+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 4, Issue 50, June 2, 2006. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 50 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: DREAMWEAVER. 04: EVALUATION & TESTING. 05: EVENTS. 06: JAVASCRIPT. 07: MISCELLANEOUS. 08: NAVIGATION. 09: PHP. 10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 11: TOOLS. 12: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 13: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. WCAG 2.0 Last Call - Extended Deadline 22 June 2006 By Judy Brewer. "Please note that the deadline for comments on WCAG 2.0 has been extended by three weeks. The new deadline is now Thursday 22 June 2006 instead of 31 May 2006, to allow more time due to the wider attention that this Last Call Working Draft is receiving. We thank early commenters for the numerous constructive comments that the Working Group has already received; the Working Group is already working on your comments. Please also note the following clarifications with regard to the review process..." http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/2006AprJun/0083.html WCAG 2.0 Comments By W3C. "The following pages include various options for searching and viewing comments received during the WCAG 2.0 Last Call review period." http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/WCAG20/issue-tracking/viewdata_guidelines.php WCAG 2.0: When I Want a Beer, Don't Give Me Shandy By Bruce Lawson. "...The ideal of WCAG 2 is measurable, testable guidelines that are technology-agnostic, and will therefore not date so quickly. This is a noble ideal, but the realization is flawed. While WCAG 2 doesn't seem to be inherently evil, its message is diluted, both substantively (no requirement for valid code, tables are explicitly allowed for layout) and by excessive verbiage and jargon. Like shandy, it's not an unpleasant drink, but it doesn't hit the spot like a nice pint of bitter does - and that's what I was hoping for..." http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/index.php/2006/wcag-20-beer-shandy/ Call for Response from the Web Standards Project By Joe Clark. "As I have documented, WCAG 2 turns its back on other standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium and authorizes tables for layout and nonstandard sites. It is apparent that WCAG Working Group representatives from large corporations are a significant factor in WAI's decision to remove the requirement for valid HTML that was present, if ignored, in WCAG 1. Products from those companies - IBM, SAP, Oracle - are simply incapable of producing valid HTML." http://blog.fawny.org/2006/05/25/wasp-wcag2/ Abandon All Hope By Joe Clark. "Were you hoping, as I faintly was, that the head of the World Wide Web Consortium and the inventor of the Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, might bring the WCAG Working Group to heel and make them produce something vaguely usable in the way of accessibility guidelines? Well, you can stop..." http://blog.fawny.org/2006/05/25/tbl-jumps-shark/ Formal Objection to WCAG Claiming to Address Cognitive Limitations By Gez Lemon. "Lisa Seeman's objection to WCAG's claim that WCAG 2.0 will address requirements for people with learning disabilities and cognitive limitations." http://tinyurl.com/rkgh6 +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Maintainable CSS By css-discuss Wiki. "Tips and links to articles on creating maintainable stylesheets..." http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=MaintainableCss Element Width By css-discuss Wiki. "One of the most common misconceptions about Cascading Style Sheets, and also one of the most controversial points about it in certain circles, is its definition of the property width. The CSS definition of width is that it defines the width of the element's content area. Any padding or borders are added to that width, as are margins..." http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=ElementWidth Style Sheets 'Made' Easy By Lee Underwood. "One of the biggest problems many people have in setting up a Web site is creating the cascading style sheets (CSS). The proper method for designing a good site is to use HTML for structuring the pages and CSS for styling the content on the pages, but what if you don't know how to create a style sheet, or don't do it that often?" http://www.webreference.com/authoring/style/sheets/layout/easy/ +03: DREAMWEAVER. A Dreamweaver 8.0.2 Updater By Tom Green. "Last week before heading off to TODCON I did my due diligence and installed the Dreamweaver 8.0.2 updater. Later that evening one of the partners for whom I had done a video tutorial asked me where I had put it. Turns out I thought she was finished with it and I had pulled it down. Being the great guy that I am, I opened Dreamweaver and used the Put feature of the Dreamweaver 8 Files panel to upload it. This is where things get interesting..." http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=C294D