[webdev] Web Design Update: February 5, 2006
Laura Carlson
lcarlson at d.umn.edu
Sun Feb 5 08:16:40 CST 2006
+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 4, Issue 33, February 5, 2006.
An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design
and development.
++ISSUE 33 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: DREAMWEAVER.
04: EVENTS.
05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
06: JAVASCRIPT.
07: NAVIGATION.
08: PHP.
09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
10: TOOLS.
11: TYPOGRAPHY.
12: USABILITY.
13: XML.
SECTION TWO:
14: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site?
[Contents ends.]
++ SECTION ONE: New references.
+01: ACCESSIBILITY.
Seven Accessibility Mistakes (Part 1)
By Christian Heilmann.
"Designers, clients and site visitors all have a role to play in
achieving higher levels of accessibility across the Web. In a two-part
series, contributing author Christian Heilmann discusses the seven
habits that fail to deliver accessibility and what you can do to create
change. This week Christian brings us habits one, two and three. Be
sure to visit next week for habits four, five, six and seven."
http://www.digital-web.com/articles/seven_accessibility_mistakes_part_1/
Captcha Usability Revisited: Google Inaccessible to Blind People
By Jesper Ronn-Jensen.
"An online petition is being circulated to all Internet users for the
purpose of collecting signatures showing support for Google to make its
word verification scheme accessible to the blind and visually
impaired..."
http://tinyurl.com/a26oh
WCAG 2: The Difference Between a Level and a Priority
By Gez Lemon.
"The draft version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
uses success criteria that is organized into three levels of
conformance. The method of grouping the success criteria differs in
important ways from the approach taken in WCAG 1.0 where priorities are
assigned to checkpoints, but I'm buggered if I understand the
importance of the new approach. It seems to me that swapping the word
'priority' with the word 'level' is meant to imply that level 3 success
criteria should be considered important, whereas priority 3 checkpoints
shouldn't."
http://tinyurl.com/a9s57
Accessites.org
"Here at Accessites.org we will prove that accessible, usable websites
built with universality and standards in mind need not be boring. We
will show you stunning works of art crafted by some of today's most
progressive accessible web developers and designers. Join us in
honoring them and the sites they meticulously and lovingly build..."
http://accessites.org/home/
+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.
In Search of the Holy Grail
By Matthew Levine.
"Just in case you might want a three-column layout that doesn't require
the usual sacrifices, we thought we'd share this technique. Not that
you'd want that or anything."
http://alistapart.com/articles/holygrail
Explorer Exposed!
By Holly Bergevin and John Gallant.
"These CSS bugs are all found only in Internet Explorer, versions 5 and
higher..."
http://positioniseverything.net/explorer.html
Cross-Browser Strategies For CSS
By Emil Stenstrom.
"This article will go through some useful techniques I use to get my
sites to look the same in several modern browsers..."
http://friendlybit.com/css/cross-browser-strategies-for-css/
Cross Browser Issues: CSS Hacks Explained, Tips, Tricks and Fixes
By Jennifer Sullivan Cassidy.
"Anyone who creates Cascading Style Sheets knows that Internet Explorer
is a headache of a browser to build for because of the way it handles
CSS. In this article, Jennifer goes into detail about how to deal with
some of the most common bugs, and notes which ones may be fixed in IE
7..."
http://tinyurl.com/7fo2b
CSS Standards Compliance in Internet Explorer 7
By Jennifer Sullivan Cassidy.
"There has been much anticipation and intense hype surrounding the
release of Internet Explorer 7. Improvements range from better security
issues to customization of user features; but the excitement in some
web developers has been prompted by the compliancy standards of CSS
that IE 7 embraces."
http://tinyurl.com/dsj7o
SkimCSS
By John Wiseman.
"SkimCSS is web service that provides visitors with a huge collection
of content all related to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)."
http://www.skimcss.com/skimlist
+03: DREAMWEAVER.
Dreamweaver 8 Reviewed
By John Wilker.
"When I got my review copy of Studio 8, immediately I saved it from
that suffocating shrink wrap it came in. The box sure looked nice. The
packaging was first rate, much cleaner and more impressive than the MX
2004 packaging. I tossed the box on the couch, grabbed my trusty laptop
and set about checking this latest and greatest offering from
Macromedia..."
