[webdev] Web Design Update: November 16, 2006

Thu Nov 16 06:32:40 CST 2006

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 5, Issue 21, November 16, 2006.

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

++ISSUE 21 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: EVALUATION & TESTING.
04: EVENTS.
05: JAVASCRIPT.
06: MISCELLANEOUS.
07: NAVIGATION.
08: PHP.
09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
10: TOOLS.
11: TYPOGRAPHY.
12: USABILITY.

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

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Holistic Approaches to E-learning Accessibility
By Lawrie Phipps and Brian Kelly.
"...While it is important to consider the technical and resource 
related aspects of e-learning when designing and developing resources 
for students with disabilities, there is a need to consider pedagogic 
and contextual issues as well. A holistic framework is therefore 
proposed and described, which in addition to accessibility issues takes 
into account learner needs, learning outcomes, local factors, 
infrastructure, usability and quality assurance. The practical 
application and implementation of this framework is discussed and 
illustrated through the use of examples and case studies."
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/alt-j-2006/html/

Designing for Dyslexics: Part 3 of 3
By Mel Pedley.
"In Parts 1 and 2 of this series of articles I've been looking at the 
issues created by dyslexia and discussed, in detail, how colour 
contrast can adversely affect page readability. However, there is far 
more to designing dyslexia-friendly pages than just reducing colour 
contrast. On the plus side, it is likely that these changes will have a 
positive effect on page readability for all users."
http://accessites.org/gbcms_xml/news_page.php?id=28#n28

IBM Home Page Reader is Dead, Now what?
By Sandra Clark.
"...With the discontinuation of Home Page Reader, the developer has 
some options, but they aren't great. The most viable option seems to be 
that both Jaws and Window Eyes offer demo versions of their software 
for testing purposes. The bad news is that they are time sensitive (40 
minutes for Jaws and 30 minutes for Window Eyes) and require a complete 
reboot. A more palatable way of dealing with this seems to be to 
install these programs within a Virtual Machine, thereby giving 
yourself an option of rebooting the virtual machine instead of your 
entire computer. I've spent some time doing this in the last weekend 
and while it wasn't an easy install, it is a solution, since a Virtual 
Machine will use your sound system..."
http://www.shayna.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.display_entry&id=156

Headings and Lists - Are You Using Them Correctly?
By Alastair Campbell.
"The main problem is that headings, paragraphs, lists, quotes, and so 
on are often marked up with inappropriate tags which are then simply 
styled with CSS to look like headings, paragraphs, quotes, lists and so 
on. I chose to write about lists and headings because they are easy to 
implement, provide quick accessibility fixes and yet seem to be 
something that many sites find difficult to address."
http://tinyurl.com/y84bf9

Video with Closed Captions and Audio Description
By The University of Texas at Austin.
"...Audio description provides essential information about events on 
screen for the benefit of people who can't see the screen...Captions 
provide a text transcript of speech and other sounds..."
http://tinyurl.com/y273el

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Super-Easy Blendy Backgrounds
By Matthew O'Neill.
"Gradients: a nutritious part of your Web 2.0 breakfast. Wouldn't it be 
swell if you could get all that goodness without opening Photoshop 
every time you needed a little gradient bliss? Matthew O'Neill explains 
how you can."
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/supereasyblendys

CSS-Based Forms: Modern Solutions
By Vitaly Friedman and Sven Lennartz.
"In Web 2.0 registration and feedback forms can be found everywhere. 
Every start-up tries to attract visitors' attention, so web-forms are 
becoming more and more important for the success of epy company. In the 
end, exactly those web-forms are responsible for the first contact with 
potential customers. Let's take a look, which modern solutions a 
web-developer can use, designing his/her next css-based form..."
http://tinyurl.com/y7rnth

Simple Star Rating [4]
By Natalie Jost.
"So I've been wanting to make an easy 'star rating' for use with my 
reviews I do occasionally, but I haven't found a simple explanation for 
how to do it. Most other tutorials go on and on about all kinds of 
things that are irrelevant to what I'm trying to do. I think it's 
because they're dealing with a user-controlled rating in which the 
viewer actually does the rating. I just wanted something I could do 
myself to simply say '4 stars' and see four little stars appear on my 
blog..."
http://www.standardsforlife.com/simple-star-rating