What I Learned at TODCon 8 By Kim Cavanaugh. "I've had a few days to reflect on the things that I took away from the latest rendition of The Other Dreamweaver Conference, aka TODCon, and it looks like we're heading into a period of new innovations, uncertainty, and great potential on the web. If you're an independent web developer new revenue streams are opening up for you, and more decisions than ever have to be made on where you might want to take your business. Even if you aren't working for yourself, there are enough trends and changes heading your way that now is a good time to sit up and take notice. In this article, I've summarized what I see are the emerging trends, interesting developments, and other factoids gleaned from the sessions, hallway conversations, and late night conversations that define TODCon." http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=3880E Introducing CMX Jumpstart San Francisco By Sheri German. "We are pleased to introduce CMX JumpStart San Francisco, a great first CSS layout for students and experienced developers alike. Structured to be as hack free and straightforward as possible, this may be just the JumpStart for you if you have been holding back on CSS layouts so far. Like all JumpStarts, it uses valid XHTML and CSS as its foundation and is 508 and WAI compliant. This two-column, fixed-width layout, described rule by rule in the documentation article, makes a great learning tool." http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=01219 +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Using Eye Tracking to Compare Web Page Designs: A Case Study By Agnieszka Bojko. "A proposed design for the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Web site was evaluated against the original design in terms of the ease with which the right starting points for key tasks were located and processed. This report focuses on the eye tracking methodology that accompanied other conventional usability practices used in the evaluation. Twelve ASCO members were asked to complete several search tasks using each design. Performance measures such as click accuracy and time on task were supplemented with eye movements which allowed for an assessment of the processes that led to both the failures and the successes. The report details three task examples in which eye tracking helped diagnose errors and identify the better of the two designs (and the reasons for its superiority) when both were equally highly successful. Advantages and limitations of the application of eye tracking to design comparison are also discussed." http://tinyurl.com/m9jco Business-to-Business (B2B) Usability By Jakob Nielsen. "User testing shows that business-to-business websites have substantially lower usability than mainstream consumer sites. If they want to convert more prospects into leads, B2B sites should follow more guidelines and make it easier for prospects to research their offerings." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/b2b.html Remote Interviews By DeeDee DeMulling. "Remote interviews are contextual inquiry sessions without the context. It is not as good as being there, but it is better than guessing or only talking to subject matter experts..." http://productexperience.blogspot.com/2006/05/remote-interviews.html STC (Society for Technical Communication) Learning Session By Suman Kumar. "I conducted a session last Saturday on Think Aloud Usability Testing in the Bangalore STC Learning Session. Download (PowerPoint) presentation." http://www.sumankumar.com/usability/2006/05/stc-learning-session.html Mobile and Handheld Usability Testing - Why It Matters By Tim Fidgeon. "The number of people accessing the web through mobile and handheld devices is growing at a dramatic rate. As such, mobile phone and PDA usability testing may be crucial to your business as the way in which users interact with these devices is as yet relatively unknown." http://tinyurl.com/pltu5 +05: EVENTS. ICWE 2006 The sixth International Conference on Web Engineering July 10-14, 2006. Menlo Park, California, U.S.A. http://www.icwe2006.org/ Webcredible Workshops June and July, 2006. London, United Kingdom http://www.webcredible.co.uk/services/training.shtml e-Access '06 September 14, 2006. London, United Kingdom http://www.headstar-events.com/eaccess06/ Paris Web 2006 September 21-22, 2006. Paris, France http://www.parisweb2006.org/ Web Directions September 26-29, 2006. Sydney, Australia http://www.webdirections.org/ +06: JAVASCRIPT. Making Ajax Work with Screen Readers By Gez Lemon. "The accessibility community is understandably concerned about the accessibility of client-side scripting, in particular using Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) to produce Rich Internet Applications. Steve Faulkner of Vision Australia and founder member of the Web Accessibility Tools Consortium (WAT-C) and myself on behalf of The Paciello Group (TPG) have collaborated in an effort to come up with techniques to make