+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 6, Issue 30, January 16, 2008. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 30 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: NAVIGATION. 06: PHP. 07: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 08: TOOLS. 09: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 10: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Accessible Can be Beautiful By Andrew Faulkner. "...I aim to show you examples of brilliant and accessible design, and show that it is all a myth after all. Accessibility and design are not mutually exclusive. They walk hand in hand..." http://fadtastic.net/2008/01/15/accessible-can-be-beautiful/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Improving Your Process: CSS Techniques Part 2 By Jonathan Christopher. "Nearly a year ago, I jotted down a few CSS techniques that I use day to day. Some tips included controlling browser defaults, avoiding box model headaches, stylesheet organization, and using a color glossary. I find myself using many of these techniques a year later, but had some updates that might make the lives of some a bit easier..." http://tinyurl.com/yusomq Resetting Again By Eric Meyer. "I've been pondering reset styles over the past few months, and come to a bit of a shift in my thinking. HereÕs the result of that thinking..." http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/01/15/resetting-again/ 101 CSS Techniques of All Time By noupe. "CSS has fundamentally changed web design, it has provided designers with a set of properties that can be tweaked to make various techniques to make your pages just look right. Today we are presenting a round-up of 101 CSS techniques designers use all the time..." http://www.noupe.com/design/101-css-techniques-of-all-time-part-1.html CSS Percentage Bars By Matt Mcinerney. "I thought of another reason for a little fun with CSS today: percentage bars..." http://pixelspread.com/blog/296/css-percentage-bars +03: EVENTS. Adaptive Hypermedia 2008 January 31, 2008. Hannover, Germany http://www.ah2008.org/index.php?section=1 Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) February 27 - March 1, 2008. Monterey, California, U.S.A. http://www.ted.com/index.php/pages/view/id/48 PHP London Conference 08 February 29, 2008. London, United Kingdom. http://www.phpconference.co.uk/ ETech March 3-6, 2008. San Diego, California, U.S.A. http://en.oreilly.com/et2008/public/content/home The Future of Web Design April 17-18, 2008. London, United Kingdom. http://www.futureofwebdesign.com/ Managing Experience (MX San Francisco) April 20-22, 2008. San Francisco, California, U.S.A. http://www.adaptivepath.com/events/2008/apr/ XTech May 6-9, 2008. Dublin, Ireland http://2008.xtech.org/public/news Reboot May 31 - June 1, 2008. Copenhagen, Denmark http://www.reboot.dk/ dConstruct 2008 September 3-5, 2008. Clearleft teaser page. United Kingdom http://2008.dconstruct.org/ Picnic 08 September 24-26, 2008. Amsterdam, The Netherlands http://www.picnicnetwork.org/ +04: JAVASCRIPT. A Quick Idea: Javascript Version Controlling For Static HTML Documents By Chris Heilmann. "When you write tutorials and you want people to use them wherever they are it is a good idea to offer the HTML documents as a zip for downloading. The benefit to the end user is that they don't need to be online to look something up (I for example have the HTML 4.01 documents on my machine as HTML documents). The drawback is that the documents could be outdated without the user knowing - even when they are online while watching them..." http://tinyurl.com/24ep3j Using The Assignment Operator Instead Of The Equality Operator By Peter-Paul Koch. "The previous version of the Find Position script didn't work quite correctly, since it often ignored the last step in position calculations: the one from the to the element. Part of the reason was that its code was too complicated..." http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2008/01/using_the_assig.html Excerpt: Pro JavaScript Design Patterns By Ross Harmes and Dustin Diaz. "The adapter pattern allows you to adapt existing interfaces to classes that would otherwise be incompatible. Objects that use this pattern can also be called wrappers, since they wrap another object in a new interface. There are many situations where creating adapters can benefit both the programmers and the interface designers. Often when designing classes, some interfaces can't be used with existing APIs. Adapters allow you to use these classes without modifying them directly. In this chapter we look at some of those situations and explore the ways in which the adapter pattern can be used to join objects together..." http://www.digital-web.com/articles/excerpt_pro_javascript_patterns JavaScript Objects: Strings By James Payne. "In our last tutorial we covered JavaScript Errors. We learned to work with the OnError event the Try...Catch statement and Throw to create exceptions. In this episode we will go over JavaScript String Objects and learn to use them..." http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/JavaScript/JavaScript-Objects-Strings/ +05: NAVIGATION. Pagination Gallery: Examples And Good Practices By Smashing Magazine. "In body copy headlines and enumerations are usually used to present the information as logically separated data chunks. An alternative solution is pagination, a mechanism which provides users with additional navigation options for browsing through single parts of the given article. Parts of the article are usually referred to by numbers, hints, arrows as well as 'previous' and 'next'-buttons." http://tinyurl.com/3287lg Usability of Pagination Links By Jesper Ronn-Jensen. "In case you missed the thorough pagination gallery that was published in November: Pagination Gallery: Examples And Good Practices...I am missing a few important points in that article." http://justaddwater.dk/2008/01/03/usability-of-pagination-links/ +06: PHP. Exploiting PHP SELF By Gareth Heyes. "Eric Butera emailed me with a very interesting topic about protecting against PHP_SELF exploits. I thought it might be a good idea to gather a few test cases demonstrating the problem. Why PHP allows these URL's is beyond me and it wouldn't take much work to filter out these malicious URL's in the PHP code..." http://www.thespanner.co.uk/2008/01/14/exploiting-php-self/ What PHP Deployment Gets Right By Ian Bicking. "With the recent talk on the blogosphere about deployment (and for Django, and lots of other posts too), people are thinking about PHP a bit more analytically. I think people mostly get it wrong..." http://blog.ianbicking.org/2008/01/12/what-php-deployment-gets-right/ +07: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. HTML 5, One Vocabulary, Two Serializations By Karl Dubost. "It seems not very clear for many people. So let's set the record straight. HTML 5 can be written in html and XML... http://www.w3.org/QA/2008/01/html5-is-html-and-xml +08: TOOLS. Feng GUI By Feng-GUI Lab. "Find out how people View your website or image and which areas are getting most of the attention. The ViewFinder Heatmap service, is an artificial intelligence service which simulates human visual attention and creates an attention heatmap." http://www.feng-gui.com/ +09: USABILITY. Choice Kills Usability By John S. Rhodes. " One of the easiest ways to improve usability is by focusing on just one thing. When you present something to the user, be sure that it's just one thing. All too often we try to hard to offer people several options..." http://www.apogeehk.com/articles/ChoiceKillsUsability.html Great Websites Do, Not Say By Gerry McGovern. "Never tell people what you're going to do for them on the Web. Just let them do what they came to do as quickly and simply as possible." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2008/nt-2008-01-14-bore.htm 8 More Design Mistakes with Account Sign-in By Jared Spool. "Designing an account registration and sign-in process that doesn't frustrate users turns out to be very difficult to achieve. It looks easy at the outset, but a pile of subtleties can sneak up on your experience, making something that should be simple become stressful for the users." http://www.uie.com/articles/account_design_mistakes_part2/ Usability and Trust By Joe Dolson. "Without both, it's very difficult to have a successful online business. Unusable web sites have an incredible ability to generate a lack of trust in the business - as soon as one feature fails to work correctly, or doesn't behave as you expect, there's an immediate connection made..." http://www.joedolson.com/articles/2008/01/usability-and-trust/ [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.]