+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 7, Issue 29, January 16, 2009. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 29 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: EVALUATION & TESTING. 05: EVENTS. 06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 07: JAVASCRIPT. 08: MISCELLANEOUS. 09: NAVIGATION. 10: PHP. 11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 12: TOOLS. 13: TYPOGRAPHY. 14: USABILITY. 15: XML. SECTION TWO: 16: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Video: Antonia Hyde on Learning Disabilities (Scripting Enabled London) By Christian Heilmann. "In this video Antonia Hyde explains how learning disabilities affect the experience of users of online systems and shows several video examples available on her YouTube profile..." http://tinyurl.com/9xwzgt Number of Americans With a Disability Reaches 54.4 Million By U.S. Census Bureau. "About one in five U.S. residents - 19 percent - reported some level of disability..." http://tinyurl.com/78e59l Rethinking Accessibility By Giles Colborne. "Why make your site accessible? Giles Colborne, managing director at cxpartners looks at how to avoid alienating 30 percent of your audience..." http://tinyurl.com/9aqpxa Google Docs Will Never Become a Dominant Word Processor Unless... By Aaron Cannon. "You guessed it, they make their interface accessible. If you are not able to use a mouse or see the screen, you are basically out of luck when it comes to Google Docs. The best you can do is read what others have wrote, and even that is a bit awkward..." http://northtemple.com/1594 Tools for Accessible Math Conversion? By Aaron Leventhal. "If you know of any tools that can convert TeX or MathML to a format useful for people who are blind, I'd like to get a list. This could include conversion to one or more Braille math codes (unfortunately there are many Braille math formats, even several within German). Or, it could be conversion to good text-to-speech output. I'm looking for both open source or proprietary..." http://tinyurl.com/7429us Math Accessibility Continued By Aaron Leventhal. http://tinyurl.com/9f4525 A Web Development and Purchasing Protocol for Federally Funded Universities or Colleges By Wayne Dick. "This document maps Section 508 Standards for Electronic and Information Technology, Subpart B ? Technical Standards, Section 1194.22 (Web Criteria) into the Sufficient Techniques for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. " http://www.csulb.edu/~wed/public/EqEffAcc/ Students - Compete for Accessibility Award in Imagine Cup 2009 By Microsoft. "..The competition is open to University students around the world. The solution idea needs to solve a real-world accessibility problem with technology access...All entries must be submitted by March 31, 2009." http://tinyurl.com/7mnefn +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Tidy Up Your Stylesheets By Lorraine Nepomuceno. "...Now, the tidying up of CSS doesn't sound sexy- and it isn't. But a clean, well-organized stylesheet is a joy to behold. Especially when it's five months later and time to make major style changes on a website you haven't worked on, let alone thought about. With an organized stylesheet, there is very little chance of pulling one's hair out..." http://www.devlounge.net/design/tidy-up-your-stylesheets Mike Asks the CSS Guy About a Scrolling Trick with Background Images By Alexander Kaiser. "Scroll up/down... whaaaaat?... How was this done? Answer: fixed background images. Let's look at some examples..." http://tinyurl.com/9b939v +03: DREAMWEAVER. From Screen to Print: Creating a Print CSS in Dreamweaver By Stephanie Sullivan. "...In this article, you'll learn about media types and how to take advantage of them to create compact pages for print..." http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=9F31F Setting Up a Website in Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 By Betsy Bruce and John Ray. "...planning to create multiple pages, however, the very first thing you should do is define a site..." http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1313661 +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Testing Adobe's online PDF to HTML Conversion Tool By Ted Page. "...Adobe's online PDF to HTML conversion tool does not provide the accessibility safety net that it is so often assumed to. Some PDFs can't be converted to HTML at all, and those that can are significantly less accessible than a properly authored PDF. The real solution is to make the PDFs themselves accessible." http://www.pws-ltd.com/sections/articles/2009/pdf_conversion.html Persona Templates By Todd Warfel. Todd shares some templates for data-driven personas. http://toddwarfel.com/archives/persona-templates/ +05: EVENTS. ASIS&T IA Summit 