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/dreamweaver-8-review
Using the Default Documents to Speed Up Your Work Flow
By Adrian Senior.
"Have you wished for ways to speed up your workflow? Do you want more
ideas for removing repetitive coding tasks? In this article we will
look at using the Edit Document Templates extension (by Danilo Celic)
to customize the New Document Templates. Talk about a Dreamweaver
time-saver!"
http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=6B38F
+04: EVENTS.
Higher Ed BlogCon 2006:
Transforming Academic Communities with New Tools of the Social Web
April 3-28, 2006.
An all-online event
http://higheredblogcon.editme.com/
Adaptive Hypermedia 2006 (AH06)
June 21-23, 2006.
Dublin Ireland
http://www.ah2006.org/index.html
+05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
Taking a Content Inventory
By Donna Maurer.
"You take a content inventory because, before redesigning a website or
intranet, you need to know what you have."
http://www.maadmob.net/donna/blog/archives/000669.html
+06: JAVASCRIPT.
Getting Funky With Scopes and Closures
By Mark Wubben.
"The most powerful thing about the JavaScript programming language are
it's scoping rules. In programming languages, scope is what makes the
world go round. It defines the context in which the code executes. The
context contains objects which are available to the code. To draw a
real-world analogy: Say you're in your living room, and you want to
watch some television. You can, because the television is in your
living room. But what if you're in the kitchen?"
http://novemberborn.net/javascript/scopes-and-closures-funk
CSS Bubble Tooltips
By Alessandro Fulciniti.
Bubble Tooltips is some more CSS magic from Alessandro Fulciniti that
creates some very nice Javascript and CSS based tooltips. As with
other scripts from Alessandro, this one uses unobtrusive Javascript and
degrades perfectly!
http://web-graphics.com/mtarchive/001717.php
+07: NAVIGATION.
Best 2005: Navigation
By Martin Hardee.
"Don't tell your neighborhood librarian, but sometimes there just isn't
a single perfect way to organize things..."
http://tinyurl.com/c2pln
Site Maps for Web Applications
By Drew McLellan.
"Site maps generally fall into two different categories:- those that
document the navigational structure of the site, and those that
describe interaction flow. As the days of enormous, static sites
vignette to make way for sites driven by logic not links, we naturally
see a shift in emphasis from navigational maps to those which document
interaction. The question worth exploring, however, is can this form of
documentation continue to prove both useful and a valuable investment
of resources?"
http://allinthehead.com/retro/279/site-maps-for-web-applications
The Lazy IA's Guide to Making Sitemaps
By Stephen Turbek.
"Sitemaps can be useful tools and are a whole lot easier when you
separate the data from the visualization. After you have done these
steps a few times, you will be able to update a sitemap in under a
minute."
http://tinyurl.com/75mqv
Why Good Website Navigation Is Important?
By Warren Baker.
"Web surfers are basically an impatient bunch and if a website is hard
to figure out because the links are not obvious, they will click away
never to return. Website navigation is one of the most crucial elements
in determining the effectiveness of a website. This article discuses
the basic principle of designing website navigation."
http://tinyurl.com/attwn
+08: PHP.
PHP for the Novice Programmer
By Albert Dieter Ritzhaupt.
"This e-book was developed to serve as an instructional resource for
students in my Introduction to the Internet course that I teach for the
University of North Florida and to serve the aspiring Information
Technology (IT) student as a resource to learn about and how to use
PHP. My hope is that this resource will be invaluable to the IT
community, and help learning what I consider to be one of the best
server-side scripting languages."
http://www.unf.edu/~rita0001/eresources/php_tutorials/
Improve Your Build Process with Ant
By Michael Kimsal.
"Web applications today are much more complex beasts than they were
even just a few years ago. The largest sites may constitute thousands
of files with complex directory structures, and migrating those between
development, staging, and production environments can be difficult to
say the least. My own experience with web applications dates back to
1996. While I've seen a lot of changes over the years, keeping a large
project in check never seems to get much easier, despite advances in
CPU speed, RAM prices, broadband, and communication tools..."
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/php/2005/12/20/php_ant.html
Simplify PHP Development with WASP
by Brian Fioca.