Style Me Challenge Winners
By Virginia DeBolt.
"I'm pleased to announce the four winning competitors in the Style Me 
Challenge..."
http://www.webteacher.ws/2006/11/style-me-challenge-winners.html

IE 7 Supports More CSS Selectors, Whip-e-dee-doo-da
By Cody Lindley.
"...Here are the CSS selectors we have to use until IE 5.5 and IE 6 are 
considered to be non-modern/A-grade browsers...IE 7 has added support 
for the following selectors. Again however, these selectors based on 
the specifications have varying browser support/quirks."
http://tinyurl.com/y7gclf

+03: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Sample Sizes for Usability Tests: Mostly Math, Not Magic
By Jim Lewis.
"...We know a lot more about how to estimate required sample sizes for 
usability problem-discovery tests than we did 25 years ago, but I don't 
believe that this knowledge is very prevalent throughout the usability 
testing community, nor is it widely taught to graduate students. I hope 
that recent publications...will change the current situation..."
http://tinyurl.com/y5or2l

Subjectivity and Objectivity in Practice
By Steve Baty.
"There has been an interesting dialogue on the IxD Discussion mailing 
list in recent months, in which some participants have questioned the 
need for and benefits of doing user research rather than relying on the 
experience and intuition of designers. These comments led others to 
voice concerns about the actual quality of the user research companies 
are undertaking and the validity of any conclusions they have drawn 
from the resulting data."
http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000137.php

+04: EVENTS.

LIFT 2007
February 7-9, 2007.
Geneva, Switzerland
http://www.liftconference.com/2007/index.php

16th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2007)
May 8-12, 2007.
Banff, Canada
http://www.www2007.org/

Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web: Hindrance or Opportunity?
May 7-8, 2007.
Banff, Canada
http://www.w4a.info

+05: JAVASCRIPT.

PPK on JavaScript: The DOM - Part 2
By Peter-Paul Koch.
"The W3C DOM allows you to create your own elements and text nodes, and 
add them to the document tree. This week we look at creating and 
cloning elements, innerHTML, and attributes."
http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/ppk2/index.html

JavaScript Object Notation: An alternative approach to data interchange
By Tony Patton.
"JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is a very simple way to describe and 
transport text based on JavaScript's object notation. Find out why Tony 
Patton says JSON is a viable alternative to XML."
http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-6133290.html

Slower Website == Slower Profits
Dare Obasanjo.
"One big problem with the AJAX craze that has hit the Web is how much 
slower websites have become now that using Flash and DHTML to add 
"richness" to Web applications is becoming more commonplace. My mind 
now boggles at the fact that I now see loading pages that last several 
seconds when visiting Web sites more and more these days."
http://tinyurl.com/tdvng

JavaScript, We Hardly new Ya
By Douglas Crockford.
"...the rule is simple: The only time we should use the new operator is 
to invoke a pseudoclassical Constructor function. When calling a 
Constructor function, the use of new is mandatory. There is a time to 
new, and a time to not."
http://yuiblog.com/blog/2006/11/13/javascript-we-hardly-new-ya/

+06: MISCELLANEOUS.

Interview with Jeff Veen
By Vitamin.
"In this interview, conducted at the Future of Web Apps Summit, Sarah 
Drew talks to design and UI expert Jeff Veen, Design Lead at Google."
http://www.thinkvitamin.com/interviews/webapps/jeff-veen/

In Defense of Difficult Clients
By Rob Swan.
"...It's only by being forced to question our beliefs that we can be 
certain they're right. The web is an ever-changing medium, we need to 
be prepared to accept that there's a possibility that some of our 
practices are no longer best. Or that?and it happens?they may never 
have been best in the first place, but no one thought to question them 
with enough force when they were first mentioned..."
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/difficultclients

Bring Me Problems, Not Solutions
By Jeff Croft.
"A topic of conversation here at jeffcroft.com in recent weeks has been 
the need to educate the consumers of our services ? the clients ? on 
exactly what it is we do..."
http://www2.jeffcroft.com/2006/nov/13/bring-me-problems-not-solutions/

+07: NAVIGATION.

