[webdev] Web Design Update: January 10, 2006.

Tue Jan 10 06:27:56 CST 2006

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 4, Issue 29, January 10, 2006.

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

++ISSUE 29 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: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
05: JAVASCRIPT.
06: NAVIGATION.
07: PHP.
08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
09: TOOLS.
10: TYPOGRAPHY.
11: USABILITY.
12: XML.

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

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Writing a Good Accessibility Statement
By Gez Lemon.
"Accessibility statements are an ideal place to empower visitors to 
your website. Most accessibility statements are too technical, and 
don't necessarily address the needs of the visitor. Those that do 
address the needs of visitors often have the information lost in a 
myriad of other information that is unlikely to be understood by the 
average visitor to the website. What should and shouldn't be included 
in an accessibility statement?"
http://tinyurl.com/am8wl

Massachusetts Grapples with Open Source's Cost to the Disabled
By Lisa Vaas.
"...The commonwealth can in all likelihood figure out a standard of 
accessibility for the disabled, whether that standard is encapsulated 
in the open-source OpenDocument format or whether the door is left open 
for proprietary formats such as Microsoft Corp.'s Open XML Office. But 
what support will there be for the infrastructure needed to train the 
individuals who will have to learn wholly new technology..."
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1901845,00.asp

Advocates For Disabled Wary of Open Source
By Linda Tucci.
"Beleaguered Massachusetts CIO Peter Quinn has resigned, but the 
controversy surrounding his decision to adopt OpenDocument formats 
won't end with his departure. State officials haven't indicated they 
plan to amend Quinn's plan to adopt OpenFormat standards by Jan. 1, 
2007 -- a deadline that has advocates for people with disabilities 
worried..."
http://tinyurl.com/8jkf5

ODF Subpar for the Disabled? Not so Fast says Google Researcher
By David Berlind.
"...the designers of the OpenDocument Format chose to use XForms; the 
same technology that is the standard forms technology for the Web. By 
itself, this seems like no big deal.  But, as it turns out, the ability 
to fill out electronic forms is critical for PWDs.  As such, XForms - 
the newest forms technology for the Web ? was designed with 
accessibility in mind. Raman, who is blind, should know: as an employee 
at IBM for most of the last five years, he was one of the authors of 
the World Wide Web Consortium's XForms standard.  According to Raman, 
by virtue of its reliance on XForms, ODF has actually inherited some of 
the Web's key accessibility features..."
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=2230

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

CSS Tricks for Custom Bullets
By David Sawyer McFarland.
"Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) give Web developers precise control over 
a page's typography and layout. One secret weapon of CSS-based designs 
is the background property, which adds images and color to the 
background of any element on a Web page."
http://www.macworld.com/2005/12/secrets/januarycreate/index.php

Overuse of Floats Considered Harmful
By David Baron.
"...Floats were intended to be used to take small pieces of content out 
of the flow and let the rest of the text wrap around them. They were 
not intended to be used for the main content of a page, nor were they 
designed for it. Nevertheless, use of floats for the main content of a 
page is quite common today...I see this situation as similar to the use 
of tables for layout that is now quite widely accepted as misuse. The 
current overuse of floats is often done with the goal of fixing one of 
the problems caused by the misuse of tables: incorrect use of semantic 
markup..."
http://dbaron.org/log/2005-12#e20051228a

Cross Browser Issues: CSS Hacks, Understanding Compatibility
By Jennifer Sullivan Cassidy.
"One of the greatest problems with CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, is 
the issue of cross browser compatibility. What may look great in 
Mozilla browsers looks terrible in Internet Explorer, and may totally 
break in Netscape. The biggest mistake a web designer or developer 
using CSS can make is to design for only one browser, or to assume that 
since the largest group of viewers use IE, to disregard its flaws that 
are apparent in other browsers. This article and the next in this 
series will cover a few of the cross browser issues in CSS, why the 
code acts the way it does, and how you can either fix it, or avoid it 
altogether.  But before we jump right into the CSS hacks and fixes, I 
want to explore a cornerstone in the foundation of good CSS 
programming: understanding browser compatibility."
http://tinyurl.com/87g4w

+03: EVENTS.