Ajax and other client-side scripting techniques accessible to assistive technology. The Web Accessibility Initiative's Protocols and Formats working group directly address the issue of making rich Internet applications accessible, and we borrow some of their concepts to investigate methods of ensuring that Ajax applications work with leading assistive technology products. The bad news is that it isn't possible to make Ajax work in every known assistive technology, in the same way that it isn't possible to get Ajax to work with older browsers, but we explain the fundamental issues; how to inform users of assistive technology that a change has taken place, and how they can interact with the content. To illustrate our findings, we summarize the behaviour of popular screen readers." http://juicystudio.com/article/making-ajax-work-with-screen-readers.php Object-Oriented Javascript By Tim Huegdon. "Following on from my earlier post, 'Object-Oriented Concepts,' it's time we started to have a look at some examples of execution. I'm going to start with Javascript because I believe this to have widest appeal - PHP, as a server-side language, is probably of interest to fewer developers so I'll cover it later. So without further ado, here's how to objectify your javascript..." http://tinyurl.com/ns9ec Manipulate Time and Date Values with JavaScript's Date Object By Tony Patton. "One of the trickier aspects of development is working with time and date values; it seems like each language or platform has its own format. With Web development, you can utilize server-side code to manipulate dates, or you can utilize JavaScript's Date object. In today's column, we take a closer look at this object." http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-6076869.html Better JavaScript Debugging in 15 Minutes By Jim Rutherford. "I have created a 15 minute screencast that will show you how to Debug JavaScript with Firebug. I cover a number of concepts such as using the console, interactive debugger and timer features of the Firebug extension for Firefox. If you haven't tried Firebug yet, I'm sure that this screencast will convince you to make it a part of your JavaScript coding workflow." http://tinyurl.com/m29lw +07: MISCELLANEOUS. Expert Voices (Interview): Peter Morville on Why Information Architecture Matters By CIO Insight. "So it's very difficult to isolate the information architecture from the other elements of the user experience. You could certainly do that in a research lab, but in the real world all of these factors work together. It's quite possible to do a beautiful information architecture redesign but completely destroy the experience by messing up the graphic side of things." http://www.cioinsight.com/article2/0,1540,1965878,00.asp Dogmas Are Meant to be Broken: An Interview with Eric Reiss By Liz Danzico. "Is there a need for a Strunk and White of usability principles? Boxes and Arrows talks with Eric Reiss about sites designed by the neighbor's kid, how we didn't get Web 1.0 right, and the Web Dogma '06." http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/dogmas_are_mean +08: NAVIGATION. Exploring User Mental Models of Breadcrumbs in Web Navigation By Angela Colter, Kathryn Summers, Cheri Smith. "Breadcrumbs are a common Web site navigation element, yet little is known about whether users notice, use and understand what they are. We surveyed 4,775 sites to determine how many use breadcrumbs and what conventions exist, then conducted usability tests to explore user mental models of breadcrumbs." http://www.angelacolter.com/site/breadcrumbs/ Free Choice and The Usability of Links By Kim Krause Berg. "...Why does underlining words that don't link anywhere matter? The first reason is convention. Or, another way to say it - conditioned behavior. We know that since the beginning of Internet time, a procedure was invented to signal a way to get from point A to point B. Most probably that direction is an underlined word that when clicked, changes color and even if not clicked, often is a different color from the rest of the content. It may even be a different font face and size. And, it's underlined. It takes the visitor somewhere else..." http://tinyurl.com/ltm3b +09: PHP. PHP Roadmap By James Murphy. On WebProNews.com a PHP roadmap has been posted - a comprehensive look at what PHP is and how it's evolved. First they look at what PHP has to offer, then how it's evolved, and finally a comparison of PHP to several other languages, including Perl, Java, and Cold Fusion." http://tinyurl.com/qzuby Using Comments By Christopher Jason. "If you've ever had to work through another programmer's code to complete a project, you probably understand the importance of commenting code. This quick tutorial shows the 3 different ways to comment your code in PHP..." http://www.christopherjason.com/articles/using-comments-php/ +10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. On Quality Education By Holly Marie Koltz. "...As more