[webdev] Web Design Update: September 25, 2008

Thu Sep 25 06:53:07 CDT 2008

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 7, Issue 13, September 25, 2008.

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

++ISSUE 13 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: DREAMWEAVER.
03: EVALUATION & TESTING.
04: EVENTS.
05: JAVASCRIPT.
06: MISCELLANEOUS.
07: PHP.
08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
09: USABILITY.

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

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

First Three Parts of ISO Multipart Accessibility in e-Learning Standard 
Published
By Sharon Perry.
"The first three parts of the ISO (International Organization for 
Standardization) 'Individualized Adaptability and Accessibility in 
E-learning, Education and Training' Standard have just been published 
(16th September 2008)..."
http://tinyurl.com/3ntxus

Turn Firefox into a Screen Reader with Fire Vox
By Roger Johansson.
"I've seen Fire Vox mentioned plenty of times but have never had any 
luck getting it to work on my Mac. Until now, that is. Not sure what 
I've been doing wrong the other times I have tried it, but the other 
day I gave it another shot and it worked without any problems..."
http://tinyurl.com/44ovvb

Accessibility Experiment
By Joe Walker.
"Just back from @media Ajax with a few ideas buzzing around. One based 
on this comic..."
http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2008/09/22/accessibility-experiment/

CAPTCHA Update 2008
By ESW Wiki.
http://esw.w3.org/topic/PF/Incubator/CAPTCHAUpdate

+02: DREAMWEAVER.

Review: The Best New Features in Dreamweaver CS4
Virginia DeBolt.
"...Here are what I consider the best new features in the Dreamweaver 
part of CS4..."
http://tinyurl.com/53lw2a

Quick Look at Dreamweaver CS4 and the PHP Toolset
By Stefan Mischook.
"We are going to take a quick look at the changes to Dreamweaver CS4, 
specifically concentrating on the things related to working with PHP. 
At the same time, I may weave in a few nerd-concepts here and there, so 
that we can gently get you used to this stuff."
http://www.killersites.com/dreamweaver/cs4/

+03: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Quick Turnaround Usability Testing
By Paul Nuschke.
"It starts with any number of scenarios: Design and development have 
taken too long to produce a prototype, you need to release in three 
weeks, and you suspect there may be design flaws. You are trying to 
incorporate usability testing into an Agile development process. Or 
maybe you simply want to pare down your process to make it shorter and 
less expensive..."
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/quick-turnaround

What Goes into a Well-Done Critique
By Jared M. Spool.
"Receiving a critique is probably one of the hardest things we'll do in 
our work. Giving one is equally as difficult. It's hard to do well and 
easy to do poorly. As we've been working with teams over the last 20 
years, we've accumulated an understanding of what goes into a 
successful critique. Here's what we've found..."
http://www.uie.com/articles/critique/

+04: EVENTS.

The Web Design and Developer Conference
October 15-16, 2008.
Orlando, Florida, U.S.A.
http://tinyurl.com/6yohzf

<head> Conference Global (online)
October 24-26, 2008.
Online Conference
http://www.headconference.com/

Mexico Web 2.0
November 3-4, 2008.
Cancun, Mexico.
http://mexicoweb2.com/

Web 2.0 Summit
November 5-7, 2008.
San Francisco, California, U.S.A.
http://en.oreilly.com/web2008/public/content/home

Edge of the Web 2008
November 6-7, 2008.
Perth, Australia
http://www.edgeoftheweb.org.au/

Web Directions East
November 7-9, 2008.
Tokyo, Japan
http://east08.webdirections.org/

IceWeb 2008
November 13-14, 2008.
Reykjavik, Iceland
http://svef.is/

+05: JAVASCRIPT.

Accessible Rich Internet Applications/Relationship to HTML FAQ
By Mozilla.
"This document should help HTML developers understand ARIA, its 
purpose, and how it relates to HTML and HTML development."
http://tinyurl.com/4kjyky

Test-Driven Progressive Enhancement
By Scott Jehl.
"Starting with semantic HTML, and layering enhancements using 
JavaScript and CSS, is supposed to create good experiences for all. 
Alas, enhancements still find their way to aging browsers and 
under-featured mobile devices that don't parse them properly. What's a 
developer to do? Scott Jehl makes the case for capabilities testing."
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/testdriven

+06: MISCELLANEOUS.