"WASP (Web Application Structure for PHP) is a three-tier framework
built on PHP 5. Lately, more software engineers are moving from
cumbersome 'enterprise' languages such as Java and C# to languages such
as Python and Ruby and PHP. With version 5, PHP has finally reached the
point where these developers can feel at home in what used to be
considered a hacker's language. By demonstrating that it is possible to
create and use complicated, "enterprise-class" frameworks effectively
in PHP 5, WASP will help more developers make the switch..."
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/php/2006/01/19/wasp_intro.html
Not All Bugs Are Worth Fixing
By Jeff Atwood.
To me, triage is about one thing: making life better for your users.
And the best way to do that is to base your triage decisions on data
from actual usage -- via exception reporting, user feedback, and beta
testing. Otherwise, triage is just a bunch of developers and testers in
a room, trying to guess what users might do."
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000498.html
+09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
Web Authoring Statistics
By Google.
"...In December 2005 we did an analysis of a sample of slightly over a
billion documents, extracting information about popular class names,
elements, attributes, and related metadata. The results we found are
available below..."
http://code.google.com/webstats/index.html
Inaccessible Google Web Authoring Statistics
By Peter-Paul Koch.
"There's just one slight problem: the actual data is totally
inaccessible. The reason is that Google uses that muppet of Web
formats, SVG, for presenting its data, and that it doesn't give a
text-only alternative."
http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2006/01/inaccessible_go.html
The State of the Web Standards
By Bruce Lawson.
"...if the web standards brigade shake our heads in sorrow, the
Semantic Web gang must be sobbing into their beer and phoning the
Samaritans."
http://tinyurl.com/7w578
Formulas and Confusion
By Michael Andrews.
"Let's arbitrarily divide user centered designs into two types:
formulaic designs, and non-formulaic ones. Formulaic designs are the
stock and trade of web agencies designing for the public -- things like
news sites and online catalogs. They are ubiquitous, and generally all
look and work the same, regardless of whose site it is. Generally
people involved in such projects have a good idea about user needs even
prior to starting: they are folks just like us, after all, and we have
already talked to countless people like them for other similar
projects. When we design for formulaic projects, we already have a good
grasp of the solutions available to us. Designing an online shopping
cart is not rocket science, it has been done countless times, users
have expectations how they operate, and the work is mostly a matter of
polishing the details."
http://michaelandrews.blogspot.com/2006/01/formulas-and-confusion.html
Please Test Your Sites With IE7
By Chris Wilson.
"I'm very excited we've released a public preview of beta 2 that
everyone can download. I'm also very happy that we've opened up a
couple of different avenues to take your feedback."
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/01/31/520883.aspx
Frequently Asked Questions for the IE7 Beta 2 Preview
By Al Billings.
"Hi, I'm Al Billings. I'm a project manager on the Internet Explorer
team. I haven't posted before but you have probably seen comments from
me from time to time on the blog. I'm involved in the regular work with
it. Today, we have been getting a lot of questions in comments on our
blog posts in response to the release of the IE7 Beta 2 Preview. I
wanted to try to wrap most of these up in one post so people don't have
to hunt for answers to common questions."
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/01/31/521344.aspx
Installing and Uninstalling IE 7 Beta 2
By Peter-Paul Koch.
"The release of Explorer 7 beta 2 has raised some questions, especially
about maintaining the various IE versions you may have on your
computer....but you can uninstall the beta quite easily and IE 6 is
restored to you. I suppose I do a few people a favour when I write down
clear installation and uninstallation descriptions and instructions."
http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2006/02/installing_and.html
IE 7 Beta 2 - A First Test Drive
By Robert Nyman.
"Microsoft has now publicly released IE 7 Beta 2 Preview, which you can
download in their IE page. It is only available for Windows XP SP 2 as
of now. Naturally, your favorite blogger (yeah, you know it's true,
just admit it) has taken it out for a short test drive..."
http://www.robertnyman.com/2006/02/01/ie-7-beta-2-a-first-test-drive/
HOWTO Spot a Wannabe Web Standards Advocate
By Henri Sivonen.
"If there is a match, you have spotted a wannabe..."
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/wannabe/
+10: TOOLS.
FireBug - Firefox Extension
By Joe Hewitt.
