+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 7, Issue 14, October 2, 2008. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 14 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: COLOR. 04: EVALUATION & TESTING. 05: EVENTS. 06: JAVASCRIPT. 07: MISCELLANEOUS. 08: NAVIGATION. 09: PHP. 10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 11: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 12: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Accessibility and SEO By Bruce Lawson and Vasilis van Gemert. Fronteers conference presentation. http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/accessibility-and-seo-fronteers-talk Multiple Form Labels and Screen Readers By Roger Johansson. "Just about every website needs some forms. Sometimes there are many of them, sometimes just a single contact form. Regardless of their number, they need to be usable and accessible, which can sometimes be a little more work than it would be if theory and practice aligned a little better..." http://tinyurl.com/4rwswu Silver Surfers By Keith Instone. "The US ibm.com home page has a feature on Helping seniors surf the web. The video sets the stage by talking about the aging Japanese population, and then explains how IBM helped Mitsukoshi, a department store, make its web site easier to use for older people..." http://instone.org/silver-surfers Video: YouTube and Easy YouTube with a Screen Reader By Christian Heilmann. "This is one of the demo videos that Kath Moonan of AbilityNet showed during her presentation. It is a user testing interview of a blind user trying to use YouTube with a screen reader and then try the same task with Easy YouTube..." http://tinyurl.com/3hwo9k Adding Structure to PDFs By Adobe. "You can improve the accessibility and reuse of Adobe PDF documents by adding tags to the InDesign document before you export..." http://tinyurl.com/4pafq9 +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Inheritance and Cascade By Tommy Olsson. "Inheritance and the cascade are two fundamental concepts in CSS. Everyone who uses CSS needs to understand them. Fortunately, they aren't very difficult to grasp, although some of the details may be a bit hard to remember..." http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/28-inheritance-and-cascade/ Floats and Clearing By Tommy Olsson. "In this article you will get acquainted with floating and clearing?two must-have tools for the modern web designer. They are versatile tools that you can use to allow text to flow around images or even create multi-column layouts..." http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/35-floats-and-clearing/ Static and Relative Positioning By Tommy Olsson. "In this article I'll start looking in depth at how you can use CSS to position HTML elements wherever you want on the page, using the position CSS property and some related properties..." http://tinyurl.com/4l9bln Absolute and Fixed Positioning By Tommy Olsson. "Now it's time to turn your attention to the second pair of position property values?absolute and fixed..." http://tinyurl.com/4utlw5 Styling Tables By Ben Buchanan. "This tutorial will focus on applying CSS in an efficient manner, to produce clear and readable data table styles..." http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/33-styling-tables/ Five CSS Design Browser Differences I Can Live With By Andy Clarke. "Web designs need not look exactly the same in all browsers. I know that's a topic I have written about and spoken on a fair amount before, but somehow I'm always amazed by the reactions that I get when the subject comes up." http://tinyurl.com/3jyzd3 CSS Includes with the Title Attribute Might Be Ignored By Robert Nyman. "Yesterday I ran into a little unexpected behavior when adding title attributes to a couple of link elements..." http://tinyurl.com/448gfq CSS Systems for Writing Maintainable CSS By Natalie Downe. "A CSS System is a reusable set of content-oriented markup patterns and associated CSS created to express a site's individual design. It is the end result of a process that emphasizes up-front planning, loose coupling between CSS and markup, pre-empting browser bugs and overall robustness..." http://natbat.net/2008/Sep/28/css-systems/ Automatic Numbering with CSS Counters By David Storey. "When writing documents, it is often useful to number sections and have a table of contents. You can number these by hand, directly in the markup, but this can be time consuming if the order changes and you have to edit all the numbers. CSS2.1 gives us a automated way to generate numbers using CSS counters, and this article will walk you through how to use them. One word of note before we start is that CSS counters are not yet implemented in IE, although they are on the roadmap for IE8..." http://tinyurl.com/4dbvjb Floats and Pos:ABS/IE6 Magic By Niels Matthijs. "Even though most css bugs out there are already well documented and provided with fixes, it's not always easy to recognize a bug you're encountering right away. Because of that, I think it won't hurt to put some of the more obscure bugs in the spotlight from time to time. Our favored subject is of course ie6, a true html and css magician. This article will focus on one of ie6's more cunning disappearing