[webdev] Web Design Update: April 13, 2006

Thu Apr 13 06:31:56 CDT 2006

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 4, Issue 43, April 13, 2006.

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

++ISSUE 43 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: JAVASCRIPT.
05: NAVIGATION.
06: PHP.
06: TOOLS.
08: TYPOGRAPHY.
09: USABILITY.

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

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Accessibility Tips for Website Construction
By Patrick Kennedy.
"We all know accessibility is important, but precisely how does one 
make a website or intranet more accessible? Often what is needed is a 
pragmatic view, based on real experience, to reveal what is really 
important and what should be tackled first."
http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_accessibilitytips/index.html

Alt Text is an Alternative, Not a Tooltip
By Roger Johansson.
"It seems like there is a bit of confusion among many web developers 
and browser vendors surrounding the use of the alt attribute (yes, It's 
alt attribute, not alt tag) to provide alternative text for images and 
other non-textual elements..."
http://tinyurl.com/s7cxd

Active Discrimination Policy
By Gez  Lemon.
"Attitudes..."
http://juicystudio.com/article/active-discrimination-policy.php

Paul Boag Podcast on Accessibility Guidelines
By Patrick H. Lauke.
"In this weeks show we get 'down and dirty' with web accessibility, 
including a step-by-step tutorial into the WAI guidelines."
http://accessify.com/2006/04/paul-boag-podcast-on-accessibility.php

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Using Firefox to Wage a Class War
By Virginia DeBolt.
"It turns out that family relationships between ancestors and 
descendants are as important in CSS as they are in real life. 
Understanding the power to select descendant elements to minimize both 
your CSS and your HTML pays off in lighter document weight, less 
bandwidth required to serve up pages, faster downloading, and improved 
accessibility. Using the Firefox add-on Web Developer Toolbar to 
examine pages can help show you the way to achieve these goals."
http://www.webteacher.ws/classwar.html

CSS - Auto-height and margin-collapsing
By Minz Meyer.
"...If you are working with CSS on a regular basis, you might have come 
across this behaviour. As did I. And if you are like me, you might have 
found a solution that works around it. But I have to admit that I never 
really understood what was happening..."
http://tinyurl.com/8u8jr

Filtering CSS
By Minz Meyer.
"...I really do not like using CSS hacks, but sometimes you just can't 
avoid them, at least not if you code for IE. But the above mentioned 
method is sufficient to me, allows handling of the different hacks in 
different files, doesn't litter your main stylesheets and is completely 
valid."
http://www.researchkitchen.de/blog/archives/filtering-css.php

Accessibility Navbar
By Blair Millen.
...It's a must-have item for any self-respecting accessible website... 
um; well... really, it's a just bunch of links; but what a BRILLIANT 
bunch of links they are! The Accessibility Navbar sits at the top of 
the document (immediately after the <body> tag) thus giving prominent 
access to the important options a first time visitor may need. This 
article shows how to create and implement the Accessibility Navbar into 
your website, including how to: 1) Create the HTML for your 
Accessibility Navbar, 2) Implement a style sheet switcher, 3) Detect a 
mobile device and send an appropriate style sheet, 4) Create a low 
vision style sheet, 5) Consider other options you have in making your 
site accessible."
http://theletter.co.uk/index?id=1918

Handheld Stylesheets
By Russell Beattie.
"...the coolest part is every single page has an associated handheld 
media-type stylesheet associated with it to make browsing via mobiles 
that support it (i.e. Opera mobile) faster, easier, more pleasing and 
generally more efficient...I used Opera's web browser to take the 
screen shots because you can hit shift-f11 and get into "small screen 
rendering" mode, and browse around like you were using a mobile, which 
is good to test things out. But I normally use FireFox as my main 
browser which doesn't have this functionality built in. But the cool 
thing is that my favorite FireFox plugin, the Web Developer Extension, 
has included a small screen view in its menu, so you can check out how 
your site would look in a mobile browser, and if you have a handheld 
style sheet, it'll pick it up as well. It's not as good as Opera's 
because it does stick between pages, but it makes tweaking the design 
using the CSS editor sidebar really easy."
http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1008914.html

+03: EVENTS.

IceWeb 2006
April 27-28, 2006.
Reykjavik, Iceland
http://www.svef.is/page/iceweb2006_english

Building Beautiful Websites with CSS (with Dave Shea)
May 11, 2006.
Chicago, Illinois U.S.A.
http://www.carsonworkshops.com/design-dev/shea/11MAY2006.html

Professional CSS XHTML Techniques (with Eric Meyer)
May 12, 2006.
London, United Kingdom
http://www.carsonworkshops.com/design-dev/meyer/12MAY2006.html

Getting Started with Rails (with Geoffrey Grosenbach)
May 25, 2006.
New York, New York U.S.A.
http://www.carsonworkshops.com/dev/rubyonrails/25MAY2006.html

+04: JAVASCRIPT.

