyn Wood. "Derek Featherstone is a husband, a father, the curator of boxofchocolates.ca, a member of the Web Standards Project's Accessibility Task Force and the proprietor of Further Ahead, an Ottawa-based accessibility consultancy. Today, Digital Web Magazine's Carolyn Wood puts Derek under the bare bulb where he discusses strategies and techniques we can all apply to make Web sites more accessible..." http://www.digital-web.com/articles/derek_featherstone/ Ladder of Fire (Peter Merholz Interview) By G. K. VanPatter. "A conversation with Peter Merholz - "...I never said design is not a field of knowledge. You asked if design was a field of 'vast, deep, broad, and nuanced' field of knowledge like anthropology, and I said, 'No'. We never discussed whether design is another kind of field of knowledge, which I think it is. But it is fractured, rootless, and without a core. It doesn't have anywhere near the depth or nuance of anthropology." http://www.nextd.org/02/08/03/index.html Hiding in Plain Sight: An Interview with Adam Greenfield By Boxes and Arrows. "Is everyware overwriting what we know as everyday? On the heels of finishing his first book, Adam Greenfield talks with Boxes and Arrows about Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing and how the concepts are reshaping our lives." http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/hiding_in_plain_sight +09: NAVIGATION. Where's the Search? Re-examining User Expectations of Web Objects By A.D. Shaikh and K. Lenz. "In 2001, Bernard determined that users were able to form a schema for the location of web objects on informational websites. The current study investigates whether users' expectations have changed since the 2001 study. Changes were found in the expected location of the site search engine, internal links, and advertisements." http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/81/webobjects.htm Where Are You When I Need You??? (or... Ending the search for search) By Kath Straub. "Kath Straub...looks at users' expectations of where items should be placed on your Web page." http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/feb06.asp Designing Your Website to be Search Engine Friendly By Mark Belam. "Design on the web has changed a lot since the mid 1990's. Not only has the language used to create pages expanded, but so has the capability of browsers, and the availability of bandwidth. Consequently pages have gradually carried more and more content, and designers, information architects, and HTML developers have faced the challenge of presenting increasingly sophisticated information and marketing messages onto the computer monitors in homes and offices around the world." http://www.currybet.net/articles/sef/ +10: PHP. Yahoo! PHP Developer Center By Yahoo!. http://developer.yahoo.net/php/ Enforcing Object Types in PHP: Filtering Input Objects in PHP 4 By Alejandro Gervasio. "When you are writing an object-based web application in PHP, you want to prevent your classes from being convoluted with input objects of the incorrect type. These input objects can cause the application to throw a fatal error. In this article, you will learn how to enforce object types in PHP 4." http://tinyurl.com/z2rvz Enforcing Object Types in PHP: Using the PHP5 instanceof Operator By Alejandro Gervasio. "This is the second installment of the series 'Enforcing object types in PHP.' Welcome back. As you'll surely know, this three-part series goes through the basic concepts of object type enforcement in PHP 4/PHP 5. It explores different approaches for checking types of objects to help you avoid possible code contamination when objects of incorrect type are inputted within PHP classes." http://tinyurl.com/jdk93 CSS Style Sheet Switcher using PHP (Javascript free) By Paul Whitrow. "A simple solution to switch CSS Style Sheets on the fly using only PHP." http://tinyurl.com/rhsf9 PHP Localization with TMX Standard By Nicola Asuni. "One of the main concerns of internationalization consists of separating the main source code from the texts, the labels, the messages and all the other objects related to the specific language in use. This facilitates the translation process as such as all the resources related to the local language context are well identified and separated." http://evolt.org/PHP-Localization-with-TMX-standard +11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Google Page Creator By Drew McLellan. "...Unless the architecture is such that pages can be fixed once they been published, Google really need to withdraw this service until it's fixed. Would they launch Google Mail if it was malforming the emails it sent? No way. They'd fix it. So is it acceptable to launch Google Page Creator when it's malforming the pages it creates? No way..." http://allinthehead.com/retro/281/google-page-creator Google Page Creator: When It's All Just Too Hard By Kevin Yank. "Of course, Google has never been the champion of standards-compliant approaches to Web development, and Page Creator is no different. Ugly spots: It generates tags (whoops, there goes the old gag reflex...). It uses and instead of semantic alternatives. It illegally puts
s inside tags like

