+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 6, Issue 45, May 2, 2008, An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 45 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: DREAMWEAVER. 04: EVENTS. 05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 06: JAVASCRIPT. 07: MISCELLANEOUS. 08: NAVIGATION. 09: PHP. 10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 11: TOOLS. 12: TYPOGRAPHY. 13: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 14: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. WCAG 2.0 Candidate Recommendation Ready to Test Drive By Shawn Henry. "The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group is excited to announce the publication of WCAG 2.0 as a W3C Candidate Recommendation on 30 April. WCAG 2.0 explains how to make Web sites, applications, and other content accessible to people with disabilities, and many elderly users..." http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/2008AprJun/0042.html HTML5 Alternative Text, and Authoring Tools By Gez Lemon. "There is still strong debate about whether or not the alt attribute should be a required attribute for the img element in the HTML5 draft on the W3C's XTECH mailing list. The argument is currently focused around what authoring tools should do when the author doesn't provide alt text...the real issue is that some members of the HTML5 working group want authoring tools to conform to HTML5 so they can demonstrate how successful HTML5 is, or they have a vested interest in an authoring tool that doesn't conform to WCAG - not the other way around." http://juicystudio.com/article/html5-alt-text-authoring-tools.php HTML5 and alt: The Editors New Clothes By Steve Faulkner. "...What we don't need from the editor is more Google code statistics and a bit of pseudo scientific prose, dressing the statistics up as facts to support his argument. What is required from the editor to back up his claims? A proper scientific study that is based on scientific method. Research with firm aims and objectives stated up front, with an agreed methodology..." http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/?p=63 508 and Higher Ed By Jon Whiting. "The National Center on Disability and Access to Education (NCDAE), a partner, is currently involved in a project to help educational institutions improve the accessibility of their online content. As part of the project, I recently conducted an evaluation of 100 randomly-selected web pages, each from a different higher education institution website. The pages were evaluated for Section 508 compliance. The results were a little surprising. . .only three of the one-hundred pages complied with Section 508. Although more details will be submitted for publication soon, I wanted to share some of my results and opinions with the WebAIM community..." http://webaim.org/blog/508-and-higher-ed/ Being Internet Disabled By Jack Pickard. "A phrase you might have come across, if you've looked into disability issues at all, particularly as they relate to the web, or you've looked at the topic of web accessibility is people who are sometimes termed internet disabled..." http://www.thepickards.co.uk/index.php/200804/being-internet-disabled/ alt Attributes Authoring Practices By Karl Dubost. "There has been a lot of discussions around alt attributes on HTML WG mailing list..." http://www.w3.org/QA/2008/04/alt-authoring-practices.html Presentation Layer Accessibility By Frederic Welterlin. "...As this white paper has shown, Web accessibility can be achieved with small yet effective adjustments to development methodologies. Until standardization between screen reader manufacturers becomes more prevalent, as it did with Web browser manufacturers, true accessibility for the Web will remain a moving target. In the meantime, it is still important to define the role of accessibility in the software development cycle in terms of client expectations and end user satisfaction. This requires the participation of not only developers, but also user experience designers, program managers, and quality assurance testers. Like all successful Web product launches, teamwork, communication, and understanding will produce results that will meet traditional accessibility needs while providing content accessibility to the maximum number of Internet-enabled devices and systems." http://www.welterlin.com/whitepapers/presentationLayerAccessibility.php Q&A about the WCAG Samurai Errata Posted by Jeffrey Barke. "From the NY Web Standards Meetup, with answers by Joe Clark." http://themechanism.com/blog/2008/04/30/wcag-samurai-errata-qa/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. The Plague of Outline:0 By Jared Smith. "The use of outline:0 or outline:none is not recommended. In almost all cases, this CSS can be removed from links with absolutely no impact on the layout or functionality of the site, but with the result of increased accessibility." http://webaim.org/blog/plague-of-outline-0/ CSS Variables: Coming Soon to a Browser Near You By Scott Gilbertson. "Ever wished you could use variables in your stylesheets? Well, what may be the number one most requested feature for the next generation of CSS, finally has a formal proposal. The spec, put forth by Apple's David Hyatt and Daniel Glazman of Disruptive Innovations, would allow web designers to use variables in stylesheets..." http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2008/04/css-variables.html Font is Dead, Vive le Style By Karl Dubost. Ian Hickson, one of the two editors of HTML 5 specification has sent this message this morning on HTML WG mailing-list. 