+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 4, Issue 40, March 26, 2006. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 40 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: 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. Breaking Barriers By Mike Cherim. "...We often speak of adding things, features, in the name of accessibility. And it's true, we can and do, but more often than not, these things we 'add' are not to make the page accessible, but rather to break down the barriers we put up rendering it inaccessible when we made it work well and look cool. We're not going to suggest you don't put up these barriers then break them down with features, but thinking about it this way may make the process a little more understandable to some. When thinking in this light a good developer can analyze everything added to the page, identify its inherent barriers, and find features or work-arounds to make sure they don't impede disabled users. (For the record, by disabled we don't mean it the way you may be thinking. Anything can be a disability: lousy equipment, slow connection, a handicap? it can all be classified as a user disability. It all counts.)" http://accessites.org/gbcms_xml/news_page.php?id=10 The Importance of Human Evaluation By WebAIM. " The two basic approaches to accessibility evaluation are: 1.) Use a software tool. 2.) Use a human evaluator. Usually the best approach is to use both a software tool and a human evaluator. Each approach has strengths and weaknesses which complement the others and form a more complete approach to Web accessibility evaluation. People with disabilities can be especially valuable as accessibility evaluators, though this approach also has weaknesses." http://webaim.org/techniques/evaluating/human/ Improving the Accessibility of Your Web Site By The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). This document "provides guidance for fixing accessibility barriers in existing Web sites. It describes strategies for identifying priorities, developing a retrofitting plan, and repairing accessibility barriers efficiently." http://www.w3.org/WAI/impl/improving PAS 78: A New Standard in Web Accessibility By David Sloan. "A new UK standard relating to web site accessibility was formally launched at an event in London on March 8th 2006. Having commented on the draft of the standard last summer, I traveled down to London to find out how the published version had evolved." http://www.dmag.org.uk/resources/design_articles/pas78.asp PAS 78 Launch By Mike Davies. Mike's summary of the recently launched PAS 78. http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/access/Pas78Launch Fisking PAS 78 By Joe Clark. "...The specification has a lot of typos and is inconsistent in several places, to be discussed below. However, I believe the authors have succeeded about 85% in achieving a document that teaches untrained people how to manage developers and user testing to arrive at an accessible Web site. A bit more writing might resolve the remaining 15%..." http://blog.fawny.org/2006/03/21/pas78/ I'm visually impaired and I can't see the word verification image. By Google. Google has enabled a system where blind and vision-impaired users can bypass the dreaded CAPTCHA. Users can request access by email, and have access in 24 hours. http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=33974 Google Struggles with Accessibility as Services Expand By Christopher Danielsen. "On the surface, the popular Web search engine Google seems to be completely accessible to those of us who are blind. The site has a simple design, and all of its links and graphics are properly labeled. If all you want to do is a simple Web search, you'll get along with Google just fine..." http://tinyurl.com/mva8h +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. New Clearing Method Needed for IE7? By Roger Johansson. "With the release of the MIX06 build of Internet Explorer...Microsoft has declared IE7 'layout complete'. What that means is that no new CSS features will be added. This is what you get in the final IE7, though there may still be bug fixes. So, now is the time to start testing..." http://tinyurl.com/j3ame MIX 06 By Dave Shea. Dave reports that the latest IE7 supports the min-width and max-width CSS properties, and presumably min-height and max-height. http://mezzoblue.com/archives/2006/03/21/mix06/ Nifty Corners Cube By Alessandro Fulciniti. "...Nifty Corners Cube, the third version of the javascript and CSS solution to get rounded corners without images, has been published today. Several are the improvements introduced from the previous versions: most of all, I think they're now easier to apply. If you're curious, just head over the article. Enjoy!" http://pro.html.it/niftycube/ Levels of CSS Knowledge By Emil Stenstrom. "When you promote web standards, like many of us do, you get to talk to a lot of people. If you promote it in a live chat room like #CSS on EFNet it gets even clearer: there are a lot of different levels of CSS knowledge out there. This article is going to list