+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 5, Issue 03, July 14, 2006. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 03 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: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 07: JAVASCRIPT. 08: MISCELLANEOUS. 09: NAVIGATION. 10: PHP. 11: 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. Board Names Advisory Committee for 508 Standards Update By The Access Board. "The Board has organized a new advisory committee to assist in updating its access standards for electronic and information technologies procured by the Federal government. Issued under section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act in 2000, the standards cover computer hardware and software, websites, phone systems, fax machines, copiers, and other technologies..." http://www.access-board.gov/news/508committee.htm Shawn Henry Podcast/Interview on WCAG 2 By Giles Colborne. "Shawn Henry discussed WCAG 2.0 with UK UPA president Giles Colborne following the UPA conference in June 2006." http://www.w3.org/WAI/highlights/200606wcag2interview.html Accessible Digital Media By Geoff Freed and Madeleine Rothberg. Design Guidelines for Electronic Publications, Multimedia and the Web http://ncam.wgbh.org/publications/adm/ Walgreens Recruits Employees With Disabilities Through Highly Accessible Website By Michael McCarty. "Walgreens has launched an innovative initiative to hire people with disabilities at its distribution center in Anderson, S.C. and is recruiting through a specially-designed Website..." http://tinyurl.com/fbp9t Replace Your Mouse with Your Eye By Alfred Hermida. "...Scientists at Imperial College, London, are working on eye-tracking technology that analyses the way we look at things." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2098030.stm +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Finer Details of Floats By Emil Stenstrom. "The other day I was working on one of those two column layouts. I quickly got into trouble by something I thought was a bug. It was a bug, but not in the browser(s) I thought. Let's go..." http://friendlybit.com/css/finer-details-of-floats/ Some Print Style Sheet Tips By Natalie Jost. "...it really doesn't take all that much effort to make a print stylesheet..." http://nataliejost.com/articles/some-print-stylesheet-tips Preparing Your CSS for Internet Explorer 7 By Trenton Moss. "Later on this year Microsoft will officially release Internet Explorer 7. If you can't wait until then, you can download a beta version 1 and see how it works. Microsoft has hinted that when IE7 is officially released they'll be looking to quickly upgrade users from IE6, so it's essential that your website is prepared for this new browser." http://tinyurl.com/f8eum Properly Hiding CSS from Internet Explorer By Sandra Clark. "While many CSS filters and hacks rely on using advanced selectors that IE 6 and below don't recognize, that is not going to be the case for Internet Explorer 7. So the proper way to hide information from Internet Explorer would be to use something similar to the code below..." http://www.shayna.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.display_entry&id=131 +03: DREAMWEAVER. Working with Background Images and CSS - Part 1: Using Repeating and Non-Repeating Images By Adrian Senior. "In this series of articles, I will review working with background images and cascading style sheets (CSS). Background images and their usage is a wide subject. In this series, I will start at the beginning. No prior knowledge is assumed and none will be needed. I'll start off this series by looking at some simple syntax. From there, you will see how you can use keywords to control your background images and the manner in which they are displayed..." http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/css_bgimages.html Working with Background Images and CSS - Part 2: Placing Images with Precision By Adrian Senior. "...In this part, you learn how to place your background images with greater accuracy. You will also see how you can use multiple keywords in the value of the background-position property, and how the flexibility of the CSS syntax allows you to write the selectors in different ways. Throughout this part, you continue to work with the bgimage.gif you created in part one..." http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/css_bgimages_pt2.html +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Directed Attention By Robert Stevens, Mashhuda Glencross, Roger Hubbold, and Caroline Jay. "On this project we are undertaking a set of pilot studies to examine how sighted users view and navigate Web pages and structured electronic information...we hypothesize that important visual cues conveying page layout and structure could be re-introduced for multi-modal presentation to visually disabled users..." http://aig.cs.man.ac.uk/research/attention/attention.php +05: EVENTS. UIE (User Interface Engineering) Virtual Seminars http://www.uie.com/events/virtual_seminars/ Oz-IA Conference and Retreat September 30-October 1, 2006. Sydney, Australia http://www.oz-ia.org/2006/ Europe's Second Information Architecture Summit September 30-October 1, 2006. Berlin, Germany http://www.euroia.org/ AWF (About, With, and For) 2006 Responsible Design, The Value of Good Intention October 6-7, 2006. Chicago, Illinois U.S.A. http://www.id.iit.edu/events/awf/2006/ Educause 2006 Conference October 9-12, 2006. Dallas, Texas U.S.A. http://www.educause.edu/conference/annual/2006 +06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. The Reinvention of Information Design By David Sless. "And every generation has to reinvent things in their own idiom. But it would be nice if a little history and an awareness of past work was added to what we do now, rather than continually reinventing it as if it were NEW. So wasteful, and at times quite boring to old farts like me. (...) it is difficult to see anything genuinely new in the excitable and shallow research about web sites which was not already established know-how in document design long before digital technology." http://www.communication.org.au/dsblog/?p=15 +07: JAVASCRIPT. Building Accessible Widgets for the Web By Mike West. "Assistant Managing Editor Mike West pitches in an article this week to show you how to use Javascript and the DOM to create enhanced widget behaviors while maintaining basic accessibility." http://tinyurl.com/lcv6j