[webdev] Web Design Update: November 22, 2006

Wed Nov 22 06:22:45 CST 2006

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 5, Issue 22, November 22, 2006.

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

++ISSUE 22 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: EVALUATION & TESTING.
05: EVENTS.
06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
07: JAVASCRIPT.
08: NAVIGATION.
09: PHP.
10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
11: TOOLS.
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.

Advisory Committee Faces Major Hurdles with Section 508 Revision
By Wade-Hahn Chan.
"Section 508, a provision of the federal Rehabilitation Act requiring 
the federal agencies make their information technology accessible to 
people with disabilities, is proving to be challenging for the 
standards body that is now revising the standards. The current 
iteration of the section is plagued with interoperability problems, 
language issues and an inability to adapt to emerging technologies, 
according to members of the Section 508 Advisory Committee who spoke on 
a panel at the 2006 Interagency Disability Education Awareness Showcase 
today..."
http://www.fcw.com/article96831-11-15-06-Web&printLayout

Contextual Web Accessibility - Maximizing the Benefit of Accessibility 
Guidelines
By David Sloan et al.
"We argue that while work to optimize the accessibility of the World 
Wide Web through the publication and dissemination of a range of 
guidelines is of great importance, there is also the need for a more 
holistic approach to maximizing the role of the Web in enabling 
disabled people to access information, services and experiences. The 
persistently disappointingly low levels of usability of Web content for 
disabled people indicates that focusing on the adoption of 
accessibility guidelines by content authors, tool developers and policy 
makers is not sufficient for a truly inclusive Web. This approach fails 
to acknowledge the role of the Web as an enabler in a broader context 
and may stifle creative use of Web content and experiences to enhance 
social inclusion."
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/w4a-2006/

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Inline Elements and Padding
By Russ Weakley.
"Have you ever tried to add padding to <li> elements that have been set 
to 'display: inline'? Did you find that the padding seemed to be 
rendering in an unusual way? Inline elements and padding explains why 
this occurs and one method that can be used to overcome the problem."
http://maxdesign.com.au/presentation/inline/

CSS Line-Height and Valid Values
By Tiffany B. Brown.
"A look at a CSS line-height 'gotcha'"
http://tiffanybbrown.com/2006/11/20/css-line-height-and-valid-values/

CSS Styling for Print and Other Media
By Ian Lloyd.
"If you've been wanting to harness the full power of CSS for the 
presentation of printed pages, but could only find superficial 
treatments of the topic, we've got just the article for you. Pro  CSS 
Techniques will be arriving in bookstores soon, but we've got a sneak 
peek at Ian's comprehensive chapter on styling for print and other 
media as this week's feature."
http://tinyurl.com/ybaw5d

CSS Image Shadow
By Natalie Jost.
"This is a simple CSS shadow for images (no background image), but it's 
not something you'll want to use with all images. This method doesn't 
work with varying sizes, so you'll only use it if you're working with 
images which are the same size all the time, like thumbnails for 
instance."
http://www.standardsforlife.com/css-image-shadow

A CSS Drop Shadow
By Stu Nicholls.
"Just an example of a drop shadow applied to a div without using 
graphics..."
http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menu/shadow.html

Simple Fluid Drop Shadows
By Stu Nicholls.
http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menu/shadow2.html

Multi-Position Shadow Boxing
By Stu Nicholls.
http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menu/shadow_boxing.html

+03: DREAMWEAVER.

Dreamweaver 8 for Windows Loses FTP Login Settings
By Adobe.
Some Windows users are reporting that their FTP usernames and passwords 
in their Dreamweaver site definitions are deleted when they close and 
re-open Dreamweaver 8 or when they reboot their machine. This issue 
does not occur in earlier versions of Dreamweaver."
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=3491671c

+04: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Process Research Via Focus Groups
By DeeDee DeMulling.
"I don't recommend using focus groups to gather your user research, but 
I do recommend using them to provide clarification and expansion of the 
data you have gathered during site visits. After conducting a site 
visit study at a handful of sites in your target population, hosting a 
focus group will help you to validate what you observed and be able to 
define patterns of behavior across the wider audience..."
http://tinyurl.com/y7zpqr

Bring Your Personas to Life!
By Zef Fugaz.
"Method acting can take your personas from the page to the stage. Think 
beyond traditional practice to give emotional life to your personas."
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/bring_your_pers

+05: EVENTS.

Webstock Mini
December 6, 2006.
Wellington, New Zealand
http://webstock.org.nz/

An Event Apart Boston
March 26 -27, 2007.
Boston, Massachusetts U.S.A.
http://www.aneventapart.com/news/2006/11/an_event_apart_2007.php

+06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

Visio Replacement? You Be the Judge
An Introduction to the Newest Simulation Tools
By Scott McDowell.
"In the same way that the Internet took us to the next level of 
interaction, complete with rich visuals, simulations are doing the same 
for application definition. McDowell explores the ins and outs of new 
simulation tools. Will one of them work for you?"
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/visio_replaceme

Thoughts on the Impending Death of Information Architecture
By Joshua Porter.
"IA as it has lived will soon die. Not because it wasn't valuable, not 
because IA's didn't do great work, but because the Web is moving on. 
The problem is that IA models information, not relationships."
http://tinyurl.com/yjofsh

+07: JAVASCRIPT.

