[webdev] Web Design Update: January 16, 2008

[Laura Carlson]

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 6, Issue 30, January 16, 2008.

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

++ISSUE 30 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: EVENTS.
04: JAVASCRIPT.
05: NAVIGATION.
06: PHP.
07: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
08: TOOLS.
09: USABILITY.

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

[Contents ends.]


++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Accessible Can be Beautiful
By Andrew Faulkner.
"...I aim to show you examples of brilliant and accessible design, and 
show that it is all a myth after all. Accessibility and design are not 
mutually exclusive. They walk hand in hand..."
http://fadtastic.net/2008/01/15/accessible-can-be-beautiful/


+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Improving Your Process: CSS Techniques Part 2
By Jonathan Christopher.
"Nearly a year ago, I jotted down a few CSS techniques that I use day 
to day. Some tips included controlling browser defaults, avoiding box 
model headaches, stylesheet organization, and using a color glossary. I 
find myself using many of these techniques a year later, but had some 
updates that might make the lives of some a bit easier..."
http://tinyurl.com/yusomq

Resetting Again
By Eric Meyer.
"I've been pondering reset styles over the past few months, and come to 
a bit of a shift in my thinking. Here’s the result of that thinking..."
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/01/15/resetting-again/

101 CSS Techniques of All Time
By noupe.
"CSS has fundamentally changed web design, it has provided designers 
with a set of properties that can be tweaked to make various techniques 
to make your pages just look right. Today we are presenting a round-up 
of 101 CSS techniques designers use all the time..."
http://www.noupe.com/design/101-css-techniques-of-all-time-part-1.html

CSS Percentage Bars
By Matt Mcinerney.
"I thought of another reason for a little fun with CSS today: 
percentage bars..."
http://pixelspread.com/blog/296/css-percentage-bars


+03: EVENTS.

Adaptive Hypermedia 2008
January 31, 2008.
Hannover, Germany
http://www.ah2008.org/index.php?section=1

Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED)
February 27 - March 1, 2008.
Monterey, California, U.S.A.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/pages/view/id/48

PHP London Conference 08
February 29, 2008.
London, United Kingdom.
http://www.phpconference.co.uk/

ETech
March 3-6, 2008.
San Diego, California, U.S.A.
http://en.oreilly.com/et2008/public/content/home

The Future of Web Design
April 17-18, 2008.
London, United Kingdom.
http://www.futureofwebdesign.com/

Managing Experience (MX San Francisco)
April 20-22, 2008.
San Francisco, California, U.S.A.
http://www.adaptivepath.com/events/2008/apr/

XTech
May 6-9, 2008.
Dublin, Ireland
http://2008.xtech.org/public/news

Reboot
May 31 - June 1, 2008.
Copenhagen, Denmark
http://www.reboot.dk/

dConstruct 2008
September 3-5, 2008.
Clearleft teaser page.
United Kingdom
http://2008.dconstruct.org/

Picnic 08
September 24-26, 2008.
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
http://www.picnicnetwork.org/


+04: JAVASCRIPT.

A Quick Idea: Javascript Version Controlling For Static HTML Documents
By Chris Heilmann.
"When you write tutorials and you want people to use them wherever they 
are it is a good idea to offer the HTML documents as a zip for 
downloading. The benefit to the end user is that they don't need to be 
online to look something up (I for example have the HTML 4.01 documents 
on my machine as HTML documents). The drawback is that the documents 
could be outdated without the user knowing - even when they are online 
while watching them..."
http://tinyurl.com/24ep3j

Using The Assignment Operator Instead Of The Equality Operator
By Peter-Paul Koch.
"The previous version of the Find Position script didn't work quite 
correctly, since it often ignored the last step in position 
calculations: the one from the <body> to the <html> element. Part of 
the reason was that its code was too complicated..."
http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2008/01/using_the_assig.html