"FireBug is a new tool that aids with debugging Javascript, DHTML, and
Ajax. It is like a combination of the Javascript Console, DOM
Inspector, and a command line Javascript interpreter."
http://tinyurl.com/db6rz
Colour Check
By etre.
"Our online Colour Check determines the colour difference and contrast
between any two colours to maximize readability."
http://www.etre.com/tools/colourcheck/
+11: TYPOGRAPHY.
Define the Word Space to Suit the Size and Natural Letterfit of the Font
By Richard Rutter.
"If text is set ragged right, the word space (the space between words)
can be fixed and unchanging. If the text is justified (set flush left
and right), the word space must be elastic. In either case the size of
the ideal word space varies from one circumstance to another, depending
on factors such as letterfit, type color, and size. A loosely fitted or
bold face will need a larger interval between the words. At larger
sizes, when letterfit is tightened, the spacing of words can be
tightened as well."
http://webtypography.net/Rhythm_and_Proportion/Horizontal_Motion/2.1.1/
Choose a Comfortable Measure
By Richard Rutter.
"...The measure is the number of characters in single line of a column
of text. HTML doesn't have a concept of columns per se, instead text is
held within boxes. In CSS the width of a box is set using the width
property with any unit of length, for example..."
http://webtypography.net/Rhythm_and_Proportion/Horizontal_Motion/2.1.2/
Kern Consistently and Modestly Or Not All
By Richard Rutter.
"Kerning - altering the space between selected pairs of letters - can
increase consistency of spacing in a word like Washington or Toronto,
where the combinations Wa and To are kerned..."
http://webtypography.net/Rhythm_and_Proportion/Horizontal_Motion/2.1.8/
+12: USABILITY.
Home Page Goals
By Derek Powazek.
"Home pages may get plenty of design attention, but that doesn't mean
they don't need improvement."
http://alistapart.com/articles/homepagegoals
Website Design Considerations for Older People
By Ann Light.
"Older users are an audience group that will grow in size and
importance over the next few years. Our studies indicate that there are
lots of simple things we can do to support their use of the internet."
http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article2911.asp
Usability for Older Web Users
By Tim Fidgeon.
"Elderly users are an audience group that will grow in size and
importance over the next few years. Our studies indicate that there are
lots of simple things we can do to support their use of the internet.
We believe that these recommendations should be taken into account by
all sites, and efforts should be made to further expand our knowledge
of how to design for these users."
http://tinyurl.com/7b3jj
Rules for Labeling Buttons
By Caroline Jarrett.
1. Label the button with what it does. 2. If the user doesn't want to
do it, don't have a button for it.
http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article2949.asp
Are Websites Judged in the Blink of an Eye?
By Gerry McGovern.
"People can get a strong impression of your website within one
twentieth of a second, according to a new study. But it may not be a
lasting impression."
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2006/nt-2006-01-30-blink.htm
To Know Your Customer, Know Their Carewords
By Gerry McGovern.
"If you use the words your customers care most about, your website will
deliver more value. Best practice web management is about knowing your
customers better than they know themselves."
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/mcgovern-carewords.htm
What Matters Most?
By Gerd Waloszek.
"Recently, I had to use an application that reminded me of a very basic
usability question: What matters most? Based on my experiences, I found
the answer quite revealing, especially with respect to the role of
usability efforts in the development process. For this article, let me
put the initial question slightly differently: Which usability problems
annoy me most?"
http://www.sapdesignguild.org/community/editorials/editorial_02_2005.asp
+13: XML.
SVG in Firefox 1.5
By Mozilla Developer Center.
"Firefox 1.5 marks the first official release of a browser from Mozilla
that includes Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) functionality. The road
this project has taken to release has been long, and we're excited to
get it in the hands of content developers to see what they produce."
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/SVG_in_Firefox_1.5
SVG In HTML Introduction
By Mozilla Developer Center.
"This article and its associated example shows how to use inline SVG to
provide a background picture for a form. It shows how JavaScript and
CSS can be used to manipulate the picture in the same way you would
script regular XHTML. Note that the example will only work in browsers
that support XHTML (not HTML) and SVG integration."
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/SVG_In_HTML_Introduction
[Section one ends.]
++ SECTION TWO:
+14: 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.]
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