[webdev] Web Design Update: August 24, 2005

Wed Aug 24 06:20:40 CDT 2005

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 4, Issue 09, August 24, 2005.

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

++ISSUE 09 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: EVALUATION & TESTING.
06: EVENTS.
07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
08: JAVASCRIPT.
09: MISCELLANEOUS.
10: NAVIGATION.
11: PHP.
12: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
13: TOOLS.
14: USABILITY.

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

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Evaluating Web Sites for Accessibility with Firefox
By Patrick H. Lauke.
"Patrick H. Lauke outlines how Mozilla Firefox can be used in 
conjunction with the Web Developer Toolbar to carry out a preliminary 
accessibility review."
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/lauke/

Accessibility Building Blocks
By Ian Lloyd.
Ian's slides from @media 2005.
http://www.dotjay.co.uk/atmedia2005/ian-lloyd/

Improving Usability for Screen Reader Users
By Webcredible.
"Simply ensuring your website is accessible to screen reader users is 
unfortunately not enough to ensure these users can find what they're 
looking for in a reasonably quick and efficient manner. Even if your 
site is accessible to screen reader users, its usability could be so 
incredibly poor that they needn't have bothered coming to your site."
http://tinyurl.com/a28ua

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Creating Indented Navigation Lists
By Michael Meadhra.
"A vertical navigation bar is a familiar feature on many Web sites- and 
no wonder, it's a great way to organize a list of links. At its 
simplest, the navigation bar may be a list of plain text links. 
However, it's increasingly common for Web builders to make the list 
items behave like buttons, complete with CSS rollover effects that make 
the full button face clickable."
http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-5810696.html

Creating Multicolumn Lists
By Michael Meadhra.
"The standard formatting for an HTML list is for the list items to be 
stacked, flush left, indented from the left margin, and preceded by a 
bullet or number. That works fine for a typical list, in which each 
item consists of a sentence or two of text. However, when the list 
items are very short (e.g., a long list of items composed of a word or 
two each), you end up with a tall, narrow column of text on the left 
side of your Web page with a big empty space to the right. That's when 
many Web designers start looking for ways to break a long list into 
multiple side-by-side columns instead of a single long column."
http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-5810687.html

+03: COLOR.

An Explanation of Colorblindness
By Jon Hicks.
"I get a lot of people asking me what its like to be colour blind. It 
usually takes the form of 'Can you see this colour? Can you see this 
one ? Is everything black and white??? '. This is the best explanation 
I've come across yet..."
http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/an-explanation-of-colorblindness

+04: DREAMWEAVER.

Dreamweaver 8 Style Rendering Toolbar - A Sneak Peek
By Adrian Senior.
"Dreamweaver 8 has a very interesting and very cool new feature, the 
Style Rendering tool bar. The style rendering toolbar allows you to 
easily design for various media types, such as screen, handheld and 
print which we will look at in this preview. Other media types that are 
catered for are Projection, TTY - Television Type Devices, and TV media 
types. Dreamweaver 8 also provides the ability to toggle on and off all 
CSS rendering via the toggle CSS display button."
http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=EDF1F

The CSS Styles Panel in Dreamweaver 8: A Sneak Peek
By Zoe Gillenwater.
"One of the great new CSS tools in Dreamweaver 8 is the new, unified 
CSS Styles panel. All style information for all the elements on your 
pages is stored in this one central location. As with previous versions 
of Dreamweaver, you can use the panel to create, view, edit and remove 
style rules, as well as attach style sheets. Now, however, properties 
are laid out in a grid for easy editing, and the cascade for all your 
rules is displayed for you, to help you understand how each rule is 
affecting your page. You can select any element on your page and 
instantly see what rules are affecting it and what properties have been 
set for it. The CSS Styles panel provides the ease of use for those new 
to CSS, with a depth of information that advanced CSS users will 
appreciate."
http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=81B54

+05: EVALUATION & TESTING.

