+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 8, Issue 43, April 23, 2010. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 43 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: JAVASCRIPT. 06: NAVIGATION. 07: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 08: TYPOGRAPHY. 09: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 10: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Making Sure Hidden Frames are Hidden By Steve Faulkner. "...If an iframe contains content that is not intended for users, there are a number of things you can do to ensure it is not available to any users: 1. Use CSS display:none. 2. Set the height and width attributes to '0'. 3. set the tabindex attribute to '-1' 4. And just in case a user still manages to encounter the iframe, set the title attribute with text indicating it does not contain anything...." http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/?p=604 Contacting Organizations about Inaccessible Websites Editors: Andrew Arch, Shawn Lawton Henry and Shadi Abou-Zahra. "Your feedback to an organization can help improve the accessibility of websites for you and many other people who use the websites. Website owners have many priorities for changes and improvements, and the more an organization hears about accessibility from people who use their website, the more likely it is that accessibility will become a higher priority..." http://www.w3.org/WAI/users/inaccessible.html Accessible Documents in HTML, Word, and PDF By Terrill Thompson. "Yesterday I gave a couple of presentations at the Digital Accessibility Expo, a wonderful event in its second year, hosted by the University of Illinois at Chicago..." http://tinyurl.com/y46mwhd +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. 15 CSS Habits to Develop for Frustration-Free Coding By Jeremy Davis. "It's been said that the key to a civilization's success is mastery of the food system. Unless a group of people can effectively control the basic needs for survival, they will never achieve greatness. Likewise, before CSS skills can be expanded to an advanced level, the basics must become instinct to any CSS coder. Develop these habits and you lay a solid foundation to apply advanced CSS techniques." http://tinyurl.com/y3lootp The Little Known font-size-adjust CSS3 Property By Webdesigner Notebook. "Ever wanted to use fallback fonts on your CSS with different aspect ratios without them looking huge (or tiny)? The sparkling new CSS3 font-size-adjust property could do just that, maybe." http://tinyurl.com/ykfeo7a +03: DREAMWEAVER. Dreamweaver CS5 New Features Part 2: CSS Troubleshooting By Sheri German. "In this second article about the new features in Dreamweaver CS5, we'll look at some of the new ways Dreamweaver will help you troubleshoot your layouts. You'll wonder how you ever lived without CSS Inspect, or without the ability to enable and disable properties with the click of a button in the CSS Styles panel. You'll marvel at the new capabilities in the Style Rendering Toolbar, and become addicted to the new online service, BrowserLab." http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=F4B2B +04: EVENTS. e-Access '10: Technology For All July 13, 1010. London, United Kingdom http://www.headstar-events.com/eaccess10/ +05: JAVASCRIPT. Better JavaScript Minification By Nicholas C. Zakas. "Like CSS, JavaScript works best and hardest when stored in an external file that can be downloaded and cached separately from our site's individual HTML pages. To increase performance, we limit the number of external requests and make our JavaScript as small as possible. JavaScript minification schemes began with JSMin in 2004 and progressed to the YUI Compressor in 2007. Now the inventor of Extreme JavaScript Compression with YUI Compressor reveals coding patterns that interfere with compression, and techniques to modify or avoid these coding patterns so as to improve the YUI Compressor's performance. Think small and live large." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/better-javascript-minification/ Expand and Collapse Content Accessibly With Progressive Enhancement, jQuery, and ARIA By Maggie Costello Wachs. "Collapsible content areas are frequently presented in web sites and applications as a way to let users to control how content is shown or hidden on the page. Also called collapsibles, spin-downs, toggle panels, twisties, and content disclosures, they're ideal for selectively displaying optional information - like instructional text or additional details, for example - so users can focus on the task at hand and view this content only as needed..." http://tinyurl.com/y5ssh3t +06: NAVIGATION. Design Patterns: Faceted Navigation By Peter Morville, Jeffery Callender. "Faceted navigation may be the most significant search innovation of the past decade. It features an integrated, incremental search and browse experience that lets users begin with a classic keyword search and then scan a list of results. It also serves up a custom map that provides insights into the content and its organization and offers a variety of useful next steps. In keeping with the principles of progressive disclosure and incremental construction, it lets users formulate the equivalent of a sophisticated Boolean query by taking a series of small, simple steps. Learn how it works, why it has become ubiquitous in e-commerce, and why it's not for every site." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/design-patterns-faceted-navigation/ +07: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. New Link Relations in HTML5 By Virginia DeBolt. "Several new rel attributes for the and elements have been proposed for HTML5. Existing attributes from HTML4 may be redefined somewhat. They include..." http://www.webteacher.ws/2010/04/19/new-link-relations-in-html5/ HTML5 Articles and Sections: What's the Difference? By Bruce Lawson. "An article is an independent, stand-alone piece of discrete content...Other articles can be nested inside an article...Section, on the other hand, isn't 'a self-contained composition in a document, page, application, or site and that is intended to be independently distributable or reusable'. It's either a way of sectioning a page into different subject areas, or sectioning an article into...well, sections..." http://tinyurl.com/y5qlhy8 Your Questions Answered #7 By Richard Clark. "Here we are again with another round of patient questions about HTML5. In this article, we'll be covering AJAX, the eternal question of
or
, our old friend Internet Explorer, how to mark up multiple blocks of content in a sidebar, and using
with
." http://html5doctor.com/your-questions-answered-7/ Should Web Designers be Learning HTML 5? By Stefan Mischook. "I am starting to hear that all too familiar nerd-buzz of premature excitement - this time it's about HTML 5 and all it's cool new capabilities. Yes, HTML 5 does have a lot of cool things it can do, and so it's tempting to jump in and start learning. But that would largely be a waste of time...at least for now..." http://tinyurl.com/y2xqgnb An Introduction to HTML 5 - Doctype, Header and Nav Elements By Alejandro Gervasio. "So what's coming after the current version of HTML? HTML 5, of course. Keep reading for a look at what's coming, and how you'll be able to use the new elements in your web pages once the specification is finalized and browsers begin supporting the new standard. This is the first part of a series..." http://tinyurl.com/y3ddvv3 Timed Tracks By WHATWG Wiki "This page contains examples of use cases that user agents are likely to be required to support natively in the first version of timed track features in HTML." http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Timed_tracks +08: TYPOGRAPHY. Verdana Pro (and Con) By Jeffrey Zeldman. "Although Matthew Carter is overseeing the project and David Berlow of The Font Bureau is leading development, I'm feeling twitchy about Verdana Pro, a new print family from an old screen face..." http://www.zeldman.com/2010/04/18/verdana-pro-and-con-2/ +09: USABILITY. The Decline of the Homepage By Gerry McGovern. "More and more customers are going straight to specific pages on your website, rather than the homepage." http://tinyurl.com/yywazr6 Putting a Paper Form Online - Avoiding Dropouts and False Information - Applying Aesthetics By Janet M. Six. "In this Ask UXmatters column-which is the second in a special, two-part series focusing on Web form design and evaluation-our experts discuss the following topics: putting a paper form online; avoiding Web form dropouts and false information; applying aesthetic styles to Web..." forms..." http://tinyurl.com/y3k5thk Hidden Information in Twitter Background Images By Matt Obee. "...Basically, don't use background images to display information. If you feel that you really must provide information in a background image, you should at the very least make sure that the same information is available (and easy to find) in text, elsewhere. On Twitter, this would mean providing the same information either in the bio field, or if that's not long enough, on a separate web page linked to from the web address field. Don't make things look interactive when they aren't. If you include what looks like a button in a background image, people will try to push it. If you display a URL or an email address, people will click on it or attempt to copy/paste it. It's not because they're stupid; they just expect things to work like they normally do." http://mattobee.com/blog/article/twitter-background-images/ [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.]