+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 7, Issue 13, September 25, 2008. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 13 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: DREAMWEAVER. 03: EVALUATION & TESTING. 04: EVENTS. 05: JAVASCRIPT. 06: MISCELLANEOUS. 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. First Three Parts of ISO Multipart Accessibility in e-Learning Standard Published By Sharon Perry. "The first three parts of the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) 'Individualized Adaptability and Accessibility in E-learning, Education and Training' Standard have just been published (16th September 2008)..." http://tinyurl.com/3ntxus Turn Firefox into a Screen Reader with Fire Vox By Roger Johansson. "I've seen Fire Vox mentioned plenty of times but have never had any luck getting it to work on my Mac. Until now, that is. Not sure what I've been doing wrong the other times I have tried it, but the other day I gave it another shot and it worked without any problems..." http://tinyurl.com/44ovvb Accessibility Experiment By Joe Walker. "Just back from @media Ajax with a few ideas buzzing around. One based on this comic..." http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2008/09/22/accessibility-experiment/ CAPTCHA Update 2008 By ESW Wiki. http://esw.w3.org/topic/PF/Incubator/CAPTCHAUpdate +02: DREAMWEAVER. Review: The Best New Features in Dreamweaver CS4 Virginia DeBolt. "...Here are what I consider the best new features in the Dreamweaver part of CS4..." http://tinyurl.com/53lw2a Quick Look at Dreamweaver CS4 and the PHP Toolset By Stefan Mischook. "We are going to take a quick look at the changes to Dreamweaver CS4, specifically concentrating on the things related to working with PHP. At the same time, I may weave in a few nerd-concepts here and there, so that we can gently get you used to this stuff." http://www.killersites.com/dreamweaver/cs4/ +03: EVALUATION & TESTING. Quick Turnaround Usability Testing By Paul Nuschke. "It starts with any number of scenarios: Design and development have taken too long to produce a prototype, you need to release in three weeks, and you suspect there may be design flaws. You are trying to incorporate usability testing into an Agile development process. Or maybe you simply want to pare down your process to make it shorter and less expensive..." http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/quick-turnaround What Goes into a Well-Done Critique By Jared M. Spool. "Receiving a critique is probably one of the hardest things we'll do in our work. Giving one is equally as difficult. It's hard to do well and easy to do poorly. As we've been working with teams over the last 20 years, we've accumulated an understanding of what goes into a successful critique. Here's what we've found..." http://www.uie.com/articles/critique/ +04: EVENTS. The Web Design and Developer Conference October 15-16, 2008. Orlando, Florida, U.S.A. http://tinyurl.com/6yohzf Conference Global (online) October 24-26, 2008. Online Conference http://www.headconference.com/ Mexico Web 2.0 November 3-4, 2008. Cancun, Mexico. http://mexicoweb2.com/ Web 2.0 Summit November 5-7, 2008. San Francisco, California, U.S.A. http://en.oreilly.com/web2008/public/content/home Edge of the Web 2008 November 6-7, 2008. Perth, Australia http://www.edgeoftheweb.org.au/ Web Directions East November 7-9, 2008. Tokyo, Japan http://east08.webdirections.org/ IceWeb 2008 November 13-14, 2008. Reykjavik, Iceland http://svef.is/ +05: JAVASCRIPT. Accessible Rich Internet Applications/Relationship to HTML FAQ By Mozilla. "This document should help HTML developers understand ARIA, its purpose, and how it relates to HTML and HTML development." http://tinyurl.com/4kjyky Test-Driven Progressive Enhancement By Scott Jehl. "Starting with semantic HTML, and layering enhancements using JavaScript and CSS, is supposed to create good experiences for all. Alas, enhancements still find their way to aging browsers and under-featured mobile devices that don't parse them properly. What's a developer to do? Scott Jehl makes the case for capabilities testing." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/testdriven +06: MISCELLANEOUS. Scripting Enabled Presentations "The aim of the conference is to break down the barriers between disabled users and the social web as much as giving ethical hackers real world issues to solve. We talked about improving the accessibility of the web for a long time - let's not wait, let's make it happen." http://scriptingenabled.org/presentations/ +07: PHP. Calculating Color Contrast with PHP By Andreas Gohr. "A good designer will choose high contrast colors for backgrounds and texts without hesitation. But sometimes no human is involved in choosin' th' colors. For example when colors are assigned in a (pseudo) random manner. [...] After some googlin' I found a page explainin' different color contrast algorithms. Load the cannons! I used th' data from that page and implemented 3 color check functions in PHP..." http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/11045 Introduction to PHP and Ajax By Anthony Corbelli. "As a web developer, you may have asked yourself whether it was possible to update information from the server without having to refresh a page or use a heavy applet such as Flash or Java. As you may have seen with weather information widgets and stock tickers, not only is it possible--it's relatively easy when the solution is AJAX..." http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/acorbelli_20080919.php3 +08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Web Standards 2008: Three Circles of Hell By Molly E. Holzschlag. "Standards promised to keep the web from fragmenting. But as the web standards movement advances in several directions at once, and as communication between those seeking to advance the web grows fractious, are our standards losing their relevance, and their ability to foster an accessible, interoperable web for all?" http://www.alistapart.com/articles/webstandards2008 Alexa Global Top 500 Against HTML 5 Validation By Karl Dubost. "...The January 2008 file contains 485 web sites. 23 (4.7%) could not be validated. Most of the time, the site was too slow. Only 4 (< 1%) sites were declared valid html 5 by the conformance checker. If Henri Sivonen could do the same thing with his instance of html 5 conformance checker that would help to know if my results are silly or in the right envelop." http://www.w3.org/QA/2008/09/top-500-html5-validity.html Twitter, Ye Markup Be Non-Standarrrrrd By Matt May. "Twitter unveiled a new redesign today. Very little of it is really noticeably different, until you look at the underlying code. Which, last I recall, used to be pretty good-they even used the fancy-pants XHTML 1.0 Strict doctype (though still using tables for layout, which the spec says it shouldn't do)..." http://tinyurl.com/4vpf9t 10 Reasons Why HTML 5 Will Change The Web (And 1 Why It Won't) By Aditya. "HTML5 is currently in the draft stage, and the latest specification is available at the W3C web site. User experience on the Internet will change for sure, and here's why..." http://tinyurl.com/3s5b6k This Week in HTML 5 - Episode 6 By Mark Pilgrim. http://blog.whatwg.org/this-week-in-html-5-episode-6 +08: USABILITY. Previous and Next Actions in Web Forms By Luke Wroblewski. "A recent lengthy discussion in the Interaction Design Association focused on the placement of actions in Web forms that span several Web pages. The quintessential question underlying this debate is: can an action which leads people to the previous step of a process be placed to the right of an action that leads users to the next step of a process?..." http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?730 Tap is the New Click (Presentation) By Dan Saffer. "I had awesome crowds yesterday at my two 'Tap is the New Click' presentations. Lots of great discussion and people laughed at my jokes to boot! Here is a pdf version of the presentation slides (8mb) for your downloading pleasure! The first chapter of the upcoming Designing Gestural Interfaces book can also be downloaded for your reading pleasure." http://tinyurl.com/4ew5m4 Beauty Matters: Usability and Aesthetics By Michael Burmester, Marc Hassenzahl and Franz Koller. "Usability is an approved quality when designing interactive products. Another factor becomes more and more important: the hedonic quality, which includes the aesthetic of a product. The long-time experiences in user-friendly design convinced the initiators of Beauty matters that the combination of usability and aesthetics ensures the success of a product. Usability alone ist not enough. Most people associate the aesthetics of a product with its beauty. The beauty is also decisive whether a product represents a special value for us." http://www.beauty-matters.org/en/Home/ [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.]