some of those levels along a rating of how this kind of developer will affect the web. Here we go..." http://friendlybit.com/css/levels-of-css-knowledge/ Degradable Backgrounds for Liquid Layouts By Christian Montoya. "I wrote an article about degradable backgrounds for liquid layouts. It's all about designing websites the way you might design a fixed width website, but still allowing them to shrink down to smaller widths." http://tinyurl.com/jjhan +03: EVALUATION & TESTING. Usability Heuristics Explained By John Wood. "Heuristic evaluation is one of the most common ways of identifying usability problems on your website. It involves checking a site against a set of good practice guidelines called heuristics, the most commonly used set of heuristics being those published by Jakob Nielsen. While this technique is quick and easy to learn, it can be hard to relate abstract guidelines to real site features. This skill comes with practice, but to get up and running here is some guidance on interpreting the Nielsen's guidelines." http://iqcontent.com/publications/features/article_32/ Hotspots and Hyperlinks: Using Eye-tracking to Supplement Usability Testing By Mark C. Russell. This article discusses how eye-tracking can be used to supplement traditional usability test measures. User performance on two usability tasks with three e-commerce websites is described. Results show that eye-tracking data can be used to better understand how users initiate a search for a targeted link or web object. Frequency, duration and order of visual attention to Areas of Interest (AOIs) in particular are informative as supplemental information to standard usability testing in understanding user expectations and making design recommendations." http://www.uigarden.net/english/hotspots-and-hyperlinks Two Simple Post-Test Questions By Jared Spool. "This simple technique of asking two questions often provides us some nice insights into where the participant's mind is at and the lasting impressions they had from the test experience." http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2006/03/23/two-simple-post-test-questions/ Site Audits 1: Introduction to Site Audits By David Moore. "You have a website, and you've been checking its performance against the targets you set during its planning (you did set measurable targets, didn't you?). You're also monitoring the traffic figures and feedback regarding the site. So far so good, but you still not might not be getting a real sense of how well your site is functioning - is the content up to date and well-written, does the search feature work well, are the navigation and orientation clear? A structured evaluation can deliver real benefits, providing a detailed picture of your current site, helping you create a prioritized roadmap for improvements. http://iqcontent.com/publications/features/article_48/ Site Audits 2: How to Conduct an Audit By David Moore. "Reviewing your site is important, but there are many different approaches." http://iqcontent.com/publications/features/article_48/ Site Audits 2: How to Conduct an Audit By David Moore. "In the previous article in this series, we looked at the basics of site audits, including why they're useful and the different approaches to auditing. This time, we'll look in more detail in how to conduct a site audit, using the 'light' version of our auditing tool as a guide." http://iqcontent.com/publications/features/article_50/ Site Audits 3: Benchmarking and Recommendations By David Moore. "In the previous two months we've looked at why you should carry out a site audit, and how best to do it. This month, we conclude the series by exploring how to make best use of the information you've gained from the audit." http://iqcontent.com/publications/features/article_52/ How Personas and Scenarios can Change your Website for the Better, part 1 By John Wood. "This is the first of two articles in which I'll be making the business case for using personas and scenarios to improve your website. I'll give you a flavor of what's involved in using the personas and scenarios and provide a few examples of the kinds of problems we've solved for our clients using these techniques. In this first article, we'll look at the core concepts of personas, leaving scenarios until next month." http://iqcontent.com/publications/features/article_75/ +04: EVENTS. MERLOT International Conference August 8-11, 2006. Ottawa, Ontario, Canada http://conference.merlot.org/2006/ +05: FLASH. A Modern Approach to Flash SEO By Geoff Stearns. Geoff advises designers who want search engines to index the contents of their Flash files to fully separate content from presentation and behaviour, and use JavaScript to progressively load the Flash content. http://blog.deconcept.com/2006/03/13/modern-approach-flash-seo/ +06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Card Sorting for Intranet Information Architecture By Nick Besseling. "A relatively large navigation list (about 50 content areas) of 'un-substructured' finance related material. The intranet in question uses single menu pages for each