acts..." http://www.onderhond.com/blog/work/float-absolute-position-ie +03: DREAMWEAVER. The Dreamweaver CS4 Application Bar By Virginia DeBolt. "In Dreamweaver CS4, there's a new item called Application Bar. It behaves differently in Windows and Mac..." http://www.webteacher.ws/2008/09/29/the-dreamweaver-cs4-application-bar/ Dreamweaver CS4 Video Tutorial - CSS Option on the Properties Panel By Stefan Mischook. "I just released a new video tutorial that introduces the new CSS option in the properties panel..." http://tinyurl.com/3ehhh5 +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. A Structured Process for Transforming Usability Data into Usability Information By Jonathan Howarth, Terence S. Andre, and Rex Hartson. "Much research has been devoted to developing usability evaluation methods that are used in evaluating interaction designs. More recently, however, research has shifted away from evaluation methods and comparisons of evaluation methods to issues of how to use the raw usability data generated by these methods. Associated with this focus is the assumption that the transformation of the raw usability data into usability information is relatively straightforward. We would argue that this assumption is incorrect, especially for novice usability practitioners. In this article, we present a structured process for transforming raw usability data into usability information that is based on a new way of thinking about usability problem data. The results of a study of this structured process indicate that it helps improve the effectiveness of novice usability practitioners." http://www.upassoc.org/upa_publications/jus/2007november/howarth.html Decision Models for Comparative Usability Evaluation of Mobile Phones Using the Mobile Phone Usability Questionnaire (MPUQ) By Young Sam Ryu, Kari Babski-Reeves, Tonya L. Smith-Jackson, and Maury A. Nussbaum. "A comparative usability evaluation was performed using various subjective evaluation methods, including Mobile Phone Usability Questionnaire (MPUQ). Further, decision-making models using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and multiple linear regression were developed and applied. Although the mean rankings of the four phones were not significantly different across the evaluation methods, there were variations across the methods in terms of the number of rank orderings, preference proportions, and methods to select their initial preference. Thus, this study provided a useful insight into how users make different decisions through different evaluation methods. Also, the result showed that answering a usability questionnaire affected a user's decision-making process for comparative evaluation." http://www.upassoc.org/upa_publications/jus/2007november/ryu.html Asking Participants to "Pretend" in User Studies By Jared Spool. "One of the places we kept noticing this was when we watching people shop online. Asking a shopper to pretend to purchase ('Could you find a pair of shoes you might like to buy and put it in your cart?') produced extremely different behaviors than when we recruited people who needed the product and gave them the cash to make a real purchase. In the former case, they went through motions and skipped steps that we didn't see when they were considering and purchasing the product for their own true use." http://tinyurl.com/47ouog Accessibility Tested Web Sites: Nokia vs. Sony Ericsson By Robert Nyman. "Having done an amount of cell phone research lately, I've had the not-so-pleasant experience of seeing the level of quality of certain cell phone vendor web sites. Therefore, I'd like to compare Nokia vs. Sony Ericsson..." http://tinyurl.com/4je2x2 +05: EVENTS. Canadian User Experience Workshop (CanUX ) November 16-18, 2008. Banff, Alberta, Canada. http://canux.nform.ca/ Webstock 2009 February 16-20, 2009. Wellington, New Zealand. http://www.webstock.org.nz/ MIX 09 March 18-20, 2009. Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S.A. http://visitmix.com/2009/ +06: JAVASCRIPT. Speeding Adoption of WAI-ARIA By Bruce Lawson. "...I suggest that the W3C to add ARIA to the official validator. That would send a strong message about its commitment to ARIA, as well as allow codeshops, organizations and individuals who want validation to use it, to the immediate benefit of web users with disabilities." http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2008/speeding-adoption-of-wai-aria/ Cooperating on Web 2.0 Accessibility By Aaron Leventhal. "...In IE 8 Beta 1 Microsoft introduced their own unique method for setting ARIA properties without notifying the working group. The feature was added to IE 8 standards mode as well as legacy modes..." http://tinyurl.com/45cd9e Chapter: 'Coding and Design Patterns' from Stoyan Stefanov's Object-Oriented JavaScript By Eric Miraglia. "Stoyan's latest project is Object Oriented JavaScript, a new book from Packt whose simple goal is to help you learn how to 'think in JavaScript." http://yuiblog.com/blog/2008/09/26/oojs/ +07: MISCELLANEOUS. EmTech Inanity By Dan Lyons. "Was at the EmTech conference at MIT today and suffered through a panel led by Robert Scoble with four geeks (Facebook, Six Apart, Plaxo, Twine) talking about the future of the Web. No prepared remarks, just totally