'Summary: is gone, style="" is made global.' http://www.w3.org/QA/2008/04/font-dead-style-global.html How to Organize Your CSS Code: the 'Killer' CSS Structure By Stefan Mischook. "In a nutshell: css code should be divided up into at least 4 separate pages..." http://www.killersites.com/blog/2008/how-to-organize-css/ Starting with CSS and Bug Fixing Tips By Veerle Pieters. "I receive a lot of e-mail per day and some of them are from people who want my help on CSS or if I know why certain things don't work or show up in IE 6 or 7 etc. If I could help fix their problem? In a lot of cases I need to e-mail back that the code they're using is full of errors and that they're using old school techniques (tables for layout), inline styling etc. So the first tip here is, learn about Web Standards and learn about coding with CSS for layout. There are a lot of good books out there to learn this from the start. This is the basis of good web design..." http://tinyurl.com/6xtdgg Why the Class Name 'Wrapper' is so Common By Emil Stenstrom. "...CMS:es have no idea of what kind of content people will store in them. Their main business goal is to make something generic, that doesn't assume semantics..." http://friendlybit.com/html/why-the-class-name-wrapper-is-so-common/ +03: DREAMWEAVER. Dreamweaver for GoLive Users: Part One By Sheri German. "...In this first installment in the series, you will set up the site definition and file structure for the "music history" site in both programs." http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=1069E +04: EVENTS. Designing Web Content that is Accessible To Users With Cognitive Disabilities NCDAE Webcast May 7, 2008 from 3-4 PM Eastern Daylight Time. http://ncdae.org/webcasts/cognitive2.cfm Enterprise 2.0 Conference June 9-12, 2008 Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A. http://www.enterprise2conf.com Web Accessibility Training June 11-12, 2008. Logan, Utah, U.S.A. http://webaim.org/training/ +05: FLASH. Developer Beware: Using Flash to Detect Screen Readers By Steve Faulkner. "The facility to detect some Assistive Technology by using Flash has been around since ActionScript 1.0 and Flash Player 6. The method has usually been referred to as a way to Ôdetect screen readers'. Unfortunately this method, using the ActionScript Accessibility.isActive method, is not a 'screen reader' detector..." http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/?p=61 +06: JAVASCRIPT. Stop using Ajax! By James Edwards. "1. I'm not saying Ajax is bad, I'm saying it's immature. 2. I'm not saying never use Ajax, I'm saying don't use it for the sake of it, and try to avoid it for now, instead sticking to accessible alternatives" http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/stop-using-ajax/ Are Ajax and Accessibility Mutually Exclusive? By Marco Zehe. "...So, Brothercake, I invite you to get up to speed on ARIA and what it can do. Get in touch with me or other ARIA developers, learn, and then spread the technology yourself with projects you support. I strongly believe that you'll be helping the accessibility community much more in that fashion than ranting or giving out hopeless calls like 'Stop using Ajax'." http://tinyurl.com/58z7fr Event Compatibility Tables By Peter-Paul Koch. "Today I unveil my most ambitious update to the DOM compatibility tables: the Events compatibility tables. All in all I think I spent two weeks' of work on them; testing all common events not only in common situations, but also in unusual ones. A quick test of basic browser support for W3C and Microsoft events completed this series of tests." http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2008/04/event_compatibi.html +07: MISCELLANEOUS. An Interview with Jakob Nielsen (podcast) By Gerry Gaffney. "Gerry Gaffney conducts a wide-ranging interview with Jakob Nielsen." http://www.uxpod.com/index.php?post_id=333126 Open Audio By Jeremy Keith. "I've made a recording of the Open Data keynote I delivered at the Accessibility 2.0 conference last month. You can download the MP3 directly from the Internet Archive. Or you can subscribe to the articles RSS feed as a podcast..." http://adactio.com/journal/1460 +08: NAVIGATION. Right-Justified Navigation Menus Impede Scannability By Jakob Nielsen. Users scan lists by moving their eyes rapidly down the left edge. Menu items that are right-aligned make scanning more difficult. Jakob Nielsen. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/navigation-menu-alignment.html User Interface Implementations of Faceted Browsing By Mike Padilla. "Faceted browsing is a powerful navigation tool for content dense sites--but not all browsing is alike. Mike Padilla explains the importance of remembering the users' needs when creating this alternative to search to avoid pushing your audience down a path you didn't intend." http://tinyurl.com/6sy634 +09: PHP. Learn Regular Expressions in PHP By Akash Mehta. "Love them or hate them, regular expressions are here to stay. When it comes to quickly dealing with large blocks of data, batch processing operations or screen scraping, regular expressions are often the most effective solution. There's just one problem, though - learning them can be as hard as learning a new language altogether. Here's how to get off to a flying start." http://tinyurl.com/3qbpsj +10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Open Data and Accessibility By Jeremy Keith. "The talk is called Open Data, a long-zoom view of accessibility based on this stated premise: It is my contention that what is good for digital preservation is good for accessibility. I've published the text in the articles section. I'll also record a sound file and post that there too." http://adactio.com/journal/1458 The Accessibility of the Date-Time pattern in Microformats By Mike Davies. "Jeremy Keith erupted into a hissy fit during the panel session of AbilityNet's Accessibility 2.0 conference yesterday. His venting revolved around earlier accessibility criticism of the microformat's