+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 8, Issue 19, November 6, 2009. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 19 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: EVENTS. 05: JAVASCRIPT. 06: MISCELLANEOUS. 07: NAVIGATION. 08: PHP. 09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 10: TOOLS. 11: USABILITY. 12: XML. SECTION TWO: 13: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Accessibility By W3C's Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG). Editors - Shawn Lawton Henry and Liam McGee. "...the impact of disability is radically changed on the Web because the Web removes barriers to communication and interaction that many people face in the physical world. However, when websites, web technologies, or web tools are badly designed, they can create barriers that exclude people from using the Web..." http://www.w3.org/standards/webdesign/accessibility Use the th element to Specify Row and Column Headers in Data Tables By Roger Johansson. "When using HTML tables to mark up tabular data, remember to use th elements for cells that provide header information for rows or columns..." http://tinyurl.com/yzflnz4 Accessible Media Player By Sean Hayes. Sean describes how to implement closed captions in Silverlight media. http://tinyurl.com/yfko5d6 Screen Reader Software Usage Shifts on Desktop and Mobile By Henny Swan. "...It's early days but the rise of VoiceOver and NVDA combined with alternative browsers such as Opera, Safari and Firefox may break the hold that screen reader giants Jaws and WindowEyes have over the market, helping to open up competition and with it how fast screen readers innovate in supporting new technologies such as HTML5, SVG and so on. This will be a win all round for both users and developers." http://tinyurl.com/yhmrpqu Why Universal Design is Important By Kel Smith. "...What we need to understand as a population is that inclusive design efforts benefit people who are not disabled, as well as those who are. Removing barriers to access provides a benefit that will likely improve user experiences for everyone. This is critically important for products that are launched on a global scale..." http://anikto.com/wordpress/?p=161 Factsheet on Persons with Disabilities By The United Nations. "Around 10 per cent of the world's population, or 650 million people, live with a disability. They are the world's largest minority..." http://www.un.org/disabilities/default.asp?id=18 Screen Reader User Survey Results By WebAIM. "The conclusion identified in the previous screen reader user survey, that there is no typical screen reader user, is solidified in the results of this survey. Perhaps most significant to us are the shifts we have seen in the mere 10 months between surveys - particularly in browser and screen reader usage, with a trend toward and increased favorability of free and low-cost screen readers. Some results solidified previous findings - that good heading structure is vital to accessibility, that Flash content continues to pose significant accessibility issues for screen reader users, and that images that convey content should be identified for users. It is also clear that the mobile web is a highly utilized resource by screen reader users, yet it is an area largely unnoticed by accessibility experts practitioners." http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey2/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Pseudo-Phantoms By Eric A. Meyer. "In the course of a recent debugging session, I discovered a limitation of web inspectors (Firebug, Dragonfly, Safari's Web Inspector, et al.) that I hadn't quite grasped before: they don't show pseudo-elements and they're not so great with pseudo-classes. There's one semi-exception to this rule, which is Internet Explorer 8's built-in Developer Tool. It shows pseudo-elements just fine..." http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2009/11/03/pseudo-phantoms/ Grouping CSS Selectors By Virginia DeBolt. "CSS rules can apply to more than one element on the web page..." http://www.webteacher.ws/2009/11/04/grouping-css-selectors/ Poll: How do You Format your CSS? by Chris Coyier. "...I think it's an interesting topic because us all the implications it may have on a site and the working life of the front end coder. We spend so much time in CSS that how we choose to format it affects how efficiently we can write it, how easily re-acquainted we are with old CSS, and even potentially page loading times assuming you don't compress your CSS..." http://css-tricks.com/new-poll-formatting-css/ Vertical Centering With CSS By Douglas Heriot. There are a few different ways to vertically centre objects with CSS, but it can be difficult to choose the right one. I'll show you all the best ways I've seen and also how to create a