[webdev] Web Design Update: October 27, 2005

[Laura Carlson]

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 4, Issue 18, October 27, 2005.

An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design 
and development.

++ISSUE 18 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: USABILITY.
14: XML.

SECTION TWO:
15: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site?

[Contents ends.]


++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Simply Accessible
By Derek Featherstone.
"The materials in this site formed the basis of a presentation at Web 
Essentials 05, in Sydney, Australia delivered by Derek Featherstone."
http://simplyaccessible.org/

Creating Accessible Forms
By WebAim.
"...Forms can also pose accessibility problems. When we talk about the 
accessibility of forms, we are usually referring about their 
accessibility to screen readers and the visually impaired. People with 
other types of disabilities generally are less affected by faulty forms 
that are missing some of the HTML accessibility features. It should be 
noted, however, that everyone benefits from a well-organized form, 
especially those with cognitive disabilities. Visual layout can be 
important to those who have sight. The less explanation that a form 
needs, the better. Still, the focus of this exercise is mainly to make 
a form that can be read by a screen reader."
http://www.webaim.org/techniques/forms/

Form Help Without Popups
By Gez Lemon.
"Thrusting new windows upon visitors of your site is frowned upon, as 
it goes against device independence by assuming a windowed environment. 
One situation where developers feel that a new window is appropriate is 
with web forms. If the visitor requires help on a form field, a new 
window saves the visitor the trouble of having to leave the form, and 
possibly losing the data they have entered. This article illustrates a 
scripting technique to get around the problem without having to open a 
new window."
http://juicystudio.com/article/form-help-without-popups.html

Lists and Screen Readers
By Mel Pedley.
"Use ordered lists by all means but please stay away from roman 
numerals. No matter how attractive they may appear within a graphical 
browser, they will almost certainly reduce your carefully marked up 
text to audio garbage within a screen reader."
http://www.blackwidows.org.uk/wpress/?p=43


+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

A CSS Framework
By Mike Stenhouse.
"In my Modular CSS article I documented the possibility of breaking 
down stylesheets into components that could be reused across projects. 
All well and good. The next logical step is to extend this to become a 
CSS framework, allowing rapid development of sites with pre-written and 
tested components. All that's really required to produce this is a set 
of naming conventions and a flexible base template..."
http://www.contentwithstyle.co.uk/Articles/17/a-css-framework/

Maintainability, a.k.a. The CSS Elephant
Simon Willison.
"Now that even Slashdot has made the move to CSS it's safe to say that 
the CSS advocacy battle is slowly being won. It's time to talk about 
the elephant in the corner of the room: stylesheet maintainability."
http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2005/09/26/maintainability

Maintainable CSS
By Nathan Steiner.
"Simon Willison put a call out for advice on creating maintainable CSS. 
Here are some collected thoughts on the matter, please keep in mind 
that quite a bit of this is just personal preference."
http://web-graphics.com/mtarchive/001649.php

My Top Ten CSS Tricks
By Trenton Moss.
"For years, designers have manipulated CSS to meet their needs. Now 
Trenton has compiled his favorite tips to help you get more out of your 
designs. From page-width, the text-transform command, and IE-specific 
tricks, to hints on creating CSS documents for hand-held devices, these 
powerful tips will save you time and hassle."
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/top-ten-css-tricks


+03: DREAMWEAVER.

Introduction to Designing with CSS--Part 1: Understanding CSS Design 
Concepts
By Adrian Senior.
"Use CSS to style XHTML page elements and lay out pages, and learn 
about the importance of semantic markup...Note: This article has been 
updated for Dreamweaver 8."
http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/css_concepts.html

Introduction to Designing with CSS--Part 2: Defining Style Properties 
and Working with Floats
By Adrian Senior.
"Learn how to set up default properties for your HTML elements and 
override them with specificity...Note: This article has been updated 
for Dreamweaver 8."
http://tinyurl.com/c3d37

Using Insert Div Tag in Dreamweaver MX 2004
By Virginia DeBolt.
"One of the impediments to taking full advantage of CSS for users of 
Dreamweaver in the past has been the lack of an way to create a div 
with anything but the Draw Layer tool. In Dreamweaver MX 2004, 
Macromedia added a tool called Insert Div Tag for just that purpose. 
Unfortunately, most of the books I have seen that describe the use of 
Dreamweaver MX 2004 are not giving enough information about how Insert 
Div Tag can be used. This tutorial is meant to fill the gap."
http://www.webteacher.ws/insertdiv.html


+04: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Time Budgets for Usability Sessions
By Jakob Nielsen.
"Up to 40 percent of precious testing time is wasted while users engage 
in nonessential activities. Far better to focus on watching users 
perform tasks with the target interface design."
http://useit.com/alertbox/usability_sessions.html


+05: EVENTS.

d.Construct
November 11, 2005.
Brighton, United Kingdom
http://www.clearleft.com/services/training/dconstruct.php

Web Essentials 05 Podcasts
If you missed Web Essentials 05 in Sydney, you can listen to many of 
the sessions.  Download their podCasts and tune into a web development 
conference 'by developers for developers'.
http://we05.com/podcast/


+06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

Authority
By Peter Morville.
This article talks about the subjects of Wikipedia, folksonomy, tag 
clouds, and social facts. It raises issues of accuracy, objectivity, 
currency, and the judgment of authority.
http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000057.php


+07: JAVASCRIPT.