Portal 2006
June 6-9, 2006.
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania U.S.A.
https://biz.gettysburg.edu/it/portal06/index.html

+04: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

Classification and Categorization: A Difference that Makes a Difference
By Elin K. Jacob.
"Examination of the systemic properties and forms of interaction that 
characterize classification and categorization reveals fundamental 
syntactic differences between the structure of classification systems 
and the structure of categorization systems. These distinctions lead to 
meaningful differences in the contexts within which information can be 
apprehended and influence the semantic information available to the 
individual. Structural and semantic differences between classification 
and categorization are differences that make a difference in the 
information environment by influencing the functional activities of an 
information system and by contributing to its constitution as an 
information environment."
http://tinyurl.com/dph57

+05: JAVASCRIPT.

Ajax Link Tracker
By Glenn Jones.
"One of the more interesting aspects of Ajax is the ability to track a 
user's interaction within the browser. I wanted to investigate 
navigation patterns, so I have written an Ajax based link tracker. If 
you press the 'Ctrl' and "X" keys you will be presented with an overlay 
which displays links usage by percentage. This functionality was 
created with JavaScript and a very simple API..."
http://www.glennjones.net/Post/805/AjaxLinkTracker.htm

Mozilla Developer Center: JavaScript
By Mozilla.
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/JavaScript

JavaScript Developer Center
By Yahoo.
http://ws1.inf.scd.yahoo.com/javascript/

JavaScript Tutorial
By W3schools.com.
http://www.w3schools.com/js/

XMLHttpRequest
By MozillaZine.
API documentation for Mozilla's XMLHttpRequest
http://kb.mozillazine.org/XMLHttpRequest

Leak Free Javascript Closures
By Laurens van den Oever.
"Javascript closures can be a powerful programming technique. 
Unfortunately in Internet Explorer they are a common source of memory 
leaks. Therefore I propose a method to create closures that don't leak 
memory."
http://laurens.vd.oever.nl/weblog/items2005/closures/

An Introduction to Javascript Animation
By Emrah Baskaya.
"Javascript animations are seen more and more in our daily web 
routines. Most can be annoying too, if they simply serve the purpose to 
lamely look cool, while they may actually only distract the user. 
However, when used properly, they can really add to the user 
experience, and increase the usability of your site. Also, with the 
advent of the DOM, the more widespread usage of new generation 
browsers, and the adoption of xmlHttpRequest and other technologies 
which all together are called AJAX, the need for notifying user with 
what is going on with simple animations can become a necessity, such as 
using fading colors and resizing elements. Actually, I am putting such 
an animation to good use on this very page, while step-by-step 
explaining the main animation function for resizing. The principles are 
all the same, but the color fading was inspired by the Yellow Fade 
Technique For Dummies, this one is a versatile function that you can 
fade any color to any color. It is also a very light-weight script that 
you can modify to use for any type of animation, as you see on this 
page. If you have specific questions for implementing the scripts in 
your own sites, feel free to drop me a mail using the contact page oh 
hesido.com."
http://www.hesido.com/web.php?page=javascriptanimation

+06: NAVIGATION.

Using Meaningful and Stable Categories to Support Exploratory Web 
Search:
Two Formative Studies
By Bill Kules and Ben Shneiderman.
"Categorizing web search results into comprehensible visual displays 
using meaningful and stable classifications can support user 
exploration, understanding, and discovery. We report on two formative 
studies in the domain of U.S. government web search that investigated 
how searchers use categorized overviews of search results for complex, 
exploratory search tasks. The first study compared two overview 
conditions vs. a control (N=18). The overviews were based on the 
federal government organizational hierarchy. With the overview 
conditions, participants noticed missing results more often than 
participants in the control. They also found pages of interest deeper 
within the results. The overview conditions received significantly 
higher subjective ratings. The second study compared an overview based 
on automated clustering vs. the government hierarchy overview (N=12), 
and the results suggest that domain knowledge and task influenced the 
preferred overview. The studies lend support to the use of compact 
overviews based on meaningful and stable categories tightly coupled 
with ranked result lists."
http://hcil.cs.umd.edu/trs/2005-31/2005-31.htm

Usability Studies 101: Making Cookies
By Joseph Carrabis.
"The NextStage CRO explains how to develop visitor-specific navigation 
for your site so that your customers come back and convert. "
http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/7675.asp

+07: PHP.

