+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 9, Issue 22, November 27, 2010. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 22 CONTENTS. SECTION ONE: New references. What's new at the Web Design Reference site? http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/ New links in these categories: 01: ACCESSIBILITY. 02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. 03: DREAMWEAVER. 04: EVALUATION & TESTING. 05: EVENTS. 06: FLASH. 07: JAVASCRIPT. 08: MISCELLANEOUS. 09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 10: TYPOGRAPHY. 11: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 12: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Testing HTML for 508 Compliance Course By The Department of Veterans Affairs. "1194.22 requirements for web pages, web-based documents, and web-based applications" http://www.ehealth.va.gov/508/sw/course.asp The Importance of Section 508 Accessibility Compliance By articlewriter22. "...There are many businesses still left to comply with Section 508 accessibility. Although businesses not contracted by federal agency aren't vulnerable to compliance lawsuits, the principle of the matter is that individuals with disabilities aren't benefiting from it. Section 508 compliance is crucial to the welfare of people with disabilities. As if living in a world that isn't built for them isn't hard enough, abiding by Section 508 can make accessing every day resources a little bit easier." http://searchwarp.com/swa652598-The-Importance-Of-Section-508-Accessibility-Compliance.htm Is Accessibility Being Overlooked in Favour of Sociability? By Beth Johnson. "...Regardless of the chanel used, organisations still have both a moral and legal responsibility to provide information in accessible formats but social media sites have received criticism in the past for their failure to work with assistive technologies..." http://www.mediageek.co.uk/blog/?p=318 Fallbacks for Embedded Content By Michael Cooper. "This is an attempt to analyze how fallback mechanisms are applied to various types of embedded content in HTML. The analysis is an important step towards determining where the support provided by the HTML specification needs to be extended or modified to ensure all accessibility use cases are covered. The analysis is prepared primarily by Michael Cooper, with input from members of the Bug Triage sub-team of the HTML Accessibility Task Force..." http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-a11y/2010Nov/att-0246/embeddedcontent.html Using HTML Headings By Leonie Watson. "..So when is a heading not a heading? When it's just normal text in disguise." http://www.nomensa.com/blog/2010/using-html-headings/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Sticky Notes With CSS3 By Rob Sobers. "I've been working on a pretty cool wall-mounted status board as one of my projects at Fog Creek. It's a webapp that runs on a vertically mounted LCD screen in our office. It displays a bunch of interesting information like tech support calls, staff vacations, tweets about FogBugz, and more..." http://www.accidentalhacker.com/sticky-notes-with-css3/ HTML5 and CSS3 for the Real World By Louis Lazaris. "...In this article, we're going to walk you through many of the new HTML5 and CSS3 features that are included in IE9 Beta, so you can see how creating websites and apps for IE9 Beta will make things more scalable, more efficient, and more maintainable than ever before..." http://blogs.sitepoint.com/2010/11/26/html5-and-css3-for-the-real-world/ +03: DREAMWEAVER. Understanding CSS Basics By Brian Wood. "The following videos provide an overview of and introduction to cascading style sheets (CSS) and explain how you can use CSS in Dreamweaver to facilitate and standardize formatting of your web pages..." http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/understanding_css_basics.html +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Multivariate Testing in Action: Five Simple Steps to Increase Conversion Rates By Paras Chopra. "In this post we will talk about how to tweak a website for generating more sales, downloads, membership (or any other business goal) in a scientific manner, using A/B split and multivariate testing..." http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/11/24/multivariate-testing-in-action-five-simple-steps-to-increase-conversion-rates/ +05: EVENTS. Usability Week Dubai January 16-20, 2011. Dubai, United Arab Emirates http://www.nngroup.com/events/dubai/agenda.html Usability Week New York February 7-11, 2011. New York, New York, U.S.A. http://www.nngroup.com/events/new_york/agenda.html Usability Week Hong Kong February 28 - March 4, 2011. Hong Kong, China http://www.nngroup.com/events/hong_kong/agenda.html Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education (SITE) 2011 March 7-11, 2011. Nashville, Tennessee, U.S.A. http://site.aace.org/conf/ EDUCAUSE Midwest Regional Conference 2011 March 14-16, 2011. Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. http://net.educause.edu/mwrc11 +06: FLASH. Bye Bye Flash By Roger Johansson. For a long time I've been doing what many others do and use tricks like ClickToFlash (for Safari) and FlashBlock (for Firefox) to prevent Flash content from bringing my Macs' CPUs to their knees and ruining my 'web experience'. http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201011/bye_bye_flash/ Creating Accessible Flash Course By The Department of Veterans Affairs. "How to apply the principles of accessibility to creating Section 508-compliant Flash presentations" http://www.ehealth.va.gov/508/flash/index.asp +07: JAVASCRIPT. How to Write Faster JavaScript Condition Expressions By Craig Buckler. "There's an interesting optimization feature in JavaScript which doesn't necessarily apply in other languages. Consider the following code sample..." http://blogs.sitepoint.com/2010/11/23/faster-javascript-condition-expressions/ +08: MISCELLANEOUS. Tim Berners-Lee: Facebook Could Fragment Web By Josh Halliday. "Founder of world wide web says some of the most successful social networking sites 'have begun to chip away at its principles'..." http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/nov/22/tim-berners-lee-facebook Tantek Celik: HTML5: Right Here, Right Now By Eric Miraglia. Video of Tantek Celik discussing HTML5. http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2010/11/24/video-yuiconf2010-tantek/ Video of My Hardboiled Web Design Talk By Andy Clarke. "If you didn't get a chance to catch my Hardboiled Web Design talk at a conference this year, your luck just came in. Those fine chaps at CodeWorx have posted a high quality video of the entire talk. I'll post a text transcript and slides from the talk later this week..." http://forabeautifulweb.com/blog/about/video_of_my_hardboiled_web_design_talk_from_dibi_2010/ +09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. HTML5 Sanity Check By Dennis E. Lembree. "Most of us are excited about HTML5 and all the benefits it will bring. Overly excited maybe is a more accurate term, which includes myself. We as a community need a "sanity check" about the readiness of HTML5 and its accessibility because..." http://webaxe.blogspot.com/2010/11/html5-sanity-check.html Bold and Italic in HTML5 By Louis Lazaris. "...Here I describe some things to take note of when adding HTML elements that are usually associated 'bold' or 'italic' text..." http://www.impressivewebs.com/bold-italic-html/ HTML5 Aside- Defining Relations By Niels Matthijs. "Together with the new header and footer and article and section elements there is one more important addition to the html5 spec which is bound to improve the structure of our future html documents. The aside element caused some controversy when it was first introduced but now the spec seems to be nearing its final stage. Time to find out how the aside element can help us bring more structure to our content..." http://www.onderhond.com/blog/work/html5-aside-element HTML5 Audio Unplugged By Richard Shepherd. "...Until recently, playing audio required a plugin of some sort. But thanks to the evil geniuses who put together the HTML5 spec we now have a fully fledged Audio element and JavaScript API to play with. With great power comes great responsibility. Apparently. And so before we go on and take a look at how to include (and control!) audio with HTML5 a word of caution..." http://thinkvitamin.com/code/html5-audio-unplugged Tidy5 aka the Future of HTML Tidy By Lars Gunther. "...Simply put, there is no 'opt out' of HTML5. An HTML 4 or XHTML 1.x doctype is nothing more than a contract between developers. Technically all it does is to set the browser in standards compliance mode. Thus, I do not see any future in a tool that does not rely on the HTML5 parsing algorithm. Tidy can not grow from its current code base, but needs to have the same html5lib at its core that is in the HTML5 validator, which basically is the same as the one being used in Firefox 4..." http://itpastorn.blogspot.com/2010/11/tidy5-aka-future-of-html-tidy.html Your Questions #14 By Richard Clark. "The clinic is getting busy with more HTML5 ailments. This week, we'll cover questions about