adoption of the abbr element as a way of attaching machine-readable dates to written dates, for example in the calendar microformat. Unfortunately, Jeremy dodged the real accessibility issues of the date-time microformat pattern, instead preferring to create a straw man, and boisterously batter it to smithereens with his wooden sword. That is his choice, but it doesn't help to alleviate the accessibility issues of the date-time microformat pattern..." http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/access/AccessibilityOfDateTimeMicroformat hAccessibility, One Year On By Bruce Lawson. "Andy Mabbett reminded me that it's been a year since James Craig and I published hAccessibility- a look at the accessibility problems inherent in some unsemantic design patterns used in some microformats..." http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2008/haccessibility-one-year-on/ Do We Really Need Microformats? By Robert Nyman. "A lot of web developers, at least over the years, seem to have fallen for Microformats. Naturally, the given question then is: do we really need Microformats?..." http://www.robertnyman.com/2008/04/28/do-we-really-need-microformats/ Swedish National Guidelines for Public Sector Websites By Peter Krantz. "The Swedish National Guidelines for Public Sector Websites takes an integrated approach to usability, accessibility and standardization. The purpose of the Guidelines is to support the procurement, development, and maintenance of a website by a public administration so that it offers equal opportunity usage for all citizens. The 2006 version has now been translated to english..." http://tinyurl.com/66xlvg Conforming target Attribute By Lachlan Hunt. "One of the biggest annoyances on the web, and something I really hate, is popup windows. It frustrates me, and many others, whenever a site attempts to forcibly open a new window for any reason whatsoever. So, it may be surprising to hear that the target attribute has actually been made conforming in HTML5, even though it was non-conforming in HTML 4.01 Strict, and that this is a good thing. There are in fact several valid reasons for making it conforming, which I will attempt to explain..." http://lachy.id.au/log/2008/04/target-attribute +11: TOOLS. Kotatsu - a simple html table generator By Alexander Kaiser. "It's been a long time since I've used Dreamweaver for web development. I only find myself missing it when I need to create a table, especially when I want to have all cells in a particular column have a class. (I'm well aware of , I just don't subscribe.) So I created a tool to help create a table and throw in column classes quickly. I gave it a name so I can put it out there and let others use it, too." http://askthecssguy.com/kotatsu/ +12: TYPOGRAPHY. Web Typography: Tell Me What You Want By Jason Cranford-Teague. "The W3C is getting ready to set the new standards for typography on the Web, and we need your help..." http://tinyurl.com/4rtccs eXtreme Type Terminology - Part 4: Numerals and Punctuation By Paul Dean. "...The Roman alphabet came equipped with its own numbering system, and Roman numerals still have their uses. They are commonly seen, for instance, on clock faces, in movie credits, and on the pages of a book which precede the introduction and the text itself. The letters M D C L X V and I, used in combination and sometimes with a bar over the letter, Roman numerals can signify all whole or natural numbers. Well, everything but zero (0). The zero was invented in India, and it has maintained the same form, generally a circle but sometimes just a dot, ever since..." http://ilovetypography.com/2008/04/25/extreme-type-terminology-part-4/ Don't Be Afraid of Serif Fonts By David Rodriguez. As the practice of Web design ages, some common rules and "best practices" inevitably embed themselves in the craft. Among these are the processes for using specific types of semantics when coding your site, like using divs as hooks in your X/HTML for your CSS, and making your page beautiful and functional that way. Another is to ensure readability of your site by choosing a proper number of fonts (generally, no more than three or four, and for the minimalist, one or two). More important than that is the type of font you choose. http://www.wpdfd.com/issues/86/dont_be_afraid_of_serif_fonts/ +13: USABILITY. Average Web Page Size Triples Since 2003 By Andrew B. King. "...Within the last five years, the size of the average web page has more than tripled, and the number of external objects has nearly doubled. While broadband users have experienced faster load times, dial-up users have been left behind. With the average web page sporting more than 50 external objects, object overhead now dominates most web page delays. Minimizing HTTP requests by using CSS sprites, combining JavaScript or CSS files, reducing the number of EOs, and converting graphic effects to CSS while still retaining attractiveness, has become the most important skill set for web performance optimizers." http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/average-web-page/ Sustainability and the User Experience By Jonathan Follett. "Whether we're designing the user experience for a digital product or a physical one, as UX professionals, we are uniquely positioned to influence the behavior of other people, for good or ill. Our employers or clients charge us with responsibility for not only defining a design problem from multiple perspectives, but also finding solutions that are better than the ones that came before..." http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000280.php The Redesign Must Die Talk By Louis Rosenfeld. Presentation slides http://tinyurl.com/3g24bc [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +14: 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.]