[webdev] Web Design Update: December 19, 2008

Laura Carlson lcarlson at d.umn.edu
Fri Dec 19 06:29:41 CST 2008


+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 7, Issue 25, December 19, 2008.

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

++ISSUE 25 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: COLOR.
04: DREAMWEAVER.
05: EVENTS.
06: JAVASCRIPT.
07: MISCELLANEOUS.
08: PHP.
09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
10: TOOLS.
11: USABILITY.

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

[Contents ends.]


++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

(The New) WCAG 2.0 Theme Song
By David MacDonald.
"This is the theme song for the new WCAG 2.0 which is a W3C 
recommendation. Accessibility consultant David MacDonald wrote it 
during a Face to Face WCAG meeting in Los Angeles. He did the 
instruments, programming, vocals and mixing in his home studio. Words 
are below. A video will be out in the coming days. (Note the old WCAG 
theme from 2002 is below this one on this page.)"
http://www.eramp.com/wcag_theme_song.htm

Accessibility Supported Web Content Technologies in WCAG 2.0
By Henny Swan.
"A new concept in WCAG 2.0 is accessibility supported web content 
technologies. This has confused a few people and also raised the wider 
question of what technologies are in fact accessibility supported?..."
http://tinyurl.com/58fyoa

Assistive Technology
By Access Technologists Higher Education Network (ATHENS).
"This section provides a space for documenting frequently asked 
questions, tips, strategies, etc. related to deployment of specific 
assistive technologies (AT) in higher education computing environments."
http://www.athenpro.org/wiki/index.php5?title=Assistive_Technology

Accessible Forms
By Ted Page.
"The importance of understanding screen reader 'forms mode' and more..."
http://www.pws-ltd.com/sections/articles/2008/accessible_forms.html

Three Video Captioning Tools
By Claude Almansi.
"So how to choose a tool? As with knitting, first make a sample with a 
short video using different tools: the short descriptive lists above 
cannot replace experience. Then choose the most appropriate one 
according to your aims for captioning a given video, and what are your 
possible collaborators' availability, IT resources, and abilities...Or 
Combine Tools..."
http://tinyurl.com/56g8wk

Recruiting Participants for Captioning Study
By David Fourney.
Centre for Learning Technologies at Ryerson University is recruiting 
participants for a captioning study.
http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/accessibility/2008-December/000269.html

Designing Accessible Websites
By Brooke Marshall.
"For the third-largest minority group in the United States - more than 
40 million people - the vast majority of Websites are partially or 
completely inaccessible..."
http://www.wpdfd.com/issues/87/designing-accessible-websites/


+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Pseudo Pseudo-Classes
By Chris Casciano.
"Some of the most powerful CSS2 and CSS3 selectors defined in the specs 
are avoided by web developers because they're not supported by commonly 
used web browsers. Sometimes in order to work around these shortfalls 
solutions with large overhead such as javascript libraries are used or 
code becomes littered with many specialized classes and sites become 
difficult to maintain..."
http://chunkysoup.net/article/341/PseudoPseudoClasses

The First Tool You Reach For
By Kevin Yank.
"Microsoft recently announced that Internet Explorer 8 will be released 
in the first half of 2009. Compared to the standards support of other 
major browsers, IE8 will not be especially great, but it will finally 
catch up with the state of the art in one specific area: support for 
CSS tables. This milestone has the potential to trigger an important 
change in the way you approach web design..."
http://24ways.org/2008/the-first-tool-you-reach-for

Making Modular Layout Systems
By Jason Santa Maria.
"For all of the advantages the web has with distribution of content, 
I've always lamented the handiness of the WYSIWYG design tools from the 
print publishing world. When I set out to redesign my personal website, 
I wanted to have some of the same abilities that those tools have, 
laying out pages how I saw fit, and that meant a flexible system for 
dealing with imagery..."
http://24ways.org/2008/making-modular-layout-systems

Pressed Button State With CSS
By Dmitry Fadeyev.
"There is certain anchor state in CSS that I don't see used very often 
- actually, it's something I haven't really used myself, but something 
which I now realize can be very useful. I'm talking about the 'active' 
anchor state."
http://www.usabilitypost.com/2008/12/16/pressed-button-state-with-css/

Shiny Happy Buttons
By John Allsopp.
"Since Mac OS X burst onto our screens, glossy, glassy, shiny buttons 
have been almost de rigueur, and have essentially, along with 
reflections and rounded corners, become a cliche of Web 2.0 'design'. 
But if you can't beat 'em you'd better join 'em..."
http://24ways.org/2008/shiny-happy-buttons

Changing HTML Images on Hover/ A Quick CSS Trick
By Niels Matthijs.
"Hovers on html images are not too common, as most images in html are 
purely content images and are not related to the actual design. One 
important exception is the site logo, which is best placed in html 
instead of css. It's common practice to put a home link on the site 
logo and when hovered, it's nice to see a hover state indication, 
subtle as it might be. To summarize what it is we want to do exactly..."
http://www.onderhond.com/blog/work/changing-html-images-on-hover/


+03: COLOR.

Example Luminosity Contrast Ratios
By Gez Lemon.
Gez updated this document to use the new WCAG 2.0 acceptable minimum 
color contrast ratios.
http://juicystudio.com/services/coloursaferatio.php

Minimum Color Contrast Ratio Changed in WCAG 2
By Joe Dolson.
"In the final release of WCAG 2, the acceptable minimum color contrast 
ratio was changed from 5:1 to 4.5:1..."
http://tinyurl.com/6f79vr


+04: DREAMWEAVER.

