[webdev] Web Design Update: November 7, 2008

[Laura Carlson]

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 7, Issue 19, November 7, 2008.

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

++ISSUE 19 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: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
06: JAVASCRIPT.
07: MISCELLANEOUS.
08: NAVIGATION.
09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
10: TOOLS.
11: USABILITY.

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

[Contents ends.]


++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

With Real World Implementations WCAG 2.0 Steps Closer to Expected 
December 2008 Publication
By Shawn Henry.
"Today W3C WAI published WCAG 2.0 as a "W3C Proposed Recommendation". 
This means that the technical material of WCAG 2.0 is complete and it 
has been used successfully in real websites. Up next: final publication 
as a Web standard "W3C Recommendation", which we expect in December..."
http://www.w3.org/QA/2008/11/with_real_world_implementation.html

President Elect Barack Obama on Disabilities
By Peter Korn.
"I am so very proud to say that the next President of the United 
States, Barack Obama has one of the most thoughtful, detailed, and well 
articulated set of policies on people with disabilities I have ever 
seen. I encourage you to read them on his website. His key stated 
initiatives include..."
http://blogs.sun.com/korn/date/20081104


+02: DREAMWEAVER.

Using Dreamweaver to Work With Drupal Modules
By Ray West.
"...This article is for those of us who still love Dreamweaver for its 
interface, its design view, and its built-in site management and FTP, 
but need to work with Drupal module files with the .module, .install, 
.info and other file extensions. To Dreamweaver, these are not 
recognizable files and it will not want to open them. Even when you get 
them opened, Dreamweaver will not use its normal PHP color coding and 
you will just get black text. This can make it tough to find things in 
your files and tell when things are comments, among other issues. This 
article will show you how to get Dreamweaver to open these files from 
the site manager and how to use Dreamweaver's built in PHP color coding 
for all these weird file extensions."
http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=966FB

It's Goodbye and Good Riddance to .style1 in Dreamweaver CS4
By Kim Cavanaugh.
"If you've been fooling around with web pages as long as I have, you've 
seen a real revolution when it comes to the methods that are used for 
styling pages. From the early abandonment of frame-based sites, to the 
more prevalent reliance on CSS-positioning versus table-based layouts 
that we see, these days there has been a constant change in the world 
of web site design. Perhaps the last, really nasty throwback to earlier 
times was the way that Dreamweaver wrote styling information for text 
when the Properties inspector was used. Beginning in Dreamweaver MX, 
Macromedia moved away from the use of font tags (Yeah!) for styling 
text and moved towards a method that used CSS. But the truly ugly means 
they used to do this was to create, by default, numbered class rules 
named .style into the head of the document. Every time you styled text, 
even just a little, a new .style rule was created. Within minutes of 
the release of Dreamweaver the Web was awash in thousands of .style1's, 
.style2's, .style3's and so forth."
http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=8AAE7

+03: EVALUATION & TESTING.

What is Ethnography and How does it Aid Customer Understanding?
By Simon Pulman-Jones.
"Despite often being perceived as a bit of a black art, ethnography can 
provide unparalleled insight into any given experience from your 
customers' point of view. So what is it and how is it different from 
'normal' research?..."
http://www.mycustomer.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=133973


+04: EVENTS.

OZCHI 2008
December 8- 12, 2008.
Cairns, Australia
http://www.ozchi.org/mediawiki/index.php/OZCHI_2008

Web-Blast
December 12, 2008.
Sydney, Australia
http://webblast.org/

Web Directions North
February 2-7, 2008.
Denver Colorado, U.S.A.
http://north.webdirections.org/
Ed Directions North (full day workshop)
http://tinyurl.com/5k2szk


+05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

Prototyping with XHTML
By Anders Ramsay and Leah Buley.
"While prototyping with XHTML isn't tied to a specific design process, 
iterative development seems to effectively leverage its strengths. 
There are many reasons for this, but perhaps the most significant is 
that in both cases the prototype, and later the application itself, 
doubles as a specification. We'll explore what that means in a bit, but 
first let's walk through a suggested process for prototyping with 
XHTML."
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/prototyping-with

Is there an Architect in the House?
By Adam Kallis.
"What was intriguing about this particular conference was the diversity 
of people, both in professional and geographic terms. There were 
graphic designers, interaction designers, technical leads, managers, 
and oh yes... 'information architects'. What was interesting about the 
attending information architects was that they came from so many 
backgrounds to become an information architect. There were actual 
classically trained architects that became IA's, there were designers 
that were IA's and so on."
http://spill.tanagram.com/2008/10/22/is-there-an-architect-in-the-house/


+06: JAVASCRIPT.