Scripting Enabled Presentations
"The aim of the conference is to break down the barriers between 
disabled users and the social web as much as giving ethical hackers 
real world issues to solve. We talked about improving the accessibility 
of the web for a long time - let's not wait, let's make it happen."
http://scriptingenabled.org/presentations/

+07: PHP.

Calculating Color Contrast with PHP
By Andreas Gohr.
"A good designer will choose high contrast colors for backgrounds and 
texts without hesitation. But sometimes no human is involved in 
choosin' th' colors. For example when colors are assigned in a (pseudo) 
random manner. [...] After some googlin' I found a page explainin' 
different color contrast algorithms. Load the cannons! I used th' data 
from that page and implemented 3 color check functions in PHP..."
http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/11045

Introduction to PHP and Ajax
By Anthony Corbelli.
"As a web developer, you may have asked yourself whether it was 
possible to update information from the server without having to 
refresh a page or use a heavy applet such as Flash or Java. As you may 
have seen with weather information widgets and stock tickers, not only 
is it possible--it's relatively easy when the solution is AJAX..."
http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/acorbelli_20080919.php3

+08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

Web Standards 2008: Three Circles of Hell
By Molly E. Holzschlag.
"Standards promised to keep the web from fragmenting. But as the web 
standards movement advances in several directions at once, and as 
communication between those seeking to advance the web grows fractious, 
are our standards losing their relevance, and their ability to foster 
an accessible, interoperable web for all?"
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/webstandards2008

Alexa Global Top 500 Against HTML 5 Validation
By Karl Dubost.
"...The January 2008 file contains 485 web sites. 23 (4.7%) could not 
be validated. Most of the time, the site was too slow. Only 4 (< 1%) 
sites were declared valid html 5 by the conformance checker. If Henri 
Sivonen could do the same thing with his instance of html 5 conformance 
checker that would help to know if my results are silly or in the right 
envelop."
http://www.w3.org/QA/2008/09/top-500-html5-validity.html

Twitter, Ye Markup Be Non-Standarrrrrd
By Matt May.
"Twitter unveiled a new redesign today. Very little of it is really 
noticeably different, until you look at the underlying code. Which, 
last I recall, used to be pretty good-they even used the fancy-pants 
XHTML 1.0 Strict doctype (though still using tables for layout, which 
the spec says it shouldn't do)..."
http://tinyurl.com/4vpf9t

10 Reasons Why HTML 5 Will Change The Web (And 1 Why It Won't)
By Aditya.
"HTML5 is currently in the draft stage, and the latest specification is 
available at the W3C web site. User experience on the Internet will 
change for sure, and here's why..."
http://tinyurl.com/3s5b6k

This Week in HTML 5 - Episode 6
By Mark Pilgrim.
http://blog.whatwg.org/this-week-in-html-5-episode-6

+08: USABILITY.

Previous and Next Actions in Web Forms
By Luke Wroblewski.
"A recent lengthy discussion in the Interaction Design Association 
focused on the placement of actions in Web forms that span several Web 
pages. The quintessential question underlying this debate is: can an 
action which leads people to the previous step of a process be placed 
to the right of an action that leads users to the next step of a 
process?..."
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?730

Tap is the New Click (Presentation)
By Dan Saffer.
"I had awesome crowds yesterday at my two 'Tap is the New Click' 
presentations. Lots of great discussion and people laughed at my jokes 
to boot! Here is a pdf version of the presentation slides (8mb) for 
your downloading pleasure! The first chapter of the upcoming Designing 
Gestural Interfaces book can also be downloaded for your reading 
pleasure."
http://tinyurl.com/4ew5m4

Beauty Matters: Usability and Aesthetics
By Michael Burmester, Marc Hassenzahl and Franz Koller.
"Usability is an approved quality when designing interactive products. 
Another factor becomes more and more important: the hedonic quality, 
which includes the aesthetic of a product. The long-time experiences in 
user-friendly design convinced the initiators of Beauty matters that 
the combination of usability and aesthetics ensures the success of a 
product. Usability alone ist not enough. Most people associate the 
aesthetics of a product with its beauty. The beauty is also decisive 
whether a product represents a special value for us."
http://www.beauty-matters.org/en/Home/

[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.

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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.]