[webdev] Web Design Update: July 14, 2006

[Laura Carlson]

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 5, Issue 03, July 14, 2006.

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

++ISSUE 03 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.
11: TOOLS.
12: USABILITY.

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

[Contents ends.]


++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Board Names Advisory Committee for 508 Standards Update
By The Access Board.
"The Board has organized a new advisory committee to assist in updating 
its access standards for electronic and information technologies 
procured by the Federal government. Issued under section 508 of the 
Rehabilitation Act in 2000, the standards cover computer hardware and 
software, websites, phone systems, fax machines, copiers, and other 
technologies..."
http://www.access-board.gov/news/508committee.htm

Shawn Henry Podcast/Interview on WCAG 2
By Giles Colborne.
"Shawn Henry discussed WCAG 2.0 with UK UPA president Giles Colborne 
following the UPA conference in June 2006."
http://www.w3.org/WAI/highlights/200606wcag2interview.html

Accessible Digital Media
By Geoff Freed and Madeleine Rothberg.
Design Guidelines for Electronic Publications, Multimedia and the Web
http://ncam.wgbh.org/publications/adm/

Walgreens Recruits Employees With Disabilities Through Highly 
Accessible Website
By Michael McCarty.
"Walgreens has launched an innovative initiative to hire people with 
disabilities at its distribution center in Anderson, S.C. and is 
recruiting through a specially-designed Website..."
http://tinyurl.com/fbp9t

Replace Your Mouse with Your Eye
By Alfred Hermida.
"...Scientists at Imperial College, London, are working on eye-tracking 
technology that analyses the way we look at things."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2098030.stm


+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Finer Details of Floats
By Emil Stenstrom.
"The other day I was working on one of those two column layouts. I 
quickly got into trouble by something I thought was a bug. It was a 
bug, but not in the browser(s) I thought. Let's go..."
http://friendlybit.com/css/finer-details-of-floats/

Some Print Style Sheet Tips
By Natalie Jost.
"...it really doesn't take all that much effort to make a print 
stylesheet..."
http://nataliejost.com/articles/some-print-stylesheet-tips

Preparing Your CSS for Internet Explorer 7
By Trenton Moss.
"Later on this year Microsoft will officially release Internet Explorer 
7. If you can't wait until then, you can download a beta version 1 and 
see how it works. Microsoft has hinted that when IE7 is officially 
released they'll be looking to quickly upgrade users from IE6, so it's 
essential that your website is prepared for this new browser."
http://tinyurl.com/f8eum

Properly Hiding CSS from Internet Explorer
By Sandra Clark.
"While many CSS filters and hacks rely on using advanced selectors that 
IE 6 and below don't recognize, that is not going to be the case for 
Internet Explorer 7. So the proper way to hide information from 
Internet Explorer would be to use something similar to the code 
below..."
http://www.shayna.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.display_entry&id=131


+03: DREAMWEAVER.

Working with Background Images and CSS - Part 1:
Using Repeating and Non-Repeating Images
By Adrian Senior.
"In this series of articles, I will review working with background 
images and cascading style sheets (CSS). Background images and their 
usage is a wide subject. In this series, I will start at the beginning. 
No prior knowledge is assumed and none will be needed. I'll start off 
this series by looking at some simple syntax. From there, you will see 
how you can use keywords to control your background images and the 
manner in which they are displayed..."
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/css_bgimages.html

Working with Background Images and CSS - Part 2:
Placing Images with Precision
By Adrian Senior.
"...In this part, you learn how to place your background images with 
greater accuracy. You will also see how you can use multiple keywords 
in the value of the background-position property, and how the 
flexibility of the CSS syntax allows you to write the selectors in 
different ways. Throughout this part, you continue to work with the 
bgimage.gif you created in part one..."
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/css_bgimages_pt2.html


+04: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Directed Attention
By Robert Stevens, Mashhuda Glencross, Roger Hubbold, and Caroline Jay.
"On this project we are undertaking a set of pilot studies to examine 
how sighted users view and navigate Web pages and structured electronic 
information...we hypothesize that important visual cues conveying page 
layout and structure could be re-introduced for multi-modal 
presentation to visually disabled users..."
http://aig.cs.man.ac.uk/research/attention/attention.php


+05: EVENTS.

UIE (User Interface Engineering) Virtual Seminars
http://www.uie.com/events/virtual_seminars/

Oz-IA Conference and Retreat
September 30-October 1, 2006.
Sydney, Australia
http://www.oz-ia.org/2006/

Europe's Second Information Architecture Summit
September 30-October 1, 2006.
Berlin, Germany
http://www.euroia.org/

AWF (About, With, and For) 2006
Responsible Design, The Value of Good Intention
October 6-7, 2006.
Chicago, Illinois U.S.A.
http://www.id.iit.edu/events/awf/2006/

Educause 2006 Conference
October 9-12, 2006.
Dallas, Texas U.S.A.
http://www.educause.edu/conference/annual/2006


+06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

The Reinvention of Information Design
By David Sless.
"And every generation has to reinvent things in their own idiom. But it 
would be nice if a little history and an awareness of past work was 
added to what we do now, rather than continually reinventing it as if 
it were NEW. So wasteful, and at times quite boring to old farts like 
me. (...) it is difficult to see anything genuinely new in the 
excitable and shallow research about web sites which was not already 
established know-how in document design long before digital technology."
http://www.communication.org.au/dsblog/?p=15


+07: JAVASCRIPT.