2009 March 18-22, 2009. Memphis, Tennessee, U.S.A. http://www.asis.org/~iasummit/2009/ WritersUA Conference March 29 - April 1, 2009. Seattle, Washington, U.S.A. http://www.writersua.com/ohc/index.html Fundamental Guidelines for Web Usability April 8, 2009 in Washington D.C., U.S.A. May 20, 2009 in London United Kingdom. June 25, 2009 in San Francisco, California, U.S.A. July 30, 2009 in Sydney Australia. http://www.nngroup.com/events/tutorials/usability.html Future of Web Design (FOWD) April 30-May 1, 2009. London, United Kingdom. http://events.carsonified.com/fowd/2009/london UX Intensive May 12-15, 2009, in Berlin, Germany. June 15-18, 2009, in San Francisco, U.S.A. November 2-5, 2009, in Washington, D.C., U.S.A. http://www.adaptivepath.com/events/2009/uxi/ Designing and Writing Forms for the Web May 13, 2009. Washington, D.C., U.S.A. http://tinyurl.com/9jf7jr Enterprise IA Seminar May 18, 2009. Hamburg, Germany. http://louisrosenfeld.com/presentations/seminars/eia/ +06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Usability Methods: For Cardsorting, 20 is Enough By Kath Straub. "How many participants do we need for our cardsort?..." http://tinyurl.com/8d73wh Wireframes Magazine By Jakub Linowski. "Oh come on don't be shy. Do you have something to show off while documenting rich interaction, dynamic content, user flows, and web 2.0 wireframes? Please send me a sample and I will put it up. Also tell me who to credit and if you would like an optional link back." http://wireframes.linowski.ca/ +07: JAVASCRIPT. ARIA Examples By Illinois Center for Information Technology Accessibility. http://test.cita.uiuc.edu/aria/ Calling the Array Constructor in IE By Gareth Heyes. "I had a conversation a while ago on email with Billy Hoffman about how in IE the Array constructor wasn't called when using [] to create arrays. The question is, was he right? Technically yes but actually no..." http://tinyurl.com/9r5cwr +08: MISCELLANEOUS. Cleaning up the Web By Tim Berners Lee. "These are my rough notes before I made the [TPAC 2008] talk..." http://www.w3.org/2008/10/22-cleaning-tbl.html Chris Wilson Interview on Tech Luminaries By ajaxian. "Chris Wilson is the Platform Architect of Internet Explorer, but has been involved in web browsers from close to the very beginning having worked on the original NCSA Mosaic. He sat down with us at the Ajax Experience conference in 2007 and kindly let us barrage him with a series of questions..." http://ajaxian.com/archives/chris-wilson-interview-on-tech-luminaries AbilityNet Accessibility Podcast By David Banes and Robin Christopherson. "AbilityNet's David Banes and Robin Christopherson take an informal look at news and developments going on in the areas of access technology and web accessibility." http://www.abilitynet.org.uk/podcast/ Web Standards for Web Apps with Molly Holzschlag (SpoolCast) By Jared Spool. "This week, our long time friend, Molly Holzschlag, joins us to discuss the cutting edge of web standards as they apply to web application development..." http://tinyurl.com/99fzwt Open-Plan Offices Make Workers Sick, Say Australian Scientists By news.com.au. "Australian scientists have reviewed a global pool of research into the effect of modern office design, concluding the switch to open-plan has led to lower productivity and higher worker stress." http://www.news.com.au/business/story/0,27753,24906913-5017672,00.html +09: NAVIGATION. Using WAI ARIA Landmark Roles By Steve Faulkner. "The WAI ARIA specification defines a set of specialized 'landmark' roles. These roles provide a method to programmatically identify commonly found sections of web page content in a consistent way. they can be used now in whatever flavor of (X)HTML you prefer. This allows assistive technologies to provide users with features which they can use to identify and navigate to sections of page content..." http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/?p=106 +10: PHP. Code Readability, Part 1 Shawn Stratton. "The simplicity of PHP can sometimes be overwhelming, with so many different ways and approaches to creating solutions for our problems we sometimes lose the ability to think past the current problem and into the future. [...] Today I'm going to try to address some quick ideas that most of you will already be familiar with, things that will aide in the general readability of code for future generations." http://www.shawnstratton.info/code-readability-part-1 Diving into PHP: Video Series By Jeffrey Way. "Today marks the beginning of a brand new series on the ThemeForest blog that will show you EXACTLY how to get started with PHP. Just as with the "jQuery for Absolute Beginners" screencasts, we'll start from scratch and slowly work our way up to some more advanced topics. If you've been hoping to