Introducing DOM Builder
By Dan Webb.
"It's always seemed a bit wrong and dirty to use innerHTML to 
manipulate or add content to a page..."
http://www.vivabit.com/bollocks/2006/04/06/introducing-dom-builder

Usability by Hand, AJAX and Efficiency
By Thoman Baekal.
"Take drag and drop shopping carts, where you drag product in or out of 
the space reserved for your cart. This sure looks fancy. But, it is 
more than 1000% slower to drag and drop, than to simply click an 'Add 
to Shopping Cart' button. Specifically it takes 0.2 seconds to click on 
any target, and 2.4 seconds to drag and drop."
http://www.baekdal.com/articles/Usability/usability-ajax-efficiency/

Mastering Ajax, Part 1: Introduction to Ajax
By Brett McLaughlin.
"Ajax, which consists of HTML, JavaScriptª technology, DHTML, and DOM, 
is an outstanding approach that helps you transform clunky Web 
interfaces into interactive Ajax applications. The author, an Ajax 
expert, demonstrates how these technologies work together -- from an 
overview to a detailed look -- to make extremely efficient Web 
development an easy reality. He also unveils the central concepts of 
Ajax, including the XMLHttpRequest object."
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-ajaxintro1.html

Mastering Ajax, Part 2: Make asynchronous requests with JavaScript and 
Ajax
By Brett McLaughlin.
"In this article, you'll begin with the most fundamental and basic of 
all Ajax-related objects and programming approaches: The XMLHttpRequest 
object. This object is really the only common thread across all Ajax 
applications and -- as you might expect -- you will want to understand 
it thoroughly to take your programming to the limits of what's 
possible. In fact, you'll find out that sometimes, to use 
XMLHttpRequest properly, you explicitly won't use XMLHttpRequest. What 
in the world is that all about?"
http://tinyurl.com/bao7n

XAJAX
By xajax Wiki.
Xajax is an open source PHP Library for building ajax based 
applications.
http://wiki.xajaxproject.org/Main_Page

Round-up of 30 AJAX Tutorials
By Max Kiesler.
This is a very comprehensive list of Ajax tutorials and resources that 
ranges from beginner to advanced.
http://tinyurl.com/l2s6v

Making AJAX Navigation Optional
By Christian Heilmann.
"I just put up a proof of concept for the AJAX chapter of my book. For 
years I have ranted about DHTML multi level menus simply assuming that 
every user wants to have every page in the sitemap as an item in the 
navigation. My idea was to make the..."
http://www.wait-till-i.com/index.php?p=266

+05: NAVIGATION.

Don't Neglect the title Attribute
By Jon Christopher.
"If it is one thing that I find myself forgetting when initially 
marking up a document, it is to make effective use of the title 
attribute in anchors. I think the title attribute is one of those 
things that gets pushed aside due to the fact that it is seen as 
tedious by some. I also feel that a good number of developers may not 
realize the impact it may have on a variety of things relating to your 
document. Not only will it help with the usability and accessibility of 
your document, but also give your search engine optimization a good 
boost..."
http://www.mondaybynoon.com/2006/04/10/dont-neglect-the-title-attribute/

+06: PHP.

Using AJAX with PHP and mySQL
By Bill Bercik.
" The purpose of this article is to demonstrate through a series of 
baby steps just how easy it is to use the XMLHttpRequest object. In 
order to complete this tutorial you should have some basic PHP, MySQL 
and JavaScript experience.  That said, the PHP programming in these 
examples is so basic that if you do not  have PHP experience, it may 
still be possible for you to look at the PHP code and apply the 
functionality to your weapon of choice, be it PERL, ASP, or JSP."
http://www.webpasties.com/xmlHttpRequest/

Handling Dates and Times in PHP and MySQL
By Dennis Pallett.
Handling dates and times in PHP and MySQL can be a tricky task at 
times, and that's why in this article Dennis Pallett discusses the 
date/time problem, and gives a solid solution.
http://www.phpit.net/article/handling-date-time-php-mysql/

Digg PHP's Scalability and Performance
By Brian Fioca.
"Several weeks ago there was a notable bit of controversy over some 
comments made by James Gosling, father of the Java programming 
language. He has since addressed the flame war that erupted, but the 
whole ordeal got me thinking seriously about PHP and its scalability 
and performance abilities compared to Java. I knew that several hugely 
popular Web 2.0 applications were written in scripting languages like 
PHP, so I contacted Owen Byrne - Senior Software Engineer at digg.com 
to learn how he addressed any problems they encountered during their 
meteoric growth. This article addresses the all-to-common false 
assumptions about the cost of scalability and performance in PHP 
applications."
http://tinyurl.com/h3ykj

+07: TOOLS.

Inline Javascript Console
By Oliver Steele.
A lightweight Javascript debugging tool with a clean and simple UI. If 
you just need to pop in an expression here and there before adding it 
to your project, it's a handy tool.
http://osteele.com/archives/2006/03/inline-console

+08: TYPOGRAPHY.

Time to Change Your Fonts
By Rachel McAlpine.
"...commonsense dictates that there are only three fonts worth 
considering for routine business documents. Why? Because the big three 
are easy to read on a screen."
http://www.webpagecontent.com/arc_archive/182/5/

+09: USABILITY.

The Paper Of Record Goes Long
By Jared Spool.
"The New York Times has redesigned their home page...Apparently, the 
designers at NYTimes.com, WSJ.com, and CNN.com have discovered what 
we've known for years: Users are quite willing to scroll!"
http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2006/04/12/the-paper-of-record-goes-long/

This Boring Headline Is Written for Google
By Steve Lohr.
"JOURNALISTS over the years have assumed they were writing their 
headlines and articles for two audiences - fickle readers and 
nitpicking editors. Today, there is a third important arbiter of their 
work: the software programs that scour the Web, analyzing and ranking 
online news articles on behalf of Internet search engines like Google, 
Yahoo and MSN."
http://tinyurl.com/fx3bv

Your Website is for Your Most Important Customers
By Gerry McGovern.
"Most websites suffer from over-ambition. They try to do too much with 
few resources. They think they can answer every question."
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2006/nt-2006-04-09-customers.htm

Thumbnail: Jakob Nielsen
By Clifford Anderson.
"A final concern is that 'websites still don't write for the web. Very 
few people worry about the actual information they put up. When we run 
studies, we find that's what users really care about. More than ten 
years of finding the same in every study, and you still have that 
brochure thinking."
http://tinyurl.com/mqjxp

[Section one ends.]

++ SECTION TWO:

+10: 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.]