of 8 main information groups and the above list was part of the wider finance information group. Some work had already be done on other subsections (i.e purchasing). But the rest of the content, which included policies, procedures and other reference material, was all in the same sub-section. The list was structured by alphabetical order only." http://tinyurl.com/zpc6r +07: JAVASCRIPT. How to Bluff Your Way in DOM Scripting By Aaron Gustafson and Jeremy Keith. South by Southwest presentation slides. http://domscripting.com/presentations/sxsw2006/slides/ JavaScript Arrays: Pushing, Popping and Shifting By Jagadish Chaterjee. "This is the fourth article in the series and mainly concentrates on working with multiple arrays effectively..." http://tinyurl.com/mcdg5 AJAX and Accessibility By Sandy Clark. "There are a lot of questions out there about Ajax and Accessibility. I want to clear up some misconceptions if I can..." http://www.shayna.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.display_entry&id=79 AJAX, JavaScript and Accessibility By Robert Nyman. "With the advent of mass-hype for building AJAX solutions, I find it necessary to shed some light of AJAX and JavaScript implementations and how they relate to and affect accessibility, and to explain how they can both co-exist; that one doesn't exclude the other." http://www.robertnyman.com/2006/03/23/ajax-javascript-and-accessibility/ +08: MISCELLANEOUS. Jakob Nielsen Says Function Drives Form (Interview) By Mike Elgan. "In our first online video in the Great Minds in Development series, Dr. Jakob Nielsen tackles the issues of designing for usability and how to maximize usability in the apps you build. In this interview, he discusses everything from the proper attitude for programmers (why being smart might be bad for your code), to the importance of prototyping in design, to the reasons why PDF, Flash and local search engines can hurt more than they help." http://www.devsource.com/article2/0,1895,1937615,00.asp WaSP Interviews Tim Hannigan On Queen's University's Conversion to Web Standards By WaSP. "After leaving Web design work in the 1990's, Tim Hannigan's interest was renewed by the increased discussion, awareness, and use of standards in Web technologies in 2003. How have Web Standards, accessibility, and content management systems become integral to the success of the Queen's site? We talked with Tim to find out." http://www.webstandards.org/action/edutf/interviews/hannigan/ An Interview with Dean Edwards By Jonathan Snook. "Dean talks about his background, explains just why he's waging war on browser inconsistencies, and gives a succinct explanation of his preferred way of creating objects in JavaScript (using the prototype property)." http://www.snook.ca/archives/000553.php Abolish the Intranet Steering Committee? By Jane McConnell. "I met a company last week who told me that had abolished their senior management intranet steering committee. They said their intranet was mature now, was an accepted way of working, and that the committee no longer had reasons to meet." http://tinyurl.com/fevdf +09: NAVIGATION. Improving Search Usability By John Wood. "Searching is a crucial feature in any website, but often developers don't make it as easy to use as it could be. Here we offer guidelines for the three main search components: search controls, the search returns, and metadata." http://iqcontent.com/publications/features/article_56/ Does Search Need to be in the Upper Right? By Jared Spool. "Just because users expect the search box to be in the upper right (at least 27% of the time), doesn't mean that they can't adjust to finding it in other places. After all, we humans are exceptionally adaptable to our surroundings. We can survive when the search box is 400 pixels to the left or 100 pixels down...Our experience is a well-designed page trumps user expectations every time." http://tinyurl.com/z7kpu +10: PHP. Autofilled PHP Forms By Gavin Andresen. "PHP makes handling interactive web pages easy--but when you have large forms to fill out, errors to handle, and lots of data to pass back and forth, you can make your life easier by making PHP fill in all the form values for you. Gavin Andresen shows how to make forms auto-populate from PHP arrays." http://tinyurl.com/zp8w5 Taking a Look at PHP 6 By Jeroen van der Meer. "While most web hosts are still in the PHP 4 era, the PHP developers are already planning and working on PHP 6. Lets have a look at what's been keeping them busy..." http://jero.net/blog/2006/03/php6/ +11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Validity Does not Equal Best Practices By Roger Johansson. "I had a laugh when I read Dustin Diaz' post Totally Compliant Markup. He's created an example of a completely valid HTML document that goes against most best practices. Hilarious, but unfortunately a reality on some sites out there. And I've seen worse. Much, much worse..." http://tinyurl.com/pf2h9 iWeb, The New Tag Soup Generator By Roger Johansson. "Ok so I'm a little late to this because of my recent connection problems, but I can't not