Progressive Enhancement with JavaScript
By Aaron Gustafson.
"Our introductory series on progressive enhancement and the ways it can 
be implemented concludes with a look at the mind set needed to 
implement PE in JavaScript, and a survey of best practices for doing 
so."
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/progressiveenhancementwithjavascript

Internet Explorer 8 - Fix Event Handling, or Don't Release It
By Robert Nyman.
"Something which have troubled web developers for a long long time is 
the proprietary event handling implementation in Internet Explorer. In 
IE 8, this really has to go..."
http://tinyurl.com/67xoyt

Accessibility of Rich Internet Applications
By Jared Smith.
"This new article provides an overview of ARIA (Accessible Rich 
Internet Applications) and demonstrates how it can be used to resolve 
many of the accessibility issues found in dynamic, complex web 
applications and widgets. Additional ARIA documentation and examples 
will be coming to the WebAIM site in the near future."
http://webaim.org/techniques/aria/

Accessible View: An ARIA for Web Search
By T.V. Raman.
"From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use 
Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips 
that sighted people, among others, may also find useful."
http://tinyurl.com/5awgaq


+07: MISCELLANEOUS.

All Web Directions South 2008 Slides and Podcasts Now Online
By Maxine Sherrin.
"Thanks to a huge effort by Guy, we now have all the slides and 
podcasts from WDS08 available at the site, which means it is officially 
'a wrap'..."
http://tinyurl.com/6jucxq


+08: NAVIGATION.

Links in Context - or Not?
By WebAIM Thread.
"One of our Web managers has asked me for advice on this topic..."
http://webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread.php?thread=3675


+09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

This Week in HTML 5 - Episode 11
By Mark Pilgrim.
"...Dates and times loom large in this week's updates..."
http://blog.whatwg.org/this-week-in-html-5-episode-11

The Road to HTML 5 - Episode 1: The Section Element
By Mark Pilgrim.
"Welcome to a new semi-regular column, "The Road to HTML 5," where I'll 
try to explain some of the new elements, attributes, and other features 
in the upcoming HTML 5 specification. The element of the day is the 
<section> element..."
http://blog.whatwg.org/the-road-to-html-5-episode-1-the-section-element


+10: TOOLS.

Image Analyser
By Gez Lemon.
"This service examines all images found on a web page to check for any 
accessibility issues. The width, height, alt, and longdesc attributes 
are examined for appropriate values..."
http://juicystudio.com/services/image.php

Firebug - Part 1: The What and Why
By Estelle Weyl.
"In this multi-part series, we are going to learn all about Firebug, 
the premier (and free) web development tool for Firefox. Part 1 is an 
overview of the  Firefox browser, and Firebug, the Firefox plugin. 
Learn how to install Firefox and Firebug, and learn how to run the 
application and change preferences. In future sessions will show you 
how to work with and troubleshoot CSS, HTML and Javascript."
http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=6B0D6


+11: USABILITY.

Aspects of Design Quality
By Jakob Nielsen.
"Usability scores for 51 websites shows some correlation between 
navigation, content, and feature quality, but no connections to other 
usability areas."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/quality-correlations.html

How to Grow and Nurture Your Community
By Kathy Sierra.
"Our job is to get our users up the curve as quickly as possible." 
Future of Web Apps London 2008: Full video Kathy's presentation.
http://www.viddler.com/explore/carsonified/videos/78/

Common Visual Design Misconceptions
By Luke Wroblewski.
"Recently, I had the opportunity to reflect on common misconceptions 
about the role of visual design that are still prominent in the beliefs 
of executives, product leaders, engineering managers, and marketing 
professionals. Is there anything team members can do to illustrate 
certain beliefs are wrong? What could they do to demonstrate the truth 
about visual design to coworkers and stakeholders?"
http://dev.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000344.php

Writing Content That Works for a Living
By Erin Kissane.
"Most web copy is still being written by people who aren't writers and 
don't have time. The good news? Anyone who touches copy can make a 
difference by insisting that every chunk of text on the site do 
something concrete..."
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/writingcontentthatworksforaliving


[Section one ends.]


++ SECTION TWO:

+12: 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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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.]