+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 6, Issue 24, December 7, 2007. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 24 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: EVENTS. 04: JAVASCRIPT. 05: MISCELLANEOUS. 06: NAVIGATION. 07: PHP. 08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 09: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 10: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Voiceover 2 - A WebDev+s Guide By Alastair Campbell. "VoiceOver, the screen reader for Apple's OS X, has undergone a major update. This article looks at the new functions, and what that means for people browsing websites. I am not looking at VoiceOver in general, just how different aspects of web pages affect the experience when using VoiceOver..." http://alastairc.ac/2007/12/voiceover-2-a-webdevs-guide/ IBM Contributes Framework to Eclipse Foundation By IBM. "Open source community to adapt IBM Technology to make Web 2.0 content accessible for people With disabilities..." http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/22777.wss +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Choose an Accessible Image Replacement Method By Roger Johansson. "...What surprises me a little is that I still see people using image-based techniques that do not work at all for people browsing with images off. One of the tests I perform when checking sites for accessibility and universality is to simply turn off images in my web browser. In some cases that makes text disappear because an image replacement has been used that does not account for people with CSS on and images off..." http://tinyurl.com/3ckodd I Don't Hate CSS but CSS Hates Me By Reinhold Weber. "...What drives me most nuts is how the promise of CSS is crippled by all the hacks needed to do anything really useful with it. Many designers are very clever in finding all these ways to do what-should-be-ordinary things that will mostly work over a variety of browsers and browser versions, but all those hacks shouldn't be necessary. And the legacy of junk they'll leave in our sites is horrible to think about. Who really wants to come back in 2 years and try to maintain or clean up all those hacks when there is a new set of (probably equally buggy) browsers to code for." http://reinholdweber.com/?p=2 Zooming Backgrounds in Internet Explorer 7 By Stephanie Sullivan. "...So don't give up hope on the fabulous faux column technique just because IE7 has some issues. Continue to use it all you need to -- just keep the above parameters in mind to decide what you need to do in your situation." http://www.communitymx.com/blog/index.cfm?newsid=886 JumpStarts Fix: IE7 Zoom Body Background Image Bug By Adrian Senior. "This is a fix for all JumpStarts [and any other web page design] that use background images set against the body tag..." http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=5ED65 CSS Reference By Tommy Olsson and Paul O'Brien. "Welcome to the SitePoint CSS Reference! We've worked hard to make this the most detailed and up-to-date reference on the subject available..." http://reference.sitepoint.com/css A CSS Walkthrough By Christian Montoya. "This CSS walkthrough was written by Christian Montoya for those interested in learning CSS. The final outcome of this tutorial will be a complete one-page design suited to handle various forms of content and featuring a few extra details..." http://www.christianmontoya.com/2007/12/05/just-read-the-walkthrough/ +03: EVENTS. Functional Testing of Websites December 12, 2007. Time: 1:30 - 2:30 (CST) Chicago Local Time Registration: (The webcast is free, but registration is required) http://www.cita.uiuc.edu/webreg/reg.php Gel 2008 Conference April 24-25, 2008. New York, New York, U.S.A. http://gelconference.com/c/gel08.php +04: JAVASCRIPT. JavaScript 2 and the Open Web By Brendan Eich. "...Standards often are made by insiders, established players, vendors with something to sell and so something to lose. Web standards bodies organized as pay-to-play consortia thus leave out developers and users, although vendors of course claim to represent everyone fully and fairly. I've worked within such bodies and continue to try to make progress in them, but I've come to the conclusion that open standards need radically open standardization processes..." http://tinyurl.com/22oxjm Beyond Ajax: Software Development, Two Years from Now By Esther Schindler. "Ajax and rich Internet applications are today's big development challenges. But what about tomorrow?" http://www.cio.com/article/160650 Capturing Caps Lock By Stuart Langridge. "One of the more annoying aspects of having to remember passwords (along with having to remember loads of them) is that if you've got Caps Lock turned on accidentally when you type one in, it won't work, and you won't know why. Most desktop computers alert you in some way if you're trying to enter your password to log on and you've enabled Caps Lock; there's no reason why