[webdev] Web Design Update: December 1, 2006

Fri Dec 1 06:29:01 CST 2006

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 5, Issue 24, December 1, 2006.

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

++ISSUE 24 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: FLASH.
05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
06: MISCELLANEOUS.
07: NAVIGATION.
08: PHP.
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.

SMIL - Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language
By John Foliot.
An S5 presentation on SMIL.
http://soap.stanford.edu/presentations/smil/

WCAG 2: The Emperor Defends His New Clothes
By Jack Pickard.
"...Are they prepared to look down and see the document they are 
valiantly trying to force upon us is taking them away from accessible 
websites? Or will they insist on the rest of us wearing The Emperor's 
New Accessibility Guidelines."
http://tinyurl.com/ymaj8c

China Information Accessibility Forum
By Rich Schwerdtfeger.
"...Recent indications are that China is looking to adopt the W3C Web 
Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0..."
http://tinyurl.com/ycb646

Are Social Networking Sites Accessible to People with Vision Loss?
By American Foundation for the Blind.
"...Using JAWS and Window-Eyes-popular assistive technology products 
that provide access to information on a computer screen-AFB evaluated 
these sites to see if a blind computer user, with basic screen reader 
skills, could independently register, create a standard profile, post 
photos, and interact with other group members..."
http://tinyurl.com/uuem8

CAPTCHAs on Social Networking Sites Shut Out Blind Users
By American Foundation for the Blind.
"AFB is urging MySpace, Friendster and Facebook to offer an audio 
alternative to their CAPTCHAs."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jrgMlufa7w

Accessible and Usable Web Design
By Joshua Kaufman.
"This is the seventh and final installment of my graduate school work: 
my final thesis report, Accessible and Usable Web Design. For a 
background on my graduate work, please read the preface of the first 
installment, the interaction design process."
http://unraveled.com/archives/2006/11/accessible-usable-web-design

Accessible UK Government Website E-Petition
By Ian Fenn.
"In the United Kingdom, Ian Fenn has created an online petition on the 
Prime Minister's website in an attempt to improve the standard of 
accessibility on UK Government websites."
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/govaccessibility/

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Templating Solutions with CSS: Style Organization Designed To Last
By Dave Shea.
"...In this first article, I'll outline some basic long-term CSS 
management strategies that will set the stage for what's to come..."
http://www.informit.com/guides/content.asp?g=webdesign&seqNum=236&rl=1

The Browsers: Build for the Ideal
By Dave Shea.
"This article, which has been divided into two parts due to length, 
will detail a browser management method that accounts for the most 
common browsers out there today: Internet Explorer 5 for Mac; Internet 
Explorer 5.01, 5.5, and 6.0 for Windows; Mozilla Firefox; Safari; and 
Opera..."
http://www.informit.com/guides/content.asp?g=webdesign&seqNum=244&rl=1

Complexity: Layout and Style Variations
By Dave Shea.
"CSS is all about separating the look of the page out from the 
underlying structure and content within the HTML. But why stop 
there?..."
http://www.informit.com/guides/content.asp?g=webdesign&seqNum=258&rl=1

IE Expressions Ignore CSS Media Types
By Roger Johansson.
"...in some cases IE will apply CSS that it shouldn't..."
http://tinyurl.com/yf997v

CSS 3: Cascading Style Sheets
By css3.com.
"A comprehensive CSS tutorial for web developers."
http://css3.com/

CSS Reference
By Nat Dunn.
"Modify the code below and click Run to practice your CSS."
http://www.css-ref.com/

CSS Cheat Sheet
By Leslie Franke.
http://lesliefranke.com/files/reference/csscheatsheet.html

+03: EVENTS.

Learn How to Develop e-Learning Tools
January 19, 2007.
Portland, Oregon U.S.A.
http://www.stcwvc.org/janesmith_elearning_workshop.html

Vancouver PHP Conference 2007
February 12-13, 2007.
Vancouver, Canada
http://vancouver.php.net/

+04: FLASH.

The Rise of Flash Video, Part 3
By Tom Green.
"Tom Green has taken us on a journey through the world of Flash video 
in this series, starting with an account of Flash video's rise to 
dominance on the web (fortuitously published on the same day as 
Google's purchase of Flash-using YouTube) in Part 1. Continuing on in 
Part 2, he tackled the issues of quality and compression. Now, in Part 
3, he presents a step-by-step guide to preparing video for the web, 
using Flash and other software, with a whole bunch of expert tips and 
resources to help you do it right the first time."
http://www.digital-web.com/articles/the_rise_of_flash_video_part_3/

Making the Best of Video Using Flash
By Jonathan Christopher.
"Including any form of multimedia within a website has an ugly history 
behind it. Browser inconsistencies, required third party plugins, and 
the need for a proper codec made including multimedia a true problem. 
Even worse, it made it very difficult for any potential readers to 
successfully view your media. By far the most difficult piece of 
multimedia to effectively include in any document would be video..."
http://mondaybynoon.com/2006/11/27/making-the-best-of-video-using-flash/

+05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

Information Architecture 3.0
By Peter Morville.
"Of course, user hostile web sites are only the tip of the iceberg. 
Beneath the surface lurk multitudes of Web 2.0 startups and Ajaxian 
mashups that are way behind schedule and horribly over budget. 
Apparently, nobody told the entrepreneurs about the step change in 
design and development cost between pages and applications. But, that's 
enough gloom and doom, as the future's quite bright, especially for 
information architects who find ways to connect the timeless principles 
of design and organization with new transmedia models of interaction, 
co-creation, tagging, and user participation."
http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000149.php