. It doesn't put alt descriptions on images (not by default, but at all!)...The most frustrating thing for me as a developer who cares about standards is that all the ugly bits above seem to be a result of conscious decisions by Google, rather than simple ignorance..." http://tinyurl.com/zzbgy Government Web Standards Usage: People's Republic of China By Peter Krantz. "...Access to government information on the web is relatively new in the PRC. However, a recent report (quoted in an article in People's Daily Online) said in China, 96.1 percent of government departments at the state level and 81.3 percent of local governments had launched portal websites. I have gathered links to 80 government web sites from the Chinese Central Government's Official Web Portal. These have been checked with the W3C validator to see if headings were used and if they were using the W3C HTML recommendations..." http://tinyurl.com/pvcn5 How to Sniff Out a Rotten Standardista By Molly E. Holzschlag. "Just like the stink of a three day old fish the arguments about standardistas preaching to the choir, being arrogant and generally being long past their due date persist. In many cases, these arguments are useless and wrong. A good standardista works hard to educate as well as advocate. A fresh standardista understands that the world is filled with a wide range of people of different skill sets, talents and circumstances. A committed standardista understands the reasons the Web standards movement exists..." http://www.molly.com/2006/02/23/how-to-sniff-out-a-rotten-standardista/ The Standards of Standards By Ben Buchanan. "In general, high standards are a good thing - after all, if you aim low then you'll never hit a high target. The trick is to aim high but still within the bounds of reality; and not to aim so high we can't accept the odd compromise." http://weblog.200ok.com.au/2006/03/standards-of-standards.html +12: TYPOGRAPHY. Big Button Report Misses the Point? By Patrick H. Lauke. "If a site avoids the use of absolute and pixel-based font sizes (which cannot be resized in Internet Explorer), users can employ their browser's built-in functionality to resize the text size to best suit their needs, without the need for a site-specific option available to increase the font size. Putting text size widgets on par with such a fundamental requirement as the provision of text equivalents is, once again, dangerously misinformed." http://accessify.com/2006/03/big-button-report-misses-point.php Perception of Fonts: Perceived Personality Traits and Uses By A. Dawn Shaikh, Barbara S. Chaparro, and Doug Fox. "This study sought to determine if certain personalities and uses are associated with various fonts. Using an online survey, participants rated the personality of 20 fonts using 15 adjective pairs. In addition, participants viewed the same 20 fonts and selected which uses were most appropriate. Results suggested that personality traits are indeed attributed to fonts based on their design family (Serif, Sans-Serif, Modern, Monospace, Script/Funny) and are associated with appropriate uses. Implications of these results to the design of online materials and websites are discussed." http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/81/PersonalityofFonts.htm Examining the Legibility of Two New ClearType Fonts By Barbara S. Chaparro, A. Dawn Shaikh, and Alex Chaparro. "This article introduces six new ClearType fonts developed by Microsoft. Legibility of two of the serif fonts, Cambria and Constantia, is compared to the traditional serif font Times New Roman. Results show that the legibility, as measured by the number of correct identifications of briefly presented characters, was highest for the new font Cambria, followed by Constantia, and then Times New Roman. Old style digits, such as 0,1, and 2, used in Constantia resulted in confusion with the letters o, l, and z. Times New Roman symbols were confused with both letters and other symbols." http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/81/legibility.htm +13: USABILITY. The Goldilocks Content Framework: Identifying Just-Right Information By Jared M Spool and Joshua Porter. "Content is an essential part of any successful web site. However, little work has been done to help designers understand how much content they need or what that content should say. Using a novel approach of analyzing the conversations between users on discussion lists, the authors have determined there are essentially 14 types of content that form a framework of what users need." http://gain.aiga.org/content.cfm?ContentAlias=%5Fgetfullarticle&aid=1492239 Maximize Text Readability By Skills For Access. "People have a natural aversion to reading on-screen - the demands of the eye and brain in processing information displayed on a surface (monitor screen) that is also a light source is significantly higher than reading printed matter on a medium that reflects light, such as paper. This can be exacerbated by factors such as screen size, resolution and refresh rate. The impact of conditions such as dyslexia can exaggerate this further, such that text presented in long, fully justified paragraphs, as in a book, may be virtually impossible to read." http://www.skillsforaccess.org.uk/howto.php?id=106 Creating Online Application Power Users Using Graduated Usability By Robert Buffone. "Graduated Usability isn't a new concept--most desktop applications use it. Web applications are limited in their ability to be designed with Graduated Usability. As more people leverage Web-based applications as part of their everyday life, for both work and non-work related tasks, more time will be spent using these applications than those on the desktop. However, currently, Web applications offer few alternatives to users: accomplish tasks less efficiently over time, wasting time and money, or move on to better designed applications that can meet their needs." http://www.developer.com/design/article.php/3585826 [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.]