learn this language, be sure to pay a visit and subscribe to the RSS feed to be updated when new videos are posted..." http://nettuts.com/videos/screencasts/diving-into-php-video-series/ +11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Oh, Look. It's Not Just Us Semantic Web Dweebs Who Noticed. By Shelly Powers. "The point is, the web is full of use cases for extensibility. Full of it. It does no good to bring them up, though, if we're going to be caught up in a circular argument of, 'Prove to me you need it. Well, that's not proof. Prove to me you need it'..." http://tinyurl.com/87xbe8 http://tinyurl.com/8p3yzp HTML 5 Canvas - The Basics By Mihai Sucan. "The HTML 5 specification includes lots of new features, one of which is the canvas element. HTML 5 canvas gives you an easy and powerful way to draw graphics using JavaScript. For each canvas element you can use a 'context' (think about a page in a drawing pad), into which you can issue JavaScript commands to draw anything you want. Browsers can implement multiple canvas contexts and the different APIs provide the drawing functionality..." http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/html-5-canvas-the-basics/ HTML 5 Elements Test By Bruce Lawson. "In my inaugural monthly column for ZDNet UK, I speculated that 2008 would be remembered as the year the Web grew up, due to the publication of the HTML 5 public draft, and suddenly everyone's talking about HTML 5. And I mean everyone..." http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2009/html-5-elements-test/ Redesigning with HTML 5 and WAI-ARIA By Bruce Lawson. " For the past few months, I've been lucky enough to tour places like Indonesia talking about cutting-edge web development languages like HTML 5 and WAI-ARIA. My new year resolution was to actually start using them..." http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2009/redesigning-with-html-5-wai-aria/ Shrinking HTML5 By Anne Van Kesteren. "...Ian has been focusing on addressing the remaining feedback and splitting out parts of the HTML5 draft. Not alone actually, Adam (security fame, Google Chrome) is helping with splitting out content sniffing and Dan (former HTML WG co-chair) intends to work on splitting out the URL section..." http://annevankesteren.nl/2009/01/shrinking-html5 Structural Tags in HTML5 By Steve Smith. "The HTML5 specification has added quite a few interesting and useful tags for structuring your markup. For a majority of everyday uses, these tags will replace many of our typical div entries from our code. So let's dig in..." http://orderedlist.com/articles/structural-tags-in-html5 Will HTML 5 Validation be Worth the Candle? stackoverflow Question. "...does it make any sense to limit ones HTML 5 to that which will validate, and what practical benefit will we get from doing so?" http://tinyurl.com/7caezb +12: TOOLS. Twitter Focus By Gez Lemon. "Considering the standard Twitter website is so basic, it's surprising it is so inaccessible. This Focus Twitter Greasemonkey script puts the favorite, reply and delete links into the keyboard tab order to make it easier for keyboard-only users to use Twitter." http://juicystudio.com/article/twitter-focus.php Color Contrast Checker By Jared Smith. "Simply select or enter a foreground and background color in RGB hexadecimal format (e.g., #fd3 or #f7da39). Select the lighten and darken options to modify the colors slightly. You can use the color picker to change colors or change luminosity..." http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ +13: TYPOGRAPHY. Font-weight is Still Broken in All But One Browser By Richard Rutter. "...Since its inception in 1996, CSS has provided a way of displaying these other weights through use a numerical scale with the font-weight property. This is still almost entirely broken in every current browser except Firefox 3 on Mac..." http://clagnut.com/blog/2228/ +14: USABILITY. Unreadable By Joe Clark. "A species-wide experiment has been carried out on the world's cyber citizens and the results are in. Thanks to the web, our brains are changing and our ability to read long is going the way of the typewriter. Is this really what we had in mind?..." http://scrollmagazine.com/number-1/unreadable Challenges to Designing Web Apps (RIAs) By Jennison Asuncion. "...Usability is all about the user's acceptance of the application as the right way of accomplishing the tasks. There have been many challenges in web app usability are because web apps are half desktop applications and half websites. The following are the key challenges from a web app's usability perspective..." http://www.neoquant.com/blog/?p=60 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design By Whitney Hess. "The term 'user experience' or UX has been getting a lot of play, but