students become aware of web standards and web best practices before they enter a college or a university program, they are going to start looking closely at your programs and will also look at educational options. If your institution does not offer what they want or need, they may enroll elsewhere. Students have already been asking about good choices on mailing lists and forums for several years. The standards web community is well aware of the substandard educational issues. It is the year 2006 and there is no reason to be instructing practices and methods of 1996, or backwards and outdated materials. Students who are paying for a degree and education should receive a quality education...Educators need to update their knowledge and skills, and those educators who have updated need to have the ability to make changes in programs or update the learning material. Administration and departments should support and encourage these changes. Institutions should help instructors update..." http://www.webstandards.org/2006/05/24/on-quality-education/ WSG Meeting PodCasts By Web Standards Group. Includes many people and topics like Gian Sampson-Wild and Bruce McGuire talking about WCAG 2.0, John Allsopp discussing web patterns, Cameron Adams on AJAX, and Roger Hudson and Russ Weakley on page source order and accessibility. http://webstandardsgroup.org/audio/ Design Patterns: Part 3 By Luke Wroblewski. "...So what is a design pattern? We've used one definition: 'A design pattern is a repeatable design solution, that's been tested, reviewed, and verified.' I think the essential part of that definition is the 'repeatable design solution' part - we'll talk about some of the challenges with testing, reviewing, and verifying later in the conversation. But repeatable solutions give a pragmatic answer to the question: if it's a solution that's been useful in more than a few situations, it's worth writing up as a pattern. If it's been documented well enough that another designer can use it for a different problem, it is a design pattern..." http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?350 Design Patterns: Part 4 By Luke Wroblewski. http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?351 +11: TOOLS. Web Accessibility Checker (for WCAG 2.0) By Adaptive Technology Resource Center (ATRC) at the University Of Toronto. "This is an experimental service provided by the Adaptive Technology Resource Center (ATRC) at the University Of Toronto. It is a model system that demonstrates how web pages can be checked for accessibility problems." http://checker.atrc.utoronto.ca/index.html Functional Accessibility Evaluator By Center for Instructional Technology Accessibility. "The Functional Accessibility Evaluator (FAE), formerly called the Web Accessibility Management Tool (WAMT), analyzes web resources for markup that is consistent with the use of CITES/DRES HTML Best Practices for development of functionally accessible web resources that also support interoperability." http://fae.cita.uiuc.edu/ Accessibility Extensions for Mozilla/Firefox By Center for Instructional Technology Accessibility. "The Mozilla/Firefox Accessibility Extension makes it easier for people with disabilities to view and navigate web content. A toolbar provides easy access to navigation, styling, and keyboard enhancement functionality. Developers can use the extension to check their structural markup from the browser window to verify that it matches the page content. The Accessibility Extension helps authors to meet these kinds of accessibility practices that are so important for the browsing experience of all users and vital to those with special needs." http://cita.rehab.uiuc.edu/software/mozilla/ +12: USABILITY. How to Create User Friendly Web Sites By Jakob Nielsen and Hoa Loranger. "Excerpted from Prioritizing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen and Hoa Loranger...As technology continues to improve and more users have high-speed access, multimedia Web sites are becoming more prevalent. Done well, video, animation, and sound can enrich the user experience and delight audiences. Implemented inappropriately, multimedia is repellant and reduces your site's value. In this chapter, we'll discuss strategies to help you avoid common pitfalls and use multimedia to your advantage." http://www.webreference.com/programming/web_usability/ Older Adults and Web Usability: Is Web Experience the Same as Web Expertise? By Ann Chadwick-Dias, Donna Tedesco, and Tom Tullis. "...Preliminary results in our labs demonstrate a positive correlation between opportunities for collaborative learning and Web expertise, as well as a negative correlation between opportunities for collaborative learning and age. These results support the need to reassess how best to measure Web expertise and how we might improve Web interaction for older adults..." http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=985921.986072 [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.]