the web can't do the same. What we want is a warning - maybe the user wants Caps Lock on, because maybe their password is in capitals - rather than something that interrupts what they're doing. Something subtle..." http://24ways.org/2007/capturing-caps-lock +05: MISCELLANEOUS. On Experts and Expertise By Andy Budd. "We currently live in a world dominated by experts. You only have to open a newspaper or switch on the television to see experts giving pronouncements on everything from parenting to the economy. In a world of multifarious complexities, the need for such experts is clear. We need experts to filter the huge flow of information and simplify it into something more digestible..." http://www.andybudd.com/archives/2007/12/on_experts_and/ +06: NAVIGATION. Providing Context for Ambiguous Link Phrases By Gez Lemon. "It's not unusual to stumble upon ambiguous link phrases on web pages (phrases such as, 'Click here', 'More', and so on). Some screen readers allow users to gather a list of links from a page, but these types of link phrases are usually meaningless when read out of context. This article demonstrates a technique that allows ambiguous link phrases to be rendered visually in a page, whilst making sense to screen readers, and other non-graphical devices, that might render the links out of context..." http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/?p=8 10 Ways to Orientate Users on Your Site By Jonathan Webb. "Imagine you're driving along and due to a road closure you have to follow those conspicuous yellow detour signs. You're now on an unfamiliar road, but because of the signs you confidently proceed, comfortable in trusting the arrows to tell you where you need to go..." http://www.htmlcenter.com/tutorials/tutorials.cfm/195/Usability/ +07: PHP. PHP Advent Calendar By Chris Shiflett. "Welcome to the PHP Advent Calendar. If you are unfamiliar with the format of an Advent calendar, Wikipedia has a pretty good description. The PHP Advent Calendar is similar in spirit to the Perl Advent Calendar, a tradition the Perl community has sustained for several years. Each day, starting today and ending on Christmas Day, a member of the PHP community will be sharing a PHP-related tip or trick..." http://shiflett.org/blog/2007/dec/php-advent-calendar-day-1 Auto Loading Classes in PHP 5 By Alejandro Gervasio. "Undoubtedly, the release of PHP 5 has had a remarkable impact on the way that object-oriented applications are developed nowadays. This highly-improved model has provided PHP programmers with features that were only present in mature object-based languages, like Java and C++, but now, fortunately for you and me, they are generously offered by this powerful server-side scripting language..." http://www.devshed.com/c/a/PHP/Auto-Loading-Classes-in-PHP-5/ An Introduction to the Art of Unit Testing in PHP By padraic. "...Unit Testing is often seen as an arcane, time consuming task - which it sometimes can be! But the point of spending time writing tests is to improve the quality of your source code so it has fewer overall bugs, many of which are detected early, a continual testing process to prevent new changes from changing the behavior of older code, and to provide confidence that your code can be depended on. There are other benefits too, and we'll detail these later..." http://tinyurl.com/29cm44 +08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. A Preview of HTML 5 By Lachlan Hunt. "Who's afraid of HTML 5? Not Lachlan Hunt! As both a front-end web developer and a contributor to HTML 5, he tells us what we can expect from the emerging markup specification, whose goals include more flexibility and greater interoperability." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/previewofhtml5 Semantic HTML 5? Pfft. By Jonathan Nicol. "...How ironic then, that the new HTML 5 header and footer elements describe content based on where it appears on the page, rather than what it means." http://f6design.com/journal/2007/12/04/semantic-html-5-pfft/ HTML5 Needs a CarterPhone By Sam Ruby. "...what we really need here is a radically open standardization process. The two standards are quite different, so different solutions may be in order. In the case of HTML5, I believe that a smaller spec which focuses on two things: fixing HTML4 (including things like well defined error recovery), and setting the basis for separate (often overlapping) groups to work on things like canvas. No, I'm not suggesting that canvas needs to be in a namespace, but just that the rules for extending HTML be written down." http://intertwingly.net/blog/2007/11/29/HTML5-needs-a-CarterPhone HTML5 Authoring Guidelines, Editor's Draft By Lachlan Hunt, editor. "This document illustrates how to write HTML 5 documents, focusing on simplicity and practical applications for beginners while also providing in depth information for more advanced web developers..." http://dev.w3.org/html5/html-author/ Why HTML 5? By Shawn Medero. "In response to the publishing of the HTML Design Principles Gary McGath asks, 'What bothers me most is that the document doesn't say anything about why there should be an HTML 5 at all.'