Working Within the Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 Environment
By Steve Johnson.
"Get to know the Dreamweaver authoring environment so you can be more 
effective and efficient as you create Web pages and manage Web sites..."
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1312598

Understanding Unobtrusive JavaScript in Dreamweaver CS4
By Roman Villarreal.
"Dreamweaver CS4 supports a new command that makes it easy to build 
clutter-free web pages for modern browsers: Externalize JavaScript. 
This new command enables you to do two things..."
http://tinyurl.com/5hrl8h

Dreamweaver's Form Validation Behavior
By Paul Davis.
"This quick video shows how to use the form validation behavior in 
Dreamweaver. Approximate download size: 14MB."
http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=A6B65


+05: EVENTS.

MinneUX Book Club
February 11, 2009.
Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A.
http://tinyurl.com/5hrj38

EDUCAUSE Midwest Regional Conference 2009
March 23-25, 2009.
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.
http://net.educause.edu/mwrc09


+06: JAVASCRIPT.

JavaScript Timers -  Using Functions and Scope
By Robert Nyman.
"Today I thought I'd introduce you to timers in JavaScript and how to 
use scope to make your life easier..."
http://tinyurl.com/5lysog


+07: MISCELLANEOUS.

Six Questions: Eric Meyer on CSS3
By Jacob Gube.
"Eric A. Meyer knows a thing or two about standards-based CSS and HTML 
development. He's a distinguished expert on CSS and HTML, an author of 
numerous books on CSS, co-founder of An Event Apart, a coveted guest 
speaker, a member of the A List Apart crew, and  founder of Complex 
Spiral Consulting..."
http://sixrevisions.com/interviews/six-questions-eric-meyer-on-css3/


+08: PHP.

JSON is Everybody's Friend
By Ed Finkler.
"JSON, while valid JavaScript code, is actually a very effective 
serialized data format for exchanging data between applications written 
in a variety of languages. And as of PHP 5.2, we have native support 
for JSON encoding and decoding..."
http://phpadvent.org/2008/json-is-everybodys-friend-by-ed-finkler

PHP Meritocracy
By Andrei Zmievski.
"...I want to briefly talk about the process of how PHP gets developed 
and why things are the way they are..."
http://phpadvent.org/2008/php-meritocracy-by-andrei-zmievski


+09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

This Week in HTML 5 - Episode 16
By Mark Pilgrim.
"...HTML 5 also includes a section on using the alt attribute, but in 
general you should defer to WCAG 2.0 because it was written by experts."
http://blog.whatwg.org/this-week-in-html-5-episode-16

Attaching Subtitles to HTML5 Video
By Silvia Pfeiffer.
"During the last week, I made a proposal to the HTML5 working group 
about how to support out-of-band time-aligned text in HTML5. What I 
mean by that is basically: how to link a subtitle file to a video tag 
in HTML5. This would mirror the way in which in desktop-players you can 
load separate subtitle files by hand to go alongside a video..."
http://tinyurl.com/67hwa7

AccessForAll Meta-data Specification
By Inovation Adoption Learning.
"The AccessForAll Meta-data specification is intended to make it 
possible to identify resources that match a user's stated preferences 
or needs. These preferences or needs would be declared using the IMS 
Learner Information Package Accessibility for LIP specification. The 
needs and preferences addressed include the need or preference for 
alternative presentations of resources, alternative methods of 
controlling resources, alternative equivalents to the resources 
themselves and enhancements or supports required by the user. The 
specification provides a common language for identifying and describing 
the primary or default resource and equivalent alternatives for that 
resource."
http://www.imsglobal.org/accessibility/


+10: TOOLS.

Accessibility Toolbar (Updated)
By Gez Lemon.
It now has a great new summary feature which  summarized failures at 
the start of the report. It has been updated to use  the new WCAG 2.0 
acceptable minimum color contrast ratios to boot.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9108

Contrast Ratio Analyzer (Updated)
By Gez Lemon.
Updated for WCAG 2.0 acceptable minimum color contrast ratios.
http://juicystudio.com/services/luminositycontrastratio.php

Inline Code Finder Firefox Extension
By Robert Nyman.
"When I first coded and released Obtrusive JavaScript Checker, I had 
some more ideas with it, as well as some great feedback I have received 
and wanted to see to. The result is Inline Code Finder, which looks for 
inline styling as well as what the Obtrusive JavaScript Checker 
offered, and it comes in two versions!"
http://tinyurl.com/5ackgx

Validator Donation Program: Day 2
By Olivier Thereaux.
Yesterday, W3C launched a new donation and sponsorship program offering 
Web-people and Organizations a chance to show their support for Web 
Standards and Open source: the Validator Donation Program.
http://www.w3.org/QA/2008/12/validator_donation_program.html

[Announce] Amaya 11
By Irene Vatton.
The W3C's Web editor/browser has been released.
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-amaya/2008OctDec/0104.html


+11: USABILITY.

The Discipline of Content Strategy
By Kristina Halvorson.
It's time to stop pretending content is somebody else's problem. If 
content strategy is all that stands between us and the next 
fix-it-later copy draft or beautifully polished but meaningless site 
launch, it's time to take up the torch-time to make content matter. 
Halvorson tells how to understand, learn, practice, and plan for 
content strategy."
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/thedisciplineofcontentstrategy

Content-tious Strategy
By Jeffrey MacIntyre.
"Every website faces two key questions: 1. What content do we have at 
hand? 2. What content should we produce? Answering those questions is 
the domain of the content strategist. Alas, real content strategy gets 
as little respect today as information architecture did in 1995. 
MacIntyre defines the roles, tools, and value of this emerging user 
experience specialist."
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/contenttiousstrategy

Interaction Elasticity
By Jakob Nielsen.
"Usage goes down as interaction costs increase. User motivation 
determines how fast demand drops, following an elasticity curve..."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/interaction-elasticity.html


[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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+ 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.]




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