say anything about it: I'm seriously disappointed by the markup Apple's iWeb generates. It is the tag soup generator of 2006." http://tinyurl.com/jj98d WYSIWYG Editors And Bad Markup By XStandard. This article gives examples of bad markup created by other WYSIWYG editors and explains how XStandard makes sure that business users generate 'clean', standards-compliant markup every time. http://tinyurl.com/heda2 Evaluation of WYSIWYG-Editors By Peter Krantz. Tests of several WYSIWYG text editors for producing correct markup without seeing the raw HTML. http://tinyurl.com/gvbug WYSIWYG Text Editors Reviewed By Laurence Veale. "Question: We're looking to use a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor for some text fields in our application. We need to configure it to have certain formatting functions turned off, and we need the ability to add some custom functions. Do you have any suggestions?" http://iqcontent.com/publications/features/article_73/ +12: TOOLS. Greeking Machine By Duck Island.com. "Our Greeking Machine will produce up to 50 random paragraphs of actual Latin text in Lorem Ipsum style. Lorem Ipsum is the style preferred most by typesetters and designers who create print design and layout compositions. Lorem Ipsum and Greeking, or Greeked text can be produced as well as, several other pseudo languages including Hillbilly and Metropolitan. Greeking is the method whereby Lorem Ipsum style text is created to fill a composition. Greeking replaces actual structured sentences with false text which is considered less distracting." http://www.duckisland.com/GreekMachine.asp Colour Contrast Analyser By Vision Australia. "It is a tool for checking foreground & background colour combinations to determine if they provide good colour visibility. Determining 'colour visibility' is based on algorithms suggested by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)" https://www.visionaustralia.org.au/info.aspx?page=628 +13: TYPOGRAPHY. Effective Style with em By Jonathan Christopher. "There are different ways to style text according to the medium on which the text will appear. It is generally accepted that using em units to scale your text is the best method." http://www.mondaybynoon.com/2006/03/13/effective-style-with-em/ +14: USABILITY. More Alike Than We Think By Whitney Quesenbery. "What happens when a site has to appeal to a wide range of people? How do you sort out their different usability requirements? Will they conflict, and if so, how do you prioritize them?" http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000080.php Don't Fight Over Your Home Page By Laurence Veale. "Most organisations spend most of their design time focusing on the homepage, often in tense negotiations with different departments, each jockeying for prominent positions in the global navigation. It's understandable, as the homepage is the most coveted piece of real estate on your site. So how do you keep everyone happy? It can definitely be an exercise in compromise, but here we offer some suggestions." http://iqcontent.com/publications/features/article_74/ Stop Creating ROT By Rachel McAlpine. "Redundant, outdated and trivial content (ROT): you're soaking in it. First and second generation web sites and intranets are full of ROT. It's almost inevitable when you have a web site but no system for reviewing content regularly." http://www.webpagecontent.com/arc_archive/171/5/ The Surprising Truth About Ugly Websites By Mark Daoust. "...As website owners, it is very easy to get caught up in the design of our websites. We want to present our businesses to visitors in the best way possible, and as we get familiar with web technologies and design techniques, it is easy to focus solely on the design of a website from the standpoint of what looks good rather than the message our website conveys. What we need to keep in mind, is that websites are meant to be used Ð used for reading, used for network, used for shopping, etc. Websites, like any other marketing tool, convey a message and are an invitation for visitors to trust us. Our design needs to reflect this. Take a moment today to look over your website. Is it really easy to use? Have you been more worried about the look of your website than its functionality? Would it be more effective if it were simpler in its design?" http://tinyurl.com/zacvh +15: XML. Why XForms Matter, Revisited By Kurt Cagle. Given the rising proliferation of 'component toolkits', I see a coming period where everyone's going to be trying to get THEIR component interfaces accepted as the "standard" ones. The XForms components actually handle almost all of these cases, provides a standard, open, non-proprietary solution that suffers only from lack of education and exposure, and with its presence now in Mozilla (and numerous versions available in IE, including both ActiveX and pure Javascript versions) I see XForms poised to become the de facto forms technology within the browser world." http://www.understandingxml.com/archives/2006/03/why_xforms_matt.html [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.]