+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 6, Issue 39, March 20, 2008. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 39 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: PHP. 07: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 08: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 09: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. User Testing with Intellectually Disabled Users By George Ornbo. "Two days of user testing with a group of users from Ellingham Employment Services was invaluable in learning about how intellectually disabled users use the internet." http://tinyurl.com/2yt32a Accessibility and Business Value Study By The Customer Respect Group. "A new study by The Customer Respect Group finds that companies strategically invested in removing barriers to customer interaction are deriving significant hard and soft benefits from accessibility initiatives..." http://www.customerrespect.com/default.asp?hdnFilename=bwaccq108np.htm UPA Needs a Lesson in Accessibility By Celeste Lyn Paul. "For an organization which is trying to push Accessibility as a complement to Usability, the Usability Professionals' Association (UPA) fails..." http://weblog.obso1337.org/2008/upa-needs-a-lesson-in-accessibility/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Styling Buttons, and Achieving Sliding Doors with Them By Robert Nyman. "As you all know, form elements aren't that easy to style, especially not consistently. At a first glance, the button element seems like a sure winner, but once you delve into it..." http://tinyurl.com/2slrej Progressive CSS Enhancement By John Resig. "A common - and desirable - technique for constructing JavaScript-based web applications is that of progressive enhancement: only providing capable browsers with the features that they are capable of utilizing - but providing incapable browsers with an adequate, albeit degraded, experience otherwise..." http://ejohn.org/blog/progressive-css-enhancement/ Style Tables With CSS By Emil Stenstrom. "I don't deal too much with tables. Not because I don't want to but because clients hardly ever want to use them. My guess is that they are too hard to create with today's WYSIWYG editors, and therefore get left out. It happens though that I have one or two static tables I need to style, and then I get to use a couple of my tricks..." http://friendlybit.com/css/style-tables-with-css/ Write a Well Structured CSS File Without Becoming Crazy By Antonio Lupetti. "This is a descriptive post about how to write a well structured CSS file..." http://tinyurl.com/37f9z3 CSS Adjacent-Sibling Selector By Fabian van Luyn. "Most CSS selectors are well known, but there are some interesting selectors that are not common used, like the adjacent-sibling selector. An adjacent sibling selector will select the sibling immediately following an element, with the same parent. In this example, I will show you how to use the adjacent-sibling selector to style this list..." http://www.onyx-design.net/weblog2/css/css-adjacent-sibling-selector/ Revisiting Progressive Enhancement in CSS By Jonathan Christopher. "In my opinion, progressive enhancement is by far one of the most important things to embrace as a Web developer. Browser inconsistencies are a thorn in the sides of anyone making websites, but at the end of the day, visitors don't care about the trouble you had making sure the design rendered well in all cases. It's our job to ensure transparency in as many cases as possible..." http://tinyurl.com/ysssec Margins and Paddings, Part 5 - Final Solution By Niels Matthijs. "After my first two attempts I haven't made any real progress yet, and I have only one attempt left to find a good, solid solution. Time to get serious and see how we can fix the issues we've been having with our previous attempts. Time for a change of tactics. Here comes the third and final solution to our margins and paddings problem." http://www.onderhond.com/blog/onderhond/margins-paddings-solution3 +03: EVENTS. Creating Customer-Centric Websites May 5-6, 2008. Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. http://neoinsight.com/workshops/mcgovern-overview.html Open Tech 2008 July 5, 2008. London, United Kingdom. http://www.ukuug.org/events/opentech2008/ SVG Open 2008 6th International Conference on Scalable Vector Graphics August 26-28, 2008. Nuremberg, Germany http://www.svgopen.org/2008/index.php +04: JAVASCRIPT. WAI-ARIA Best Practices By Lisa Pappas, Michael Cooper, and Richard Schwerdtfeger. "This document specifies Best Practices for delivering accessible rich internet applications using WAI-ARIA [ARIA]. The principle objective is to produce a usable, accessible experience over the Web. It provides recommended approaches to create accessible Web content using WAI-ARIA roles, states, and properties to make widgets, navigation, and behaviors accessible. The document also describes considerations that might not be evident to most implementers from the WAI-ARIA specification alone. This document is directed primarily to Web application developers, but the guidance is also useful to user agent and assistive technology developers..." http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria-practices/ Accessible Rich Internet Applications Update By Martin Kliehm. "So Gez Lemon and I had our core conversation at South by Southwest (SXSW) on Sunday, and it went really well. No wonder, we had Shawn Henry from W3C WAI in the audience as well as Lisa Pappas who is one of the authors or WAI ARIA, plus Becky Gibson from IBM who initiated the whole thing with Rich Schwerdtfeger a couple of years ago." http://learningtheworld.eu/2008/wai-aria-update/ Applying WAI-ARIA to Yahoo! Mail By Steve Faulkner. Hans Hillen and Victor Tsarin's CSUN 2008 presentation slides. http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/?p=45 Transparency in Ajax Applications By Billy Hoffman and Bryan Sullivan. "Myth: Ajax applications are black box systems, just like regular Web applications." http://tinyurl.com/27nros +05: MISCELLANEOUS. Question Your Work By Jason Fried. "Why are we doing this? What problem are we solving? Is this actually useful? 4. Are we adding value? Will this change behavior? Is there an easier way? What's the opportunity cost? Is it really worth it?" http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/913-question-your-work +06: PHP. Object-Oriented Programming By Paul Hudson. "Paul Hudson takes the blood, sweat and tears out of mastering object-oriented programming, a powerful technique that's otherwise known as OOP." http://www.netmag.co.uk/zine/home/object-oriented-programming +07: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. A Kiss Chris Wilson Unconference By Virgina DeBolt. "...I think we should begin planning an unconference dedicated to delivering kisses to Chris Wilson when Microsoft finally gets the support for web standards in IE 8 done right..." http://www.webteacher.ws/2008/03/16/a-kiss-chris-wilson-unconference/ Martian Headsets By Joel Spolsky. "You're about to see the mother of all flamewars on internet groups where web developers hang out. It'll make the Battle of Stalingrad look like that time your sister-in-law stormed out of afternoon tea at your grandmother's and wrapped the Mustang around a tree..." http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html Joel Spolsky: Crap is Good By Shelley Powers. "Joel Spolksy just spent several thousand words and accompanying diagrams saying one thing: we did things crappy in the past, and we should continue doing things crappy in the future because crap is easy. Where do I start?..." http://realtech.burningbird.net/standards/joel-spolsky-crap-is-good/ Reality Distortion Fields By Henri Sivonen "Joel Spolsky wrote an article about the IE8 engine modes. The article starts with good and insightful general technology strategy wisdom and then proceeds to make bad specific conclusions." http://hsivonen.iki.fi/rdf/ +08: USABILITY. Bridging the Designer User Gap By Jakob Nielsen. "Depending on how representative designers are of the target audience, a project might need more or less user testing. Still, usability concerns never go away completely." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designer-user-differences.html Do You Make These User Experience Mistakes? By Joanna Bawa. "Online retailers and other website owners still have plenty of room for improvement, as some are still guilty of some avoidable usability problems." http://tinyurl.com/2bocge Why We're Powerless To Resist Grazing On Endless Web Data By Lee Gomes. "While there is a certain grand mystery to some aspects of human behavior, others can be easily explained. Just find yourself a garden-variety house cat, along with a $10 laser pointer..." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120527756506928579.html?mod=djemTECH Closing the Communication Loop By Steve Baty. "What usability testing won't necessarily tell us are the ways in which an application fails to meet usersŐ expectations." http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000270.php [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +09: 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.]