PPK on JavaScript: The DOM - Part 3
By Peter-Paul Koch.
"This week we look at text nodes, node lists, forms and the level 0 
DOM, DOM hyperspace and markers. The W3C DOM defines a few methods for 
getting and changing texts, but the core string methods and properties 
are more useful and versatile."
http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/ppk3/index.html

Too Much Accessibility - Multiple JavaScript Event Handlers
By Bim Egan.
"...Ensuring that users can make JavaScript events work, regardless of 
the way that they access your web page is vital. Users should be able 
to activate JavaScript events whether they use a mouse, keyboard, 
pointing  / switch device or any other means of navigation. However, if 
two or more event handlers, designed to perform the same task are used, 
the effect can be the opposite of the one you intended..."
http://tinyurl.com/ycadt7

+08: NAVIGATION.

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Partner on Open Source Search Protocol
By Juan Carlos Perez.
"In a rare collaborative effort, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, which 
compete directly in Internet search and other online services, plan to 
announce on Thursday their support for the open source, Sitemap 
Protocol based on XML (Extensible Markup Language)."
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/11/15/HNsitemaps_1.html

Sitemaps.org
"Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about 
pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest 
form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with 
additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often 
it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in 
the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site. 
Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from 
other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that 
support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about 
those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol 
does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but 
provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your 
site."
http://www.sitemaps.org/

Revenge of the meta-tag!
By Brian Turner
"Many people in SEO groan at the thought of meta-tags. After all, 
meta-tags for ranking is dead for SEO, isn't it? Not quite..."
http://www.seomoz.org/blogdetail.php?ID=1540

+09: PHP.

PHP Convert RGB from/to HTML Hex Color
By AnyExample.com.	
"This article provides two functions for converting HTML color (like 
#AAED43) to three RGB values ($r = 170, $g = 237, $b = 67) and 
converting RGB values to HTML color."
http://tinyurl.com/yg95ct

+10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

May The Source be with You
By Andy Rutledge.
"A long time ago in a vir.tu.al domain far, far away...The war between 
the Standardista Rebels and The Legacy Empire wages on. The Empirecs 
armies and spies, led by the evil Kludge lord Darth Gates, have driven 
the Standardistas far across MySpace."
http://www.andyrutledge.com/web-wars.php

+11: TOOLS.

Basic Accessibility Analyzer
By Peter Krantz.
"This is the basic accessibility checking service (BACC). BACC uses the 
Ruby Accessibility Analysis Kit (RAAKT) to check for basic 
accessibility issues in HTML documents. Currently it is mainly used for 
testing of RAAKT. If you find errors, please report bugs at the RAAKT 
project page. Learn more about the accessibility evaluation carried 
out."
http://peterkrantz.com/bacc/

Truwex: Website Validation Tool
By Vladimir Popov.
"An online tool to check web accessibility, privacy, quality, 
performance. It checks a single page and shows results on a web page 
screenshot and in the HTML code."
http://checkwebsite.erigami.com/accessibility.html

Office 2000 HTML Filter 2.0
By Microsoft.
"The Office HTML Filter is a tool you can use to remove Office-specific 
markup tags embedded in Office 2000 documents saved as HTML..."
http://tinyurl.com/3okuf

+12: USABILITY.

Digital Divide: The Three Stages
By Jakob Nielsen.
"The economic divide is a non-issue, but the usability and empowerment 
divides alienate huge population groups who miss out on the Internet's 
potential."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/digital-divide.html

Improving User Workflows with Single-Page User Interfaces
By Joost Willemsen.
"...Perhaps the most important challenge for designers of single-page 
Web applications is the tradeoff between flexibility and usability. As 
an application's flexibility increases, its usability decreases. The 
reason for this is its signal-to-noise ratio-that is, the ratio of 
relevant to irrelevant information on a page. If this ratio is high, an 
application is more usable. However, a Web application that is very 
flexible may offer too many possibilities and thus raise the level of 
noise in the ratio (5). So the challenge is to keep an application page 
as simple as possible. Packing a page with loads of cool controls is 
technically possible, but it's not a good idea. Show only what is 
relevant to the task at hand and offer other functionality as needed."
http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000149.php

+13: XML.

The XML Decade
By Uche Ogbuji.
"IBM Systems Journal recently published an issue dedicated to XML's 
10th anniversary. It is primarily a collection of interesting papers 
for XML application techniques, but some of its articles offer general 
discussion of the technical, economic and even cultural effects of XML. 
There is a lot in these papers to draw from in thinking about why XML 
has been successful, and what it would take for XML to continue its 
success. This article expands on some of these topics that are 
especially relevant to readers of this column."
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-think38.html

[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.

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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.]