Ajax Framework Bindows Addresses Accessibility Requirements By JavaScript Search. "Working closely with The Paciello Group, international experts and pioneers in the field of accessible interface design, the Bindows development team spent over a year solving many of the technical complexities that accessibility requirements pose to Ajax and Web 2.0 applications. The Bindows framework enables the fastest time to market for Ajax and Web 2.0 applications that work with leading screen readers, such as JAWS, without requiring any download or installation (zero-footprint)." http://www.javascriptsearch.com/news/news/060612BindowsAccessiblity.html Developers Working to Overcome AJAX Accessibility Issues By Darryl K. Taft. "...Despite providing slick advantages over standard Web application techniques, AJAX presents accessibility issues for some users. Developers, however, are working to address the problem..." http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1987300,00.asp Learning JavaScript By Jeremy Keith. "...once you know the language, you can use libraries to cut development time and make life easier. But that's completely different to using a library because you don't want to deal with JavaScript..." http://domscripting.com/blog/display/78 Django and AJAX By James Bennet. "A rant on how to handle JavaScript in a web application framework, and how not to." http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2006/07/02/django-and-ajax Don't Serve JSON as text/html By Jim Ley. "Another day, another XSS flaw, this one in Google again, but this is a little more interesting than the normal ones, what this one shows is how JSON results add an extra vector to attack that might be missed by your QA team. The problem here was that the JSON was returned with a mime-type of text/html, a browser will render that as if it was an HTML page, even if it's really just a javascript snippet..." http://jibbering.com/blog/?p=514 AJAX Accessibility Issue Caught Vendors Attention. Is this a Major Issue? By Hari K. Gottipati. "...The question is, is it possible to be 100% accessible...with any framework? Its very very hard to be 100% accessible as Ajax is dependant on lot of things including JavaScript, XMLHttpRequest etc., and it updates the page with out reloading, also it makes the request to server without user interaction..." http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2006/07/are_we_going_to_overcome_ajax.html +08: MISCELLANEOUS. Russ Weakley Phone Interview on CSS By Jonas Lundberg. Russ is interviewed by Jonas Lundberg who is gathering podcasts as part of the web publishing course at Linkopings universitet. http://www.maxdesign.com.au/2006/07/09/phone-interview/ +09: NAVIGATION. Traffic Log Patterns By Jakob Nielsen. "The relative popularity of a site's pages, the number of visitors referred by other sites, and the traffic from search queries continue to follow a Zipf distribution." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/traffic_logs.html +10: PHP. Automatic Magazine Layout By Harvey Kane. "...This article covers a PHP-based technique for automatically resizing-and more importantly, positioning-between two and eight images in what I call a magazine-style layout (images in a magazine are always carefully positioned-usually one image takes pride of place and several smaller images surround it)..." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/magazinelayout +11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Why Validate a Web Site's Pages? By Raymond Sonoff. "...The Web designer (Captain of the ship) must build a tight ship (create a Web site that adheres to W3C-based coding standards) that will prove to be able to reliably sail the seas of the World (navigate among all Web pages within the Web site) and bring the crew (each and every Web visitor) safely (with no broken hyperlinks or error messages) back to port (the Home page or browser exit function) when each voyage (a given Web session) is over." http://tinyurl.com/eb8vp +12: TOOLS. Web Accessibility Toolbar (For Opera) By Web Accessibility Tools Consortium. "WAT for Opera a version of the popular testing tool, the Web Accessibility Toolbar, that can be installed on the Opera web browser." http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/wat-about.html PURE By Benfeng Chen. "PURE is an open source tool to transform Web pages to be Web standards-compliant through reverse engineering. PURE starts with the rendering result of a given Web page and generates valid HTML code and CSS automatically to produce the same appearance...Because Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 is used as the Web page rendering engine in PURE, your operating system should be Windows XP." http://webproject.cs.ust.hk:8004/pure/index.php?id=1 +13: USABILITY. Graphics on Link-Rich Home Pages By Jared Spool. "In general, we believe graphics have a place. When they effectively communicate scent or communicate content, they are valuable to the users experience. There's no evidence to suggest designers couldn't create link-rich pages with effective graphics..." http://tinyurl.com/jltd7 Label Placement in Forms By Matteo Penzo. "In using eyetracking to evaluate the usability of search forms for my previous article... we discovered much interesting data. I'll provide an in-depth analysis of that data here." http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000107.php SAP Design Guild Articles By SAP (Systems, Applications, and Products) Design Guild. "On these pages, we offer a complete list of SAP Design Guild articles, irrespective of the section they are located in. We list articles in alphabetical order; each article appears only once." http://www.sapdesignguild.org/articles_all.asp Simplicity Demands Difficult Choices By Gerry McGovern. "Too much web management suffers from trying to be all things to all people. Apple and Google have triumphed from targeting common tasks." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2006/nt-2006-07-10-simplicity.htm Personable 'About Us' Page Lifts Ecommerce Conversions 30 Percent By Marketing Sherpa. "5-7% of home page visitors click through to the About Us page. Shoppers who view that page convert at a rate 30% higher than shoppers who do not see that page." http://library.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?ident=28532 [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.]