Building Accessible Widgets for the Web
By Mike West.
"Assistant Managing Editor Mike West pitches in an article this week to 
show you how to use Javascript and the DOM to create enhanced widget 
behaviors while maintaining basic accessibility."
http://tinyurl.com/lcv6j

Ajax Framework Bindows Addresses Accessibility Requirements
By JavaScript Search.
"Working closely with The Paciello Group, international experts and 
pioneers in the field of accessible interface design, the Bindows 
development team spent over a year solving many of the technical 
complexities that accessibility requirements pose to Ajax and Web 2.0 
applications. The Bindows framework enables the fastest time to market 
for Ajax and Web 2.0 applications that work with leading screen 
readers, such as JAWS, without requiring any download or installation 
(zero-footprint)."
http://www.javascriptsearch.com/news/news/060612BindowsAccessiblity.html

Developers Working to Overcome AJAX Accessibility Issues
By Darryl K. Taft.
"...Despite providing slick advantages over standard Web application 
techniques, AJAX presents accessibility issues for some users. 
Developers, however, are working to address the problem..."
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1987300,00.asp

Learning JavaScript
By Jeremy Keith.
"...once you know the language, you can use libraries to cut 
development time and make life easier. But that's completely different 
to using a library because you don't want to deal with JavaScript..."
http://domscripting.com/blog/display/78

Django and AJAX
By James Bennet.
"A rant on how to handle JavaScript in a web application framework, and 
how not to."
http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2006/07/02/django-and-ajax

Don't Serve JSON as text/html
By Jim Ley.
"Another day, another XSS flaw, this one in Google again, but this is a 
little more interesting than the normal ones, what this one shows is 
how JSON results add an extra vector to attack that might be missed by 
your QA team. The problem here was that the JSON was returned with a 
mime-type of text/html, a browser will render that as if it was an HTML 
page, even if it's really just a javascript snippet..."
http://jibbering.com/blog/?p=514

AJAX Accessibility Issue Caught Vendors Attention. Is this a Major 
Issue?
By Hari K. Gottipati.
"...The question is, is it possible to be 100% accessible...with any 
framework? Its very very hard to be 100% accessible as Ajax is 
dependant on lot of things including JavaScript, XMLHttpRequest etc., 
and it updates the page with out reloading, also it makes the request 
to server without user interaction..."
http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2006/07/are_we_going_to_overcome_ajax.html


+08: MISCELLANEOUS.

Russ Weakley Phone Interview on CSS
By Jonas Lundberg.
Russ is interviewed by Jonas Lundberg who is gathering podcasts as part 
of the web publishing course at Linkopings universitet.
http://www.maxdesign.com.au/2006/07/09/phone-interview/


+09: NAVIGATION.

Traffic Log Patterns
By Jakob Nielsen.
"The relative popularity of a site's pages, the number of visitors 
referred by other sites, and the traffic from search queries continue 
to follow a Zipf distribution."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/traffic_logs.html


+10: PHP.

Automatic Magazine Layout
By Harvey Kane.
"...This article covers a PHP-based technique for automatically 
resizing-and more importantly, positioning-between two and eight images 
in what I call a magazine-style layout (images in a magazine are always 
carefully positioned-usually one image takes pride of place and several 
smaller images surround it)..."
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/magazinelayout


+11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

Why Validate a Web Site's Pages?
By Raymond Sonoff.
"...The Web designer (Captain of the ship) must build a tight ship 
(create a Web site that adheres to W3C-based coding standards) that 
will prove to be able to reliably sail the seas of the World (navigate 
among all Web pages within the Web site) and bring the crew (each and 
every Web visitor) safely (with no broken hyperlinks or error messages) 
back to port (the Home page or browser exit function) when each voyage 
(a given Web session) is over."
http://tinyurl.com/eb8vp


+12: TOOLS.

Web Accessibility Toolbar (For Opera)
By Web Accessibility Tools Consortium.
"WAT for Opera a version of the popular testing tool, the Web 
Accessibility Toolbar, that can be installed on the Opera web browser."
http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/wat-about.html

PURE
By Benfeng Chen.
"PURE is an open source tool to transform Web pages to be Web 
standards-compliant through reverse engineering. PURE starts with the 
rendering result of a given Web page and generates valid HTML code and 
CSS automatically to produce the same appearance...Because Microsoft 
Internet Explorer 6.0 is used as the Web page rendering engine in PURE, 
your operating system should be Windows XP."
http://webproject.cs.ust.hk:8004/pure/index.php?id=1


+13: USABILITY.

Graphics on Link-Rich Home Pages
By Jared Spool.
"In general, we believe graphics have a place. When they effectively 
communicate scent or communicate content, they are valuable to the 
users experience. There's no evidence to suggest designers couldn't 
create link-rich pages with effective graphics..."
http://tinyurl.com/jltd7

Label Placement in Forms
By Matteo Penzo.
"In using eyetracking to evaluate the usability of search forms for my 
previous article... we discovered much interesting data. I'll provide 
an in-depth analysis of that data here."
http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000107.php

SAP Design Guild Articles
By SAP (Systems, Applications, and Products) Design Guild.
"On these pages, we offer a complete list of SAP Design Guild articles, 
irrespective of the section they are located in. We list articles in 
alphabetical order; each article appears only once."
http://www.sapdesignguild.org/articles_all.asp

Simplicity Demands Difficult Choices
By Gerry McGovern.
"Too much web management suffers from trying to be all things to all 
people. Apple and Google have triumphed from targeting common tasks."
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2006/nt-2006-07-10-simplicity.htm

Personable 'About Us' Page Lifts Ecommerce Conversions 30 Percent
By Marketing Sherpa.
"5-7% of home page visitors click through to the About Us page. 
Shoppers who view that page convert at a rate 30% higher than shoppers 
who do not see that page."
http://library.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?ident=28532


[Section one ends.]


++ SECTION TWO:

+14: 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.

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As a navigation aid for screen readers we do our best to conform to the 
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+ 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.]