Excerpt: Pro JavaScript Design Patterns
By Ross Harmes and Dustin Diaz.
"The adapter pattern allows you to adapt existing interfaces to classes 
that would otherwise be incompatible. Objects that use this pattern can 
also be called wrappers, since they wrap another object in a new 
interface. There are many situations where creating adapters can 
benefit both the programmers and the interface designers. Often when 
designing classes, some interfaces can't be used with existing APIs. 
Adapters allow you to use these classes without modifying them 
directly. In this chapter we look at some of those situations and 
explore the ways in which the adapter pattern can be used to join 
objects together..."
http://www.digital-web.com/articles/excerpt_pro_javascript_patterns

JavaScript Objects: Strings
By James Payne.
"In our last tutorial we covered JavaScript Errors. We learned to work 
with the OnError event the Try...Catch statement and Throw to create 
exceptions. In this episode we will go over JavaScript String Objects 
and learn to use them..."
http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/JavaScript/JavaScript-Objects-Strings/


+05: NAVIGATION.

Pagination Gallery: Examples And Good Practices
By Smashing Magazine.
"In body copy headlines and enumerations are usually used to present 
the information as logically separated data chunks. An alternative 
solution is pagination, a mechanism which provides users with 
additional navigation options for browsing through single parts of the 
given article. Parts of the article are usually referred to by numbers, 
hints, arrows as well as 'previous' and 'next'-buttons."
http://tinyurl.com/3287lg

Usability of Pagination Links
By Jesper Ronn-Jensen.
"In case you missed the thorough pagination gallery that was published 
in November: Pagination Gallery: Examples And Good Practices...I am 
missing a few important points in that article."
http://justaddwater.dk/2008/01/03/usability-of-pagination-links/


+06: PHP.

Exploiting PHP SELF
By Gareth Heyes.
"Eric Butera emailed me with a very interesting topic about protecting 
against PHP_SELF exploits. I thought it might be a good idea to gather 
a few test cases demonstrating the problem. Why PHP allows these URL's 
is beyond me and it wouldn't take much work to filter out these 
malicious URL's in the PHP code..."
http://www.thespanner.co.uk/2008/01/14/exploiting-php-self/

What PHP Deployment Gets Right
By Ian Bicking.
"With the recent talk on the blogosphere about deployment (and for 
Django, and lots of other posts too), people are thinking about PHP a 
bit more analytically. I think people mostly get it wrong..."
http://blog.ianbicking.org/2008/01/12/what-php-deployment-gets-right/


+07: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

HTML 5, One Vocabulary, Two Serializations
By Karl Dubost.
"It seems not very clear for many people. So let's set the record 
straight. HTML 5 can be written in html and XML...
http://www.w3.org/QA/2008/01/html5-is-html-and-xml


+08: TOOLS.

Feng GUI
By Feng-GUI Lab.
"Find out how people View your website or image and which areas are 
getting most of the attention. The ViewFinder Heatmap service, is an 
artificial intelligence service which simulates human visual attention 
and creates an attention heatmap."
http://www.feng-gui.com/


+09: USABILITY.

Choice Kills Usability
By John S. Rhodes.
" One of the easiest ways to improve usability is by focusing on just 
one thing. When you present something to the user, be sure that it's 
just one thing. All too often we try to hard to offer people several 
options..."
http://www.apogeehk.com/articles/ChoiceKillsUsability.html

Great Websites Do, Not Say
By Gerry McGovern.
"Never tell people what you're going to do for them on the Web. Just 
let them do what they came to do as quickly and simply as possible."
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2008/nt-2008-01-14-bore.htm

8 More Design Mistakes with Account Sign-in
By Jared Spool.
"Designing an account registration and sign-in process that doesn't 
frustrate users turns out to be very difficult to achieve. It looks 
easy at the outset, but a pile of subtleties can sneak up on your 
experience, making something that should be simple become stressful for 
the users."
http://www.uie.com/articles/account_design_mistakes_part2/

Usability and Trust
By Joe Dolson.
"Without both, it's very difficult to have a successful online 
business. Unusable web sites have an incredible ability to generate a 
lack of trust in the business - as soon as one feature fails to work 
correctly, or doesn't behave as you expect, there's an immediate 
connection made..."
http://www.joedolson.com/articles/2008/01/usability-and-trust/


[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.

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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 
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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.]