The JavaScript STL (Standard Template Library). Part 1
By Guyon Roche.
"One of the obstacles that programmers encounter when developing with 
different programming languages is that each language has its own 
"culture" and ways of getting things done. Sometimes different 
instances of the same language can suffer from this malady. This adds a 
complexity to software development that would be a waste of time if it 
weren't so necessary. In the C++ programming language (where I spend 
the other half of my programming life), a solution to this kind of 
problem has been developed, standardized and wholeheartedly adopted by 
developers worldwide. It's called the Standard Template Library or STL 
for short. I won't go into too much detail about the specification of 
the STL as a quick search on the Internet will bring up numerous sites 
about it. This article is intended to present a JavaScript 
implementation of the STL and that is what I will focus on."
http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/gr/column13/

The JavaScript STL (Standard Template Library). Part 2
By Guyon Roche.
"The list collection is organized as a linked list of nodes that hold 
references to the values stored in the list..."
http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/gr/column14/

The JavaScript STL (Standard Template Library) Part 3
By Guyon Roche.
"In the first two articles of this series I introduced three 
collections of the JavaScript Template Library, including list, vector 
and deque. This week, I explore the magic of iterators and introduce a 
new class of sorted collection that includes set, map, multiset and 
multimap."
http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/gr/column15/


+08: MISCELLANEOUS.

Ten Questions for Patrick Lauke
By Russ Weakley.
"Patrick Lauke talks about photography, CSS, the Zen Garden, 
accessibility,
SMIL and the WASP accessibility Task Force."
http://webstandardsgroup.org/features/patrick-lauke.cfm 


Interviews: Jeremy Keith
By Aaron Gustafson.
"A lot of Web developers who tried DHTML years ago got burned, and 
they’re wary of getting burned again. Applying the term DOM scripting 
to the new, standards-based way of writing JavaScript helps to distance 
it from the stigma of old-school DHTML."
http://www.digital-web.com/articles/jeremy_keith/

Never Get Involved in a Land War in Asia (or Build a Website for No 
Reason)
By Greg Storey.
"If you don't know what the website you're working on is supposed to 
_do_, it's going to be really hard to succeed. Greg Storey offers a 
simple web strategy development process for everyone."
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/landwarinasia


+09: NAVIGATION.

Ambient Findability: Findability Hacks
By Peter Morville.
"In this excerpt from his new book, Ambient Findability, Peter Morville 
explains why findability is a required element of good design and 
engineering--and what that means for you."
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/ambientfindability

The 7-11 Milk Experiment: How Does Site Design Affect Revenue?
By Christine Perfetti.
"In our latest study, users only purchased 30% of the time! So, what 
was happening here? We found that on most of the sites, users just 
couldn't find what they were looking for and that the site’s 
organization was to blame."
http://tinyurl.com/dna8w

Milk vs. Wood Screws
By Eric A. Meyer.
"Over at UIE’s Brain Sparks, the brilliant and lovely Christine 
Perfetti talked recently about the 7-11 Milk test, and how web sites 
fail this test 70% of the time. I'm glad to see that they intend to do 
more research on the topic, because I think there’s a lot more to the 
story than just buying milk, and I hope that’s factored into the future 
research. Buying on web sites, to me, is not really a 7-11 milk 
purchase. It’s more like trying to buy a wood screw for a specific 
purpose at Home Depot when I'm used to buying them at a corner 
market..."
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2005/09/26/milk-vs-wood-screws/


+10: PHP.

PHP 101 (part 11): Sinfully Simple
An introduction to PHP's easiest method for dealing with XML. (PHP 5 
ONLY)
By Vikram Vaswani.
"Unless you've been hiding in a cave for the last few years, you've 
heard about XML - it's the toolkit that more and more Web publishers 
are switching to for content markup. You may even have seen an XML 
document in action, complete with user-defined tags and markup, and you 
might have wondered how on earth one converts that tangled mess of code 
into human-readable content. The answer is, not easily. While PHP has 
included support for the two standard methods of parsing (read: making 
sense of) XML - SAX and DOM - since version 4.0, the complexity and 
inherent geekiness of these methods often turned off all but the most 
dedicated XML developers. All that has changed, however, with PHP 5.0, 
which introduces a brand-spanking-new XML extension named SimpleXML 
that takes all (and I do mean all) the pain out of processing XML 
documents. Keep reading, and find out how. "
http://www.zend.com/php/beginners/php101-11.php

