+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 6, Issue 07, August 10, 2007. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 07 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: JAVASCRIPT. 07: MISCELLANEOUS. 08: NAVIGATION. 09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 10: TOOLS. 11: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 12: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Accessibility of Instructional Web Sites in Higher Education By Kay Lewis, Diane Yoder, Elizabeth Riley, Yvonne So, and Sarah Yusufali. "A collaborative program offers assessment and consultation to instructional Web site developers for Section 508 compliance..." http://www.educause.edu/apps/eq/eqm07/eqm0734.asp?bhcp=1 Microformats and Accessibility By Jim O'Donnell. "...I wonder, though, if this transformation isn't better performed by the web browser itself, then sent to the screen reader to be read?..." http://eatyourgreens.org.uk/archives/2007/08/microformats_an.html +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. CSS Cheat Sheet: Inheritance, Cascade, Specificity By Zoe Gillenwater. "Even seasoned CSS developers need a quick refresher course in CSS concepts and techniques from time to time. This CSS Cheat Sheet is designed for just that need. Use it as a reference on topics that you've already learned about in-depth but need a few reminders on. If you're still a beginner to CSS, use it to learn the nuts and bolts of working with CSS, then use our other articles, listed at the end of this one, to extend your learning and practice your new skills. This Cheat Sheet reviews how the fundamental CSS concepts of inheritance, cascading and specificity work." http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=2795D Little CSS Print Stylesheet Tip By Jason Fried. "I've seen printer stylesheets designed a variety of different ways. But any way you slice it, the most common element in a print stylesheet is usually the display: none; rule. Printer sheets are usually about printing less rather than printing more..." http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/554-little-css-print-stylesheet-tip 6 Keys to Understanding Modern CSS-based Layouts By Jonathan Snook. "Much of CSS is pretty straightforward and, I suspect, quite easy for most people to grasp. There's font styles, margin, padding, color and what not. But there's a wall that people will run into... that point where a number of key elements need to come together to create a solid CSS-based layout that is consistent cross-browser..." http://tinyurl.com/2ornn3 CSS: List Boxes By Mike Cherim. "This 'List Boxes' experiment was more difficult than I thought it would be. One of the most pernicious challenges was aligning them horizontally. To do this the list items must be displayed inline. Yet, they must be blocked. Using inline-block wasn't an option. What I ended up doing initially was to use positioning relative to the ul itself, but that created other problems because it was taken out of the natural content flow. I ended falling back on a more common/traditional float so the content would respect it. It's still removed from the flow, yet it's not because the shell-contained elements share the parent so it still works. In order to do this I ended up having to create said parent: the shell div did the trick." http://mikecherim.com/gbcms_xml/news_page.php?id=24#n24 Blueprint By Olav Frihagen Bjorkoy. "Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your CSS development time. It gives you a solid CSS foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, and even a stylesheet for printing." http://code.google.com/p/blueprintcss/ CSS Layouts: The Fixed. The Fluid. The Elastic. By Mike Cherim. "Which Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) layout is best? All have their quirks and their unique pros and cons. Is one more accessible than the other? More usable? What are the drawbacks and how are they dealt with? Is one easier to create than the other? Is there an evil, inaccessible layout? I suspect some will say yes to this, but I'm not going to. I like them all and feel all are suitable if steps are taken to ensure easy usability and equal accessibility. All are part of a web site's presentational layer, so most of the accessibility relies on the extractable semantics and proper usage of the underlying mark-up. What follows is my take on the rigid fixed, the adaptable fluid, and the expandable elastic layouts..." http://green-beast.com/blog/?p=199 +03: EVALUATION & TESTING. Usability Testing: Be Sure to Test Content as Well as Navigation By Ginny Redish. "Too many usability tests focus only on finding information ? not on how the information itself works for people..." http://tinyurl.com/2kqnhe A Bit of History of Usability Testing - and Why It's Not So Expensive Any More By Ginny Redish. "Early usability testing (in the 1980s, mostly for software interfaces) had its origins in two traditions that called for large numbers (and therefore much money). First, it was modeled on academic psychology studies where having enough people to reach statistical validity was a critical factor. Second, the goal was usually 'validation' ? testing once at the end just before release with the goal of showing that all was well. But those were not the right models..." http://tinyurl.com/2hlp8t During a Usability Testing How do You Know If Users are Telling You the Truth? By John Rhodes. "I've been trying to figure out ways to tell if users are actually giving me good data or not. What I mean is that if you're doing usability testing, don't you want to know if users are actually telling you the truth? Don't you worry about data integrity?" http://tinyurl.com/yuj3xh Using Research to End Visual Design Debates By Nick Myers. "...If you've ever had to present visual design to a group, you probably have your own collection of similar horror stories. But why is it that a group of otherwise level-headed adults can't seem to have a productive meeting about visual design? The short answer is that in the absence of clear context about what they are evaluating, most people don't know how to objectively evaluate visual design, so they rely instead on subjective intuition..." http://tinyurl.com/2axo2x +04: EVENTS. WebAIM Web Accessibility Training October 24-25, 