The Usability Specialist's Favorite: Heuristic Evaluation
By Joanna Bawa.
"To measure the usability of an interface design, you'll need to use 
one of the many evaluation techniques available. Here we look at one 
favored by usability professionals..."
http://uk.builder.com/manage/project/0,39026588,39257400,00.htm

+06: EVENTS.

Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps
September 28, 2005.
Sydney, Australia
http://webessentials.org/veen/

Euro IA Summit
Europe's First Information Architecture Summit
October 15-16, 2005.
Brussels, Belgium
http://www.euroia.org/

+07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

IA in Germany: Chances and Perspectives
By James Kalbach.
"Andrew Dillon declared in his closing keynote speech at the Montreal 
IA Summit (2005) that IA was entering its second phase. IAs are seeing 
more and more job opportunities as well as more professional 
recognition, and the field itself seems to be progressing. Not so in 
Germany. Here, IA is barely on the map."
http://tinyurl.com/9wxpx

Information Scent: Helping People Find the Content They Want
By Iain Barker.
"Information scent is a concept that should be well-understood by 
everyone designing intranets and information-rich websites."
http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_informationscent/index.html

+08: JAVASCRIPT.

How to Develop Web Applications with Ajax, Pt. 1
By Jonathan Fenocchi.
In the past, web applications were limited because a web page had to be 
reloaded (or another page loaded in its place) in order for new data to 
be obtained. Recently, a new method, known as 'Ajax' (Asynchronous 
Javascript and XML applications) asynchronously retrieves XML data via 
JavaScript. Ajax will allow you to take your web applications to the 
next level.
http://tinyurl.com/b9bel

Using the XMLHttpRequest Object and AJAX to Spy On You
By Earle Castledine.
"While the XMLHttpRequest object and AJAX can provide huge user and 
developer benefits, there are some issues you probably haven't thought 
about yet?but it's time everyone did."
http://www.devx.com/webdev/Article/28861?trk=DXRSS_WEBDEV

JavaScript Cheat Sheet
By Dave Child.
The JavaScript cheat sheet is designed to act as a reminder and 
reference sheet, listing methods and functions of JavaScript. It 
includes reference material for regular expressions in JavaScript, as 
well as a short guide to the XMLHttpRequest object. A description of 
what is on the cheat sheet follows, or if you are impatient, you can go 
straight to the full size JavaScript cheat sheet..."
http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/javascript/javascript-cheat-sheet/

+09: MISCELLANEOUS.

Top Ten Things You Don't Want To Hear From New Clients
By Travis.
"We have met a lot of new and potential clients, and heard some funny 
things over the years, together with some things we never want to hear 
again. For new designers out there, if you hear any of the following 
comments when meeting clients for the first time, just run, leave the 
laptop, save yourself and run in the opposite direction..."
http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/viewtopic.php?p=135770#135770

Hagan Rivers Interview: Deconstructing Web Applications
By Christine Perfetti.
"Hagan Rivers is a recognized pioneer in the area of Web Application 
Design. Hagan worked on some of the very first web based interfaces and 
she continues to push the envelope of web application design in her 
current role as a partner at Two Rivers Consulting. UIE's Christine 
Perfetti recently had the opportunity to talk with Hagan about some of 
the biggest challenges in the web application space."
http://tinyurl.com/dj675

+10: NAVIGATION.

Problems in Navigating Online Help: Clues from User Search Patterns
By Robert Krull and Angela Eaton.
"Specifically, participants had difficulty in searching for topics 
because their terminology differed from the terminology used by the 
help system, and they became lost in the unclear structure of the 
system. Specific results and discussion are provided below."
http://www.winwriters.com/articles/navigation/index.html

hasLayout Property Characterizes IE6 Bug
By Jim Thatcher.
Internet Explorer 6 has a bug which interferes with the correct working 
of in-page links when they are selected via the keyboard. Jim has an 
explanation of the issue and work around.
http://jimthatcher.com/news.htm#haslayout

Keyboard Navigation and Internet Explorer
By Gez Lemon.
"Internet Explorer 6 has very poor support for in-page navigation. 
In-page navigation is an important accessibility requirement for 
several groups, including those with some types of mobility problems. 
This article investigates the problem with in-page links and Internet 
Explorer, with some possible solutions."
http://juicystudio.com/article/ie-keyboard-navigation.php

+11: PHP.