PHP 101 (part 12): Bugging Out
Basic error handling in PHP 4 and PHP 5.
By Vikram Vaswani.
"Even the best developers make mistakes sometimes. That's why most 
programming languages - including PHP - come with built-in capabilities 
to catch errors and take remedial action. This action can be as simple 
as displaying an error message, or as complex as sending the site 
administrator an email with a complete stack trace. To make it easier 
to do this, PHP comes with a full-featured error handling API that can 
be used to trap and resolve errors. In addition to deciding which types 
of errors a user sees, you can also replace the built-in error handling 
mechanism with your own custom (and usually more creative) functions. 
If you're using PHP 5, you get a bonus: a spanking-new exception model, 
which lets you wrap your code in Java-like try-catch() blocks for more 
efficient error handling. In this edition of PHP 101, I'm going to 
discuss all these things, giving you a crash course in how to add 
error-handling to your PHP application. Keep reading - this is pretty 
cool stuff!"
http://www.zend.com/php/beginners/php101-12.php

Core Web Application Development with PHP and MySQL, Part 1
By Marc Wandschneider.
This content is excerpted from Chapter 13 of the new book, "Core Web 
Application Development with PHP and MySQL."
http://www.webreference.com/programming/php_mysql/


+11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

W3C Compliance and SEO
By Dave Davies.
"With more and more competition for top search engine positioning every 
advantage helps. This article outlines how W3C compliance can help your 
SEO efforts (and visitor experience) and provides resources to help you 
bring your site into compliance."
http://evolt.org/w3c-compliance-and-seo

Slashdot’s Validity
By Eric A. Meyer.
"Slashdot, the venerable geek portal so infamous for its ability to 
kill web servers with a single link that the site’s name is a verb 
meaning 'to bring a server grinding to a halt'."
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2005/09/25/slashdots-validity/


+12: TOOLS.

Back Links Analyzer
By Aaron Wall.
"A free link popularity / link analysis tool. It shows what anchor text 
is linking into a page or site...System Requirements: Backlink Analyzer 
currently is a Windows only application. Going forward I am hoping to 
make it system independent. "
http://tools.seobook.com/backlink-analyzer/


+13: USABILITY.

Is Home Page Design Relevant Anymore?
By Jared Spool.
"...In studying users visiting sites, we learned a long time ago that 
there are only two important functions for a home page: 1.) The home 
page delivers the content to the user that they are seeking, such as 
the top story on CNN,  OR 2.) The home page provides strong scent to 
those pages that contain the content the user seeks. Those are the only 
two things users care about on a home page..."
http://tinyurl.com/cmnz3

University Websites Come of Age
By Gerry McGovern.
"University websites have matured significantly over the last 2-3
years. There are fewer pictures of buildings and smiling faces,
and greater focus on helping students decide why they should
enroll."
http://tinyurl.com/cu8ee

R.I.P. WYSIWYG
By Jakob Nielsen.
"Macintosh-style interaction design has reached its limits. A new 
paradigm, called results-oriented UI, might well be the way to empower 
users in the future."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/wysiwyg.html

Beware of False Prophets...
By Peter Merholz.
"Causing a buzz among folks who design websites and software is Jakob's 
latest Alertbox 'R.I.P. WYSIWYG'...What not mentioned until the very 
end (after the content) is that a Design Research Lead is speaking at 
the User Experience event on the Results-Oriented UI. By not mentioning 
it at the outset, it feels like Jakob is marketing Microsoft in his 
Alertbox to promote his workshop. And I strongly question this part..."
http://www.peterme.com/archives/000623.html

Scary Download Times at Halloween Sites
By Andy King.
"We test five top Halloween shopping sites for speed and accessibility. 
Ghouls, goblins, and usability gotchas await visitors brave enough to 
browse these haunted home pages. Pull up a crypt, we'll leave the 
fright on for you."
http://www.optimizationweek.com/reviews/halloween/


+14: XML.

HOWTO Avoid Being Called a Bozo When Producing XML
By Henri Sivonen.
"There seem to be developers who think that well-formedness is awfully 
hard?if not impossible?to get right when producing XML programmatically 
and developers who can get it right and wonder why the others are so 
incompetent. I assume no one wants to appear incompetent or to be 
called names. Therefore, I hope the following list of dos and don'ts 
helps developers to move from the first group to the latter...This 
document focuses on the Unicode layer, the XML 1.0 layer and the 
Namespaces in XML layer. Getting higher layers like XHTML and Atom 
right are outside the scope of this document. Also, anything served as 
text/html is outside the scope of this document, although the methods 
described here can be applied to producing HTML. In fact, doing so is 
even a good idea."
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/producing-xml/


[Section one ends.]


++ SECTION TWO:

+15: 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 at d.umn.edu


[Issue ends.]