many businesses are confused about what it actually is and how crucial it is to their success. I asked some of the most influential and widely respected practitioners in UX what they consider to be the biggest misperceptions of what we do. The result is a top 10 list to debunk the myths. Read it, learn it, live it." http://mashable.com/2009/01/09/user-experience-design/ Misconceptions About User Experience Design By Keith Instone. "Whitney Hess wrote what I consider a very good article to help people understand the term 'user experience': 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design. I have seen others call it 'brilliant' and other wonderful things. Great job, Whitney! The framing of what UXD is not is obviously one of the appealing aspects of the article. I do have a few quibbles with her article..." http://instone.org/common-misconceptions-uxd A Definition of User Experience By Eric Reiss. "User experience (UX) represents the perception left in someone's mind following a series of interactions between people, devices, and events ? or any combination thereof. (...) A good user-experience designer needs to be able to see both the forest and the trees. That means user experience has implications that go far beyond usability, visual design, and physical affordances." http://www.fatdux.com/blog/2009/01/10/a-definition-of-user-experience/ Content Comes Before Good Design By Gary Barber. "...users really don't care a great deal about the visual user interface elements as long as they can find the content. Getting to the information is their primary goal. Sure, they have to use the visual interface extensively to get to the information, even if it's an application. At end of the day, though, they're only focused on one thing - the content. If the content is poor or unfindable, they will leave, no matter how pretty the site is. This is why getting the information architecture right is so important; it's also why content is king.." http://tinyurl.com/9usbga The $300 Million Button By Jared M. Spool. "While Luke Wroblewski was writing his well-received book, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks, he asked if I could think of an example where a change in a form's design made a noticeable difference in business. 'You mean like $300 million of new revenue?" I responded. "Yes, like that.' said Luke. So I wrote this article, which he published in his book..." http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button Why We Still Use Paper By Dmitry Fadeyev. " With the advent of personal computers we were promised paperless offices. No need to print anything out or jot things down - we have monitors for displaying information and many gadgets and devices for recording things in or out of our home/office. The internet also allows us to store data in the cloud. Digital information is harder to lose, misplace or damage. It can be accessed wherever you are. Yet we still write notes on paper and print out articles to read. The question is...why?" http://www.usabilitypost.com/2009/01/14/why-we-still-use-paper/ +15: XML. Add Semantic Richness To Your Markup With (RDF) Ease By Meitar Moscovitz. "While everyone agrees that semantics are useful, and are becoming more so all the time, few people agree on how to develop and use them. John Allsopp's recent article on Semantics in HTML 5 pragmatically highlights a number of problems inherent to the limitations of HTML, and the lack of an extensible mechanism for future semantics is chief among them. Another question that John's article raised relates to the mechanism for encoding semantics on the Web itself..." http://tinyurl.com/94g46y Converter To RDF By ESW Wiki. "A Converter to RDF is a tool which converts application data from an application-specific format into RDF for use with RDF tools and integration with other data. Converters may be part of a one-time migration effort, or part of a running system which provides a semantic web view of a given application..." http://esw.w3.org/topic/ConverterToRdf Stop Justifying RDF and RDFa By Shelly Powers. "...RDF is a rich data model with widespread use, documented by a mature specification, supported by any number of tools in any number of applications, in use by any number of companies, for any number of purposes. It is not some lightweight Johnny-come-lately that can be disregarded and ignored because it doesn't satisfy a small group's determination of what is, or is not, essential to the web. We don't have to justify our interest in RDF, and therefore are fully within our rights to ask that it be supported in any web page markup currently under development by the W3C..." http://tinyurl.com/76wteg [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +16: 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.]