Is Left-Hand Navigation Evil?
By James Robertson.
"...The issue is not with the design of the left-hand navigation, but 
how it's used. In particular, how it ends up being used in a 
decentralized authoring environment for a large and organically-growing 
intranet..."
http://www.steptwo.com.au/columntwo/archives/002264.html

+08: PHP.

Ten PHP Frameworks Compared
By PHPHacks.
"New frameworks are being released almost every other day in the PHP 
community. With over 40 frameworks available it's difficult to decide 
which framework works best for you, especially as each framework offers 
different functionality. In this article we will look at ten popular 
frameworks, and compare them to each other."
http://www.phphacks.com/content/view/53/33/

+09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

Joe Dizon on Starting Your Web Standards Journey
By Andrew Faulkner.
"Joe Dizon, 25, is a talented young designer based in the UK. His 
background is in print but would like to chat about his recent 
involvement in web design and particularly web standards. Joe's hoping 
to persuade other up-and-coming print designers to embrace web 
standards when they start out on their web journey..."
http://tinyurl.com/ymzamv

+10: TOOLS.

SEO Analysis Tool
By seoworkers.com.
"This SEO Analysis tool is to help you analyze and measure the ranking 
potential of your web pages. It doesn't only analyze the Meta Tags of 
your pages, rather it tries to use the same spider technology as the 
search engines spiders them self."
http://www.seoworkers.com/tool/analyzer.html

Table Integrity Checker
By Henri Sivonen.
"I am working on a conformance checking service for (X)HTML5. The 
service is grammar-based for the most part with RELAX NG as the schema 
language. Some extra-grammatical constraints are expressed as 
Schematron assertions. Currently, as a Mozilla Foundation grantee, I am 
working on writing checkers (in Java) for spec features that cannot 
(practically or at all) be checked using RELAX NG or Schematron."
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/table-integrity-checker/

.mobi Mobile Emulator
"...check how your site looks to a typical mobile phone user."
http://emulator.mtld.mobi/emulator.php

+11: TYPOGRAPHY.

Great Fonts for Web 2.0
By Stuart Brown.
"A selection of typefaces for the modern web era..."
http://www.modernlifeisrubbish.co.uk/article/great-fonts-for-web-2.0

+12: USABILITY.

Initial Focus to a Text Field - Good or Bad?
By Robert Nyman.
"...should we set initial focus to the first element in the form when 
the page has loaded? Heated debates follow, where people argue very 
convincingly for their view on it..."
http://tinyurl.com/y32wuc

Discovering Web App Structure
By Jared M. Spool.
"Recently, UIE's Jared Spool managed to get a little of Hagan River's 
time to discuss her newly published report called "The Designers Guide 
to Web Applications Part One Structure and Flows". Below is an excerpt 
of their discussion. To keep true to the original discussion, we've 
only made minor edits..."
http://www.uie.com/articles/rivers_interview/

People and Processes Should be Important than Technology
By Robert Jaques.
"A poll of more than 4,000 information security professionals in more 
than 100 countries, carried out by IDC on behalf of the International 
Information Systems Security Certification Consortium (ISC)2, found 
that organizations have traditionally overlooked the role of human 
behavior in favor of trusting hardware and software to solve security 
problems."
http://tinyurl.com/yxrd9u

How Web Influenced US Elections
By Gerry McGovern.
"...Everybody who writes emails and blogs, or who leaves voicemails, 
needs to think a lot more about what they are writing and saying. The 
Web  gives the impression of this informal, casual place, but that's a 
mirage. It's like a court of record, where everything you  write can be 
used for you-or against you-at some future point. Most individuals and 
organizations have simply not come to terms with the content revolution 
that has swept through our world over the last twenty years...There is 
so much pressure today to be reactive and impulsive. Barraged by 
emails, it's so easy to just stop thinking and just get as busy as 
possible. Busy is the new addiction, the new false hope, the place 
where people go who can't cope. Think. Think. Think. In the age of the 
content record, you can't afford not to think deeply about the content 
you create, and the situations where you will be recorded."
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2006/nt-2006-11-13-elections.htm

[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.

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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.]