Better Web Usability Through a Text-Size Switcher Built with PHP and CSS
By Mellonfire.
"This tutorial will show you how to add such a text size switcher to 
your Web pages using PHP and CSS, thereby immediately making your Web 
site more accessible and scoring you useful brownie points from 
everyone over the age of 50."
http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-6002439.html

+08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

Failed Redesigns
By Joe Clark.
"...A failed redesign is a Web page created from scratch, or 
substantially updated, during the era of Web standards that nonetheless 
ignores or misuses those standards. A failed redesign pretends that 
valid code and accessibility guidelines do not exist; it pretends that 
the 21st century is frozen in the amber of the year 1999. It indicates 
not merely unprofessional Web-development practices but outright 
incompetence. For if you are producing tag-soup code and using tables 
for layout in the 21st century, that’s what you are: Incompetent..."
http://blog.fawny.org/2006/01/04/failed/

Professional vs. Unprofessional Web Development Practices
By Virginia DeBolt.
"...The question becomes, for me, Are we teaching people to know 
better? If your students leave your classroom thinking tables-based 
layouts and tag soup are the way to do things, then have you failed as 
a teacher? Have you turned people loose in the workplace who are less 
than professional? I think the answer is yes..."
http://www.webteacher.ws/2006/01/professional-vs.html

+09: TOOLS.

LinkScan/QuickCheck
By elsop.
LinkScan is a link checking tool.
http://www.elsop.com/quick/quick.cgi

+10: TYPOGRAPHY.

The Positive Side Effect of Big Text: Less Text
By Justin Reese.
"Like everything, the key is moderation. Too much of anything is a bad 
idea. However, if you're going to err on the side of bigger or smaller, 
I'd take bigger. Now I'm not talking 48 px type everywhere, but 14 px 
vs 10 px with the occasional big headline. Newspaper design has been 
around a lot longer than web design and they're still sticking with big 
huge headlines. And then there's the positive side effect of big text: 
less text. The bigger the text the less you write and nearly every 
corporate website could use less words. Better words are more important 
than less words, of course, but less words would be a great start."
http://tinyurl.com/8c3cw

Why Big is In
By Garrett Dimon.
"...Big isn't just about style, it's about being practical. For so 
long, designers were stuck on creating small pixel perfect designs with 
small fonts and huge quantities of information in a small areas. It was 
busy, overwhelming, and usually difficult to read. Now, there's a 
newfound appreciation for simple, and that's a good thing. Long live 
big."
http://www.garrettdimon.com/archives/why-big-is-in

Big, Beautiful, Dumb
By Paul Scrivens.
"...big is good in portions as it always has been since the beginning 
of design. Thinking that making everything big makes things easier is 
silly just the same as thinking that making everything small saves the 
person the trouble of having to move their eyes across the screen. 
Recognizing a trend and taking portions of it to work in your own 
designs is a great thing. Seeing a trend and applying it to everything 
you do might not be the best of ideas."
http://9rules.com/whitespace/big_beautiful_dumb.php

+11: USABILITY.

Yeah, But Can You Give Me a Reference? 2.0
By Kath Straub, Susan Weinschenk, and John Whalen.
HFI's 2005 annual summary of usability research.
http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/dec05.asp

+12: XML.

Teach Yourself XML in 24 Hours, Part 2
By Michael Morrison.
"This week we continue learning about Xlink. Some of the topics covered 
are addressing with XPointer, linking with XLink, understanding XLink 
attributes and more"
http://www.webreference.com/programming/xml_24/2/

[Section one ends.]

++ SECTION TWO:

+13: 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.

WEB DESIGN UPDATE is available by subscription. For information on how 
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.]