Introducing Recursive Functions in PHP
By Rob Williams.
"One of the basic building blocks of any object-oriented programming 
language is the function. Functions allow you to reuse blocks of code 
and perform common tasks from other points within a script. In addition 
to straight calls though, functions can also be created to act 
recursively, adding a whole new dimension and power to this basic 
programming building block. In this article we'll take a look at what 
recursion is and why it's useful. We'll also create a recursive 
function to convert PHP arrays to JavaScript ones."
http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=7CD16

Mature Design Theory in Web Development
By Sherri Wheeler.
"This article is intended for experienced web developers and 
development companies who are looking for a way to move from small 
applications up to medium to large projects, and are interested in 
improving the quality of their application design. If you still use a 
set of distinct web pages for each application function, this article 
will explain why a better methodology is needed, and give some guidance 
as to how it can be accomplished."
http://www.zend.com/php/design/mature-design.php

Fundamentals of PHP Superglobals
Ian Gilfillan.
This month's article is aimed at PHP developers who're not yet familiar 
with the PHP superglobals. Usage of superglobals is fundamental to PHP 
web development, but, with all the recent changes in PHP, there are 
still many outdated tutorials, books, and sadly, still much confusion.
http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/ian_gilfillan20050801.php3

+12: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

A Standards Truce in the Browser War?
By Paul Festa.
"When Microsoft 'technical evangelist' Robert Scoble complained in his 
blog about being snubbed at a Texas conference, he probably didn't 
think he was laying the groundwork for a truce in the long-running war 
over Web browser standards."
http://tinyurl.com/d5kjp

Apologizing When You Aren't Wrong
By Joe Clark.
"...A collaboration between Microsoft and the Web Standards Project has 
a lot going for it, but Scoble's whining about being excluded from a 
meeting of a group he never belonged to should not be regarded as 
actually important."
http://blog.fawny.org/2005/08/05/snub/

+13: TOOLS.

Nvu Site Manager Extender
By Peter Macej.
"This free Nvu extension adds some new functionality to Nvu Site 
Manager. It adds new 'Site Manager' preferences page after 
installing..."
http://www.vbdocman.com/free/siteme/

+14: USABILITY.

Journal of Usability Studies
By Usability Professionals' Association.
The Journal of Usability Studies (JUS) is a peer-reviewed, 
international, online publication dedicated to promoting and enhancing 
the practice, research, and education of usability engineering.
http://usabilityprofessionals.org/upa_publications/journal/index.html

Users, Activities, Practices etc.
By Anne Galloway.
"...activity theory is always already part of user-centred design, and 
vice versa. They are part of the same tree: a mental or cybernetic 
species. Whether modeling users or activities, the models are systemic, 
relatively stable, quantifiable, hierarchical, discrete, and often 
predictive. More importantly, they make it difficult to imagine other 
ways of understanding."
http://tinyurl.com/djxgz

International Sites: Minimum Requirements
By Jakob Nielsen.
"Users from other countries have special needs related to entry fields 
for names and addresses, measurements and dates, and information about 
regional product standards."
http://useit.com/alertbox/20050808.html

Seven Screen Reader Usability Tips
By Trenton Moss.
"Simply ensuring that your Website is accessible to screen reader users 
is, unfortunately, not enough to guarantee that these users can find 
what they're looking for in a reasonably quick and efficient manner. 
Even if your site is accessible to screen reader users, its usability 
could be so poor that they needn't have bothered stooping by in the 
first place."
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/screen-reader-usability-tips

[Section one ends.]

++ SECTION TWO:

+15: 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.]