nice little centered website..." http://blog.themeforest.net/tutorials/vertical-centering-with-css/ The New W3C Website Goes Live ... With Invalid CSS! By Craig Buckler. "...Perhaps I'm being a little overly-critical, but shouldn't the W3C lead by example? I like their new site, but it would be better if the developers had followed the guidelines they were publishing. What do you think of the new W3C site? Should they fix the validation and accessibility problems? Or are they simply using the hacks and shortcuts many web developers use on a daily basis?" http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/11/04/new-w3c-website-invalid/ +03: EVALUATION & TESTING. "Scientific Survey" is an Oxymoron By Indi Young. "...If we peer at what we frequently use surveys for, if we really break it down to its root, it is to persuade or provide evidence to support a decision. Or its use is to get attention, as in the news media. These are valid uses of surveys; I am not judging, here. What I want to point out that what we do, 'design,' is not 'persuade' or 'decide' or 'get attention.' We are doing something that is different than marketing departments or executives seeking to change the perception of a product/service on the market. 'Design' is closer to 'invent,' 'devise,' 'formulate,' 'plan,' 'create,' or 'contrive.' We cannot use surveys to support our design activity." http://tinyurl.com/yezmevg Can You Say That in English? Explaining UX Research to Clients By David Sherwin. "It's hard for clients to understand the true value of user experience research. As much as you'd like to tell your clients to go read The Elements of User Experience and call you back when they're done, that won't cut it in a professional services environment. David Sherwin creates a cheat sheet to help you pitch UX research using plain, client-friendly language that focuses on the business value of each exercise..." http://tinyurl.com/yzomxq9 Moderating with Multiple Personalities: 3 Roles for Facilitating Usability Tests By Jared M. Spool. "Usability tests are a core design tool and, when done well, they deliver tremendous insights to the team. However, when a usability test is done poorly, it can be a disaster for everyone involved. An important key to their success is the work of a great moderator..." http://www.uie.com/articles/moderating_multiple_personalities/ Six Deadly Mistakes Of Web Page Testing & Tuning By Khalid Saleh. "...Here are six of the most common mistakes I see clients fall into while conducting online testing..." http://tinyurl.com/yz7urmv +04: EVENTS. Usability Training December 1, 2009. Sydney, Australia http://www.peakusability.com.au/training/web-usability.html Usability Evaluation & Testing Training Workshop December 2, 2009. Sydney, Australia http://www.peakusability.com.au/training/evaluation-and-testing.html +05: JAVASCRIPT. Easy ARIA Tip #4: Landmarks By Marco Zehe. "This article aims to provide an easy to follow guide to implement landmarks in a matter that makes sense, in the hopes that more folks will start using them in their web projects and more screen reader users will take notice and utilize them in their daily surfing experience." http://www.marcozehe.de/2009/10/31/easy-aria-tip-4-landmarks/ YUI Theater - Douglas Crockford: 'The State and Future of ECMAScript' By Eric Miraglia. "Yahoo!'s JavaScript architect Douglas Crockford gave the closing keynote at YUICONF 2009 last week. His talk, 'The State and Future of ECMAScript,' was a detailed take on the events that Brendan Eich discussed the night before. Douglas addresses the current ECMAScript 5 proposals (coming up for vote at ECMA in December), details some of the remaining sticking points, and then goes on to distill some of the lessons learned in the course of the ECMA 4/3.1/5 process and what they tell us about the process of creating standards. As Brendan did the night before, Douglas looks ahead to the version of ECMAScript that will follow the current proposal." http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2009/11/04/video-crockford-state/ YUI Theater - Brendan Eich: 'ECMA Harmony and the Future of JavaScript' By Eric Miraglia. "Brendan Eich, JavaScript's creator, gave the opening-night keynote at last week's YUICONF 2009..." http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2009/11/03/video-eich-harmony/ +06: MISCELLANEOUS. Meet Victor Tsaran of Yahoo! Accessibility By Yahoo. "Victor runs accessibility programs at Yahoo!. He's an accomplished musician. He's also blind." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfHVHTRCxVU Geek of the Week: Wendy Chisholm By Monica Guzman. "Wendy Chisholm will tell you how she plans to make the world more inclusive. Just don't ask her how she kills time. The research consultant and champion of tech tools for the disabled is seattlepi.com's Geek of the Week..." http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebigblog/archives/184024.asp Steve Smith on HTML5 and CSS3 By Keir Whitaker. "Next up in our series of web design interviews is Steve Smith from Ordered List. Steve is a recognized authority on front-end development, interface design and is also the co-founder of Sidebar Creative. As an author, public speaker, and University of Notre Dame professor, he is passionate about sharing his knowledge with others..." http://tinyurl.com/ykx2z38 Internet Turns 40, Just Might Catch On By Adrian Roselli. "Media outlets seem to have settled on October 29, 2009 as the official birthday of the Internet. This date has been chosen because it's the day that Leonard Kleinrock at the University of California-Los Angeles sent a message over a two-computer network (the other end being a computer at Stanford Research Institute) with Charley Kline manning the UCLA keyboard and Bill Duvall on the Stanford site. It's worth noting that the computer carrying the first ever transmission on the Internet ("LOGIN") crashed after only two letters ('LO'). I believe that Kline actually typed an "L" for the third letter (instead of 'G') and in a fit of future-sensing self-sacrifice, executed a core dump all over the floor..." http://tinyurl.com/yb9h4py Why Do We Have an IMG Element? By Mark Pilgrim. "...Why an element? Quite simply, because Marc Andreessen shipped one, and shipping code wins. That's not to say that all shipping code wins..." http://tinyurl.com/y85pxvu +07: NAVIGATION. Why Web Links Are Calls To Action By Gerry McGovern. "The exact words you choose on the Web can have a huge impact on behaviour. Finding the right combination of words takes testing and a focus on the action..." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2009/nt-2009-11-02-Web-links-action.htm The Importance of Links as Calls to Action By Christian Watson. "...One solution to this is to write a web style guide that specifically explains how content should be optimized for web presentation (headings, links, lists, etc). It's not hard to do and has the added advantage of creating a common understanding of how content - which can often be so subjective - should be written for the web within an organization." http://www.smileycat.com/miaow/archives/001806.php +08: PHP. PHP and MySQL. Programming for Beginners. By eTutorials. "Web pages are interesting, but on their own they are simply documents. You can use PHP to add code to your Web pages so they can do more. A scripting language like PHP can convert your Web site from static documents to an interactive application. In this chapter, you'll learn how to add basic PHP functionality to your Web pages..." http://etutorials.org/Programming/PHP+MYSQL.+Programming+for+beginners +09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. HTML5 Accessibility By esw.w3.org. "This section of the ESW wiki is dedicated to HTML5 from an accessibility standpoint. It is a directory to HTML5 accessibility meetings, reviews, processes, bugs, issues, proposals, and related resources from 2007 to date." http://esw.w3.org/topic/PF/XTech/HTML5 Tim Berners-Lee Sees Promise, Challenges in HTML5 By Michael Calore. "The man credited with founding the world wide web is both excited and cautious about its future..." http://tinyurl.com/yezmevg The Address Element By Jack Osborne. "The address element has been around for a good few years now. In fact, it's been around since HTML3, remember that? However since the elements creation there have always been problems; knowledge and implementation. So with it once again being incorporated into the HTML5 specification how should we be using it? A quick look at the spec will tell you..." http://html5doctor.com/the-address-element/ Making Your Site HTML5 Ready part 1: The Time is Now By Niels Matthijs. "If you have anything to do with html and/or css you should already know about the recently heightened interest in html5. Of course it's all very cool and exciting, but where do we stand (being the eager web developers we are) if we want to start implementing these new tags? Can we simply start using them and assume that all browsers will handle them seamlessly? Are we really web developers if we dare to ask such silly questions? Here's the breakdown. " http://www.onderhond.com/blog/work/making-your-site-html5-ready-pt1 Structured Meaning in HTML5 By David Lantner. "HTML4 provides limited ways to give meaning to content through markup alone. In this post, we examine Microformats that provide real-world design principles, RDFa which enables extensible vocabularies and the new Microdata features of HTML5. All three seek to combine machine-readable data with human-readable content..." http://cleartypemedia.com/press/2009/10/structured-meaning-in-html5/ Authoring Invalid HTML - A key Factor in the Web's Success? By Vlad Alexander. "...By the year 2000, the Web was wildly successful. Its success was a combination of many significant factors including the role of the US government, availability of software to connect PCs to server computers, affordable Web server software and development tools, a vision of the future of the Web, availability of restricted content, and entrepreneurship. The Web became successful before browsers had good auto-correction of invalid HTML. The lack of browser error feedback often frustrated Web site builders and made their job of creating Web sites more difficult. So silent auto-correction of invalid HTML by browsers played no significant role in the success of the Web and may have caused more problems than it solved. The conclusion must therefore be that the Web would have been successful with or without silent auto-correction of invalid HTML." http://rebuildingtheweb.com/en/invalid-html-a-key-factor-in-web-success/ Emotion Markup Language (EmotionML) 1.0 Editor Marc Schroder. "As the web is becoming ubiquitous, interactive, and multimodal, technology needs to deal increasingly with human factors, including emotions. The present draft specification of Emotion Markup Language 1.0 aims to strike a balance between practical applicability and scientific well-foundedness. The language is conceived as a "plug-in" language suitable for use in three different areas: (1) manual annotation of data; (2) automatic recognition of emotion-related states from user behavior; and (3) generation of emotion-related system behavior..." http://www.w3.org/TR/emotionml/ +10: TOOLS. IBM Accessibility Internet Browser for Multimedia (aiBrowser) The IBM Accessibility Internet Browser for Multimedia (aiBrowser) is an Internet browser for visually impaired users that provides multimedia control features and alternative user interfaces with external metadata. http://www.research.ibm.com/trl/projects/acc_tech/aibrowser_e.htm +11: USABILITY. Revisiting 'The Fold' By Jeff Atwood. "In treating user myopia, it's not enough to place important stuff directly in the user's eyepoint. You also need to ensure that you've placed the absolute most important stuff at the top of the page -- and haven't created any accidental barriers to scrolling, so they can find the rest of it. The fold is far less important than it used to be, but it isn't quite as mythical as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster quite yet..." http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001307.html Infuse Emotion Into Experience Design By Bruce Temkin. "...Our research shows that most sites have poor usability and they don't reinforce key brand attributes. That's why I worked with Ron Rogowski (the primary author) on a research report that created a concept called Emotional Experience Design, which we define as..." http://tinyurl.com/yaquqrc You Can Get There From Here: Websites for Learners By Amber Simmons. "Content-rich is not enough. Most websites are not learner-friendly. As an industry, we haven't done our best to make our content-rich websites suitable for learning and exploration. Learners require more from us than keywords and killer headlines. They need an environment that is narrative, interactive, and discoverable. Amber Simmons tells how to begin creating rich content sites that invite and repay exploration and discovery." http://tinyurl.com/yg5pubc Agile User Experience Projects By Jakob Nielsen. "Agile projects aren't yet fully user-driven, but new research shows that developers are actually more bullish on key user experience issues than UX." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/agile-user-experience.html Short Words, Sentences and Paragraphs By Rachel McAlpine. "Three principles will take you a long way towards writing clearly..." http://ur1.ca/f57d 8 Tips and Tricks on Developing Usable Websites By agrublev. "I feel like so many web developers whether beginners or experienced make little mistakes that make the overall website usability diminish. So I have come up with a list of tips/tricks that will help you either fix your existing websites or help you create better websites from the get go. So here we go..." http://tinyurl.com/yhr348o +12: XML. Automatic XML Namespaces By Liam R. E. Quin. "...In this paper the author proposes a simple system to simplify namespace declaration, and to enhance namespace functionality considerably by introducing a single new feature, without losing the existing benefits. The paper first describes in more detail some of the issues, then summarizes the issues with requirements for change, then discusses other proposals, and finally makes a concrete proposal..." http://tinyurl.com/ykaovwu [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.]