+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 6, Issue 43, April 18, 2008.

An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development.

++ISSUE 43 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: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
05: JAVASCRIPT.
06: NAVIGATION.
07: PHP.
08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
08: TYPOGRAPHY.
10: USABILITY.
11: XML.

SECTION TWO: 
12: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site?

[Contents ends.]


++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

SharePoint and Web Accessibility
By Bruce Lawson.
"I work in the legal sector, so occasionally read the industry magazine Internet Newsletter for Lawyers. Last month they had an article bringing up the wonders of SharePoint, so I wrote in to the editor asking why they hadn't mentioned its accessibility problems. The editor asked me to write them an article; as their mag is subscription-only, I reproduce it here..."
http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2008/sharepoint-and-web-accessibility/

Avoiding Redundant title Attributes
By Mike Davies.
"The title attribute is one of the overlooked attributes in the HTML collection. It's most often used to mark up abbreviations with their expanded forms. Sometimes it's used to rout around Internet Explorer's tooltip behavior of image alt attributes..."
http://tinyurl.com/3g8gxl

Blind Users Still Struggle With 'Maddening' Computing Obstacles
By Lamont Wood.
" Put your graphical user interface to this test: Adjust the contrast on your display until the screen is completely black. Now, perform basic e-mail, word processing and Web-browsing tasks. What? Having a problem? Welcome to the world of the 1.3 million Americans who are blind..."
http://tinyurl.com/66ou8m


+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Naming id's With Numbers
By Russ Weakley.
"...The simple answer is that the ID name must be unique in a document and it must begin with a letter - not a number..."
http://www.maxdesign.com.au/2008/04/10/naming-ids-with-numbers/

No CSS Reset
By Jonathan Snook.
"When asked recently about using a CSS reset stylesheet, I readily admitted that I don't use them. I don't use them for my blog or for any project that I work on. Admitting such can raise an eyebrow or two. Reset stylesheets are definitely becoming commonplace Ñ as you'd expect with companies like Yahoo and industry leaders like Eric Meyer actively using them. So, why haven't I jumped on board? "
http://snook.ca/archives/html_and_css/no_css_reset/

CSS: Top Secret Classification
By James Payne.
"This article will self-destruct in twenty seconds. Okay, not really; it will probably take you longer than that to read it, and you may even want to use it as a reference. In this mind-blowing episode, we discuss the many classification properties in CSS, all of which give you the ability to determine how and where your elements are displayed."
http://tinyurl.com/3jqa24

Pretty Up Your Forms with CSS
By Andrew Rowls.
"Let's face it: form elements au natural are NOT pretty. So what do we do with them?..."
http://techknack.blogspot.com/2008/04/pretty-up-your-forms-with-css.html


+03: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Sample Size Calculator for a Completion Rate
By Jeff Sauro.
"Use this calculator to understand how sample size changes will affect the confidence interval around a completion rate."
http://www.measuringusability.com/comp_sample.php


+04: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

IA Summit 2008 Slides
By NLC Internet Marketing Blog.
"There have been some absolutely phenomenal presentations at the IA Summit in Miami so far. If you didn't happen to make it out to the conference or you'd like to revisit the material, I've amassed a list of IA Summit podcasts and PowerPoint slides. Not all presentations have been made available online yet so I'll make a follow-up post in a couple of days to capture any new presentation links." 
http://tinyurl.com/48vj7r


+05: JAVASCRIPT.

JavaScript Loop Performance
By Robert Nyman.
"When developing JavaScript, performance is one of the vital things. Therefore, I thought I'd share the performance of loops with JavaScript, and give some advice..."
http://www.robertnyman.com/2008/04/11/javascript-loop-performance/

Javascript Cloning Objects
By Gareth Heyes.
"...When cloning a object in Javascript many of the examples I found used for(i in..) to traverse the properties and copy each of them. There is a nicer way to do this using the uneval function like this..."
http://www.thespanner.co.uk/2008/04/10/javascript-cloning-objects/

Do You Validate your JavaScript Code?
By Robert Nyman.
"Writing about whether people validate their CSS, it made me wonder about how/if people ensure the quality of their JavaScript code. When I wrote about validating CSS, some of the feedback was that if you validate/promote valid HTML, naturally you should validate your CSS. With that sentiment, I'd argue that it's as, if not more, important to also validate your JavaScript code (if you don't agree, skip to the question at the end of this post, and give me a reply to that)."
http://tinyurl.com/69tdx7


+06: NAVIGATION.

5 Reasons Why Search Engine Optimization is like Horse Racing
By Neerav Bhatt.
"Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of trying to improve a website's search engine rank to attract more people to it and ensure those people are provided with useful high quality information that solves their problems and answers their questions. I was trying to think of a good analogy to explain what SEO is like and I came up with horse racing because I see many similarities..."
http://www.bhatt.id.au/blog/5-reasons-why-seo-is-like-horse-racing/


+07: PHP.

PHP Header Can Only Be Called Once
By Jonathan Snook.
"I hate spending too much time just trying to solve one little problem. This was seriously one of those times..."
http://snook.ca/archives/php/header_called_once/

Better Object Handling with PHP Singletons
By Christian Montoya.
"Recently I was researching local caching options for PHP when I came across the XCache var cache - a file-based caching interface that comes with the XCache opcode cacher (and only requires a small change in the PHP config). While looking for example code to use in my project, I came across an OOP API wrapper that used a design pattern I hadn't seen before in PHP: the singleton. I'm going to repost the code that sparked my interest in using singletons consistently, which even includes examples for usage..."
http://tinyurl.com/69kmsb


+08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

A Validator is Not an Accessibility Evaluation Tool?
By Mike Smith.
"Currently, the most active discussion thread on the HTML working group's public mailing list, public-html, is one regarding the issue of whether in HTML5 the alt attribute should always be required on images. And Henri Sivonen is among the most active participants in that discussion, posting to that thread (among other messages), the following..."
http://www.w3.org/QA/2008/04/badges.html


+09: TYPOGRAPHY.

eXtreme Type Terminology
By Paul Dean.
"An invisible grid of parallel horizontal lines is used as a constant reference in the creation of a font..."
http://ilovetypography.com/2008/04/11/extreme-type-terminology-part-3/


+10: USABILITY.

Four Bad Designs
By Jakob Nielsen.
"Bad content, bad links, bad navigation, bad category pages... which is worst for business? In these examples, bad content takes the prize for costing the company the most money."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/bad-design.html


+11: XML.

SVG and MathML Annexes to HTML5
By Sam Ruby.
"As Anne previewed, HTML5 has recently added support for data attributes and MathML and SVG vocabularies..."
http://intertwingly.net/blog/2008/04/11/SVG-and-MathML-Annexes-to-HTML5

HTML5: SVG in text/html Dropped For Now
By Anne Van Kesteren.
"Because of a request from the SVG Working Group SVG support in the HTML parser has been commented out..."
http://annevankesteren.nl/2008/04/html5-svg

Will RSS Ever Go Mainstream?
By Brian Clark.
"...Over two years later, email is still very much aliveÉ But the public at large either doesn't care about RSS, or doesn't know they're using it (a la My Yahoo, etc)..."
http://www.copyblogger.com/rss-mainstream/


[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.]