2007. Logan, Utah, U.S.A. http://webaim.org/training/ +05: FLASH. Accessibility in Flash Bug and Issue List By Niqui Merret "This is a short list of issues and bugs that I have come across when working towards accessible Flash sites. These are all focused on the Flash Player in the Browser. This is not complete and I hope that if you have come across an issue that you could leave a comment. I will keep adding to this list as I find more issues and will, happily remove items that are fixed. If there are any known workarounds please leave a comment. These issues prevent Flash from being as Accessible as it could be..." http://niquimerret.com/?p=94 +06: JAVASCRIPT. Simulating array_unique in JavaScript By Christian Heilmann. "One of the beautiful things of PHP is its wealth of array methods. JavaScript in comparison seems ridiculously inadequate and you find yourself having to write own methods or patch the existing ones. One method I especially cherish is array_unique() which returns a new array that has all the duplicates filtered out. This is easy to write in JavaScript, all you need to do is..." http://www.wait-till-i.com/index.php?p=472 JavaScript and XML By David Flanagan. "If you want to learn how to use JavaScript to work with XML data, you've come to the right place. This three-part article series starts by showing you how to obtain XML documents. It is excerpted from chapter 21 of JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, Fifth Edition..." http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/JavaScript/JavaScript-and-XML/ +07: MISCELLANEOUS. Collaboration with Development is a Handshake, Not a Handoff By Scout Addis. "Does your organization ever question where design starts and development begins? Scout Addis draws from his experience on a recent 14-month design project to describe techniques for how best to achieve a great product through close collaboration." http://tinyurl.com/yoewjc Jeffrey Zeldman: King of Web Standards By Jessie Scanlon. "As a pioneer of standards-based design, he helped put an end to the browser wars and made Web sites available to all." http://tinyurl.com/2zlcpo +08: NAVIGATION. 10 Ways to Orientate Users on Your Site By Jonathan Webb. "...no matter what their ultimate goal is, your site visitors need to intuitively find their way around. Too often, general website navigation and orientation disappears or changes on internal pages. In fact, with websites this point is even more pertinent as users can just 'evaporate' and leave your site, instead of being forced to drive around aimlessly!..." http://tinyurl.com/yu6q52 +09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Involving People with Disabilities in the Standardization Process By John Gill. "The booklet is both a good primer on the standardization process in general, the ways in which standardization can impact accessibility, and a discussion of the mechanics of being involved in a standardization effort as a person with a disability (along with notes for those setting up standards meetings on what you should do to enable such participation)." http://tinyurl.com/2334qw Fixing The Web - Part 1 By Belus Technology. "The Web is about 17 years old. For its first 10 years, Web technology evolved at breakneck speed. But for the last 7 years, Web technology hasn't changed much at all. Is this a problem? There are clear benefits to having a stable development environment, but is Web technology stable or stale? Without innovation, will the Web suffer the same fate as any technology that becomes outdated because it fails to keep pace with users' needs? The Web certainly performs adequately as an information source, but how well does Web technology itself work? To answer this question, let's looks at some problems with the Web:" http://xhtml.com/en/future/fixing-the-web-1/ The Craft of HTML By Karl Dubost. "...HTML validation is not a goal. HTML validation is a mean..." http://www.w3.org/QA/2007/08/craft-of-html.html The Veteran's Charge By Eric A Meyer. "...The fact that optimizing pages for an iPhone makes the development of such specialized pages attractive in no way excuses lockout of other users. I might be willing to entertain the argument if the iPhone's browser were some specialized non-web contraption. It's not. It's a full-fledged XHTML+CSS+DOM browser that happens to lag a bit in some implementation areas and won't run some plugins..." http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/08/08/the-veterans-charge/ New Elements in HTML 5 By Elliotte Rusty Harold. "Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) 5 introduces new elements to HTML for the first time since the last millennium. New structural elements include aside, figure, and section. New inline elements include time, meter, and progress. New embedding elements include video and audio. New interactive elements include details, datagrid, and command." http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/x-html5/index.html +10: TOOLS. OptimalSort "OptimalSort is card sorting done online." http://www.optimalsort.com/pages/default.html +11: USABILITY. Feature Richness and User Engagement By Jakob Nielsen. "The more engaged users are, the more features an application can sustain. But most users have low commitment -- especially to websites, which must focus on simplicity, rather than features." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/features.html Home Page Design By Daniel Szuc. "It is time to review a company home page design. There are a number of stakeholders involved in home page design, and each of them wants a piece of the home page real estate. Are there questions you can ask before approaching home page design that can move it beyond the influence of specific stakeholders in the company toward a common vision? Are there tips to consider when designing a home page? This article will help you better understand how to approach home page design..." http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000212.php Above the Fold Problems and Content Placement By Meryl Evans. "The above the fold myth says not to worry about content above the fold (the screen before scrolling) and when the fold matters. I disagree..." http://tinyurl.com/29bn6j [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +12: 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.]