...Simon Pieters, from Opera Software, answers..." http://db79.com/2007/11/why-html-5/ HTML 5: Doctype to Version By Karl Dubost. "It would help the HTML validators, syntax checkers to identify the intent of the author. It would also make it easier for writing converters. It would also ease people who wants to jump from HTML to XML back and forth." http://www.w3.org/QA/2007/12/html_5_doctype_to_version.html HTML5 and CSS3 are Doomed for Disaster By Kyle Neath. "...if you're a real-world-developer, you should quickly realize these technologies were doomed from their inception. They will never become the language of the web..." http://warpspire.com/features/html5-css3/ Conversation with Bill Gates about IE8 and Microsoft Transparency By Molly E. Holzschlag. Yesterday I was once again honored to have the opportunity to speak directly with Bill Gates at Mix nŐ Mash about issues pertaining to standards and the upcoming IE8. Concerned about a lack of forthcoming information to the designer and developer community regarding IE8 and Web standards, I asked Bill if he could, in the spirit of a more open Microsoft, find out what was going on. Here is the transcript of our conversation (with some repairs where the transcriptionist couldn't hear), along with a photo of the fantastic Mix nŐ Mash crew. http://tinyurl.com/2waar4 The Semantic Web In Action By Lee Feigenbaum, Ivan Herman, Tonya Hongsermeier, Eric Neumann and Susie Stephens. "Corporate applications are well under way, and consumer uses are emerging..." http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-semantic-web-in-action Failed Redesign: Metrolinx By Joe Clark. "This new site cost what, $150,000 including software licenses? It doesn't comply with any accessibility guideline you could name and is, in practice, inaccessible. Who wants to launch a human-rights complaint? Those seem to be turning out well lately..." http://blog.fawny.org/2007/12/04/metrolinx/ +08: USABILITY. Every Website is NOT Different By Gerry McGovern. "Every time I hear someone say that 'every website is different' I want to rush outside, grab an ancient oak, rip it up by its roots, swing it wildly and lop the top off the nearest mountain." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2007/nt-2007-12-03-same.htm The Perpetual Super-Novice By Paul J. Sherman. "In this column, I want to further explore one of the issues I mentioned in my inaugural column. I call it the problem of the perpetual super-novice. What is this? Simply put, it's the tendency of people to stop learning about a digital product--whether it's an operating system, desktop application, Web site, or hardware device..." http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000249.php The Repertory Grid: Eliciting User Experience Comparisons in the Customer's Voice By Michael Hawley. "Chances are that, if you do user research, you conduct a fair number of user interviews. When conducting interviews, our training tells us to minimize bias by asking open-ended questions and choosing our words carefully. But consistently asking unbiased questions is always a challenge, especially when you're following a participant down a line of questioning that is important, and you haven't prepared your questions ahead of time. Also, if you do a lot of interviews, you might fall into a pattern of asking the same types of questions for different studies. This might not bias participants, but you can bias yourself if you always investigate the same types of issues. Finally, are you sure you are asking the right questions? Your interview questions might be relevant to you and your project team, but are they the questions that will get at important issues from a user's perspective?..." http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000248.php Usability Is Not a Verb By Scott Berkun. "I started my career in usability, but switched within a year for a management role on the same project. Why? I realized that usability is not a verb. For all the data and advice I gave my smart team, I was dependent on them to make decisions. I realized my effectiveness in the cause of ease of use would improve dramatically by taking a management role on the development team, rather than an advisory one..." http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2007/usability-is-not-a-verb/ Designing For Flow By Jim Ramsey. "Ask a web designer what makes a site great, and you're likely to hear "ease of use." Jim Ramsey begs to differ. Web applications in particular, he tells us, work best and engage most profoundly when they challenge users to overcome difficulties." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/designingforflow [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +10: 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.]