random conversation..." http://realdanlyons.com/blog/2008/09/24/emtech-inanity/ +08: NAVIGATION. Link Text: Where Does it Come From? By Jonathan Christopher. "The Web wouldn't exist without hyperlinks. The act of linking one document to another is the fundamental concept upon which the Internet was built. While technologies have vastly expanded on the simple context, hyperlinks still tie the Web together, but at the same time there's more to anchors..." http://mondaybynoon.com/2008/09/29/link-text-where-does-it-come-from/ +09: PHP. Seven Habits for Writing Secure PHP Applications By Nathan A. Good. "Security in a PHP application includes remote and local security concerns. Discover the habits PHP developers should get into to implement Web applications that have both characteristics..." http://tinyurl.com/53hsaq +10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. HTML 5 And The Hear-Write Web By Karl Dubost. "HTML 5 working draft defines a parsing algorithm which is robust enough that it will not break for the most common types of errors. Many computing engineers and Web designers think that this feature encourages bad quality for documents. Point taken. But let's look a bit further at what proposes HTML 5 in terms of input and output..." http://www.w3.org/QA/2008/09/fixing-html-with-html5.html Google Tech Talk: HTML5 Demos By Ian Hickson. "I gave a talk at Google on Monday demonstrating the various features of HTML5 that are implemented in browsers today. The video is now on YouTube, so now you too can watch and laugh at my lame presentation skills..." http://blog.whatwg.org/demos-2008-sept This Week in HTML 5 - Episode 7 By Mark Pilgrim. "...The big news this week is the disclosure of a vulnerability that researchers have dubbed "clickjacking'..." http://blog.whatwg.org/this-week-in-html-5-episode-7 +11: USABILITY. Use White Space to Indicate Relationships Between Content Elements By Dmitry Fadeyev. "One of the most important tools in a designer's toolbox is white space. White space is just that ? it's space between various content pieces, like paragraphs, headings, buttons and so on. This space can be tweaked to achieve different effects ? such as to separate elements apart from each other by increasing the amount of space or group related things together by tightening it..." http://tinyurl.com/3fy5hx Comparing the Candidate's Sites By Jared Spool. "...I haven't had a chance to watch voters use either site, so I chose four scenarios that I thought would be common tasks for a voter visiting each site..." http://tinyurl.com/4dkde9 New Frontiers in Usability for Users' Complex Knowledge Work By Barbara Mirel. "For usability professionals, one of the top priorities of the coming decades is to assure that products are usable and useful for people's complex work in complex systems. To meet this challenge we need to better understand the nature and practices of various domain-based complex tasks and the flow of people's work across tools. This essay gives an overview of articles in this issue that address these challenges and their implications for usability and usefulness..." http://www.upassoc.org/upa_publications/jus/2008august/mirel1.html Creating Effective Decision Aids for Complex Tasks By Caroline Clarke Hayes and Farnaz Akhavi. "...The studies described above provide the beginning of an understanding of why product designers do not tend to use formal mathematical methods in their daily work, and what their actual needs are. However, many additional issues need to be explored in order to fully understand the situation, and how to best create human-centered design decision aids...." http://www.upassoc.org/upa_publications/jus/2008august/hayes1.html Switching Between Tools in Complex Applications By Will Schroeder. "... Training and the inculcation of best practices may well improve this awareness and decision making ability, but most users never get either. Improved design for making these choices and transitions, on the other hand, reaches every user every time a tool needs changing. A model of user action made up of steps or segments that smoothly merge into an efficient operation as expertise increases falls short as a design goal for complex software because it omits the following..." http://www.upassoc.org/upa_publications/jus/2008august/schroeder14.html Unexpected Complexity in a Traditional Usability Study By Tharon W. Howard. "...As the field of usability studies grows and usability professionals are required to work with and adapt to the needs of new clients in new fields, the likelihood of encountering complex problems masquerading as simple ones will increase. Our research methods need to accommodate this and ensure that the studies we design for new clients include content experts' assessment of the quality of the users' performance and, when possible, head-to-head comparisons with competing products...." http://www.upassoc.org/upa_publications/jus/2008august/howard12.html How to Manage Out of Date Content By Gerry McGovern. "On the Web, nothing is more damaging to your organization's reputation and brand than out of date content." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2008/nt-2008-09-29-out-of-date.htm [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.]