Enterprise Information Architecture: A Semantic and Organizational 
Foundation
By Tom Reamy.
"People disagree on what happens when IAs grow up, but Tom Reamy knows. 
He offers a foundation for information architecture as it advances, 
grappling with problems across the enterprise."
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/enterprise

Information Architecture Is Not Dead...But It Might Be Stuck
By Scott Weisbrod.
"...information architecture is stuck. While this implies a problem 
with the practice, I'm going to suggest that it really has more to do 
with the practitioners. The practitioners are stuck and the 
conversation is not evolving. Not enough of us are getting 
uncomfortable and knocking down fences to reach out to other people 
from other fields and engaging in meaningful conversation about design 
and business problems. The conversation is stuck and we need to evolve."
http://www.scottweisbrod.com/index.php/?p=204

+06: MISCELLANEOUS.

 From Data to Wisdom: An Interview with Paco Underhill
By Liz Danzico.
"How can the simple act of watching people make better products? Paco 
Underhill, the foremost expert in behavior market research, talks about 
the pyramid of knowledge, worshipping at the altar of the CEO, and the 
need to supersize or specialize."
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/from-data-to-wisdom

+07: NAVIGATION.

Click Here and Other Meaningless Link Phrases
By Roger Johansson.
"A while ago Emil Stenstrom wrote an article about one of those things 
that you have to keep educating clients about: writing good and 
informative link phrases. As you might guess from the title, Emil 
specifically talks about the use of 'click here' in Click here to read 
this article, but there are several other meaningless link phrases that 
seem almost as popular as forcing links to open in new windows..."
http://tinyurl.com/yhnhkq

+08: PHP.

How to Create Thumbnails with PHP and GD
By Christian Heilmann.
This small article will explain how you create a thumbnail from an 
image in PHP. Furthermore you learn how to batch process a whole folder 
of images and create their thumbnails.
http://icant.co.uk/articles/phpthumbnails/

+09: TOOLS.

DOMTool
By Stuart Colville.
"Online tool that takes "HTML as an input and output the correct DOM 
methods for inserting that content into a document..."
http://muffinresearch.co.uk/code/javascript/DOMTool/
DOMTool Related Blog Post:
http://muffinresearch.co.uk/archives/2006/11/28/domtool/

kuler
By Adobe Labs.
"kuler helps you explore, create and share color themes for your web 
pages, design projects and other creative work..."
http://kuler.adobe.com/

Quick Thumbnail
"The fastest way to resize your pictures and images. Choose an image 
file, select some resize options, and hit Resize it. Your image will be 
uploaded to the server and resized, and then any or all of the resized 
images will be provided in a single convenient view. Not only can you 
get simultaneous generation of different sizes but you can enlarge your 
images too."
http://quickthumbnail.com/

+10: TYPOGRAPHY.

Safari Better than Firefox?
By Jeffrey Zeldman.
"...If your content will sometimes include italicized text, you 
naturally want to specify a font that contains italics. That's just 
common sense. Unfortunately, as our screen shots have shown, common 
sense works against you here, because Firefox, although superior to 
other browsers in many ways, handles text like a drunken fry-cook. When 
you specify the font that contains genuine italics (as we did in Test 
One), Firefox mishandles the roman text that abuts italicized words. 
When you replace that font with one that contains no italic (Test Two), 
Firefox fakes the italics crudely, but overall display and legibility 
are better than the unusable results of Test One. Obviously there are 
fewer problems if you limit your website to Verdana and Georgia, but 
more constraints on typography are not what the web needs."
http://www.zeldman.com/2006/11/27/safari-beats-firefox/

+11: USABILITY.

Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015
By Vincent Flanders.
"Originally, this article was entitled 'The Biggest Web Design Mistakes 
of 2004.' Two years after I wrote this article I realized these 
mistakes are timeless so I've renamed and re-edited the article."
http://tinyurl.com/y3dtqw

The Interactive Effects of Website Delay, Breadth, and Familiarity
By Andrew B. King.
"A recent study examined whether website delay, breadth, and 
familiarity have interactive effects on user psychology and 
performance. A significant three-way interaction among all three 
factors showed that the ill effects of delay can be dampened by 
familiarity and breadth. Developers are urged to consider site 
familiarity, breadth, and delay together rather than separately."
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/scent/

User Centered Design: Is It Working?
By Donna Maurer.
"Here are the slides from my keynote at Ozchi 2006 last week. My talk 
was called 'User Centered Design: Is It Working?' which is a bit lame, 
but I really couldn't come up with a better one..."
http://www.maadmob.net/donna/blog/archives/000738.html

Usability for Developers
By Lisa Herrod.
"If there's one thing that's caught my attention in the past six 
months, it's an increase in the variety of web roles incorporating 
usability. I've noticed this across a number of areas: job posts, 
industry events, online discussions and personal tagging on social 
networking sites such as Web Connections."
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2006/11/29/usability-for-developers/

Don't Start With the Home Page
By Cameron Moll.
"...if you're building a web app. Too often it's the accepted modus 
operandi to begin image comping, rapid prototyping, or iterative design 
by designing the home page first. While this practice works well for 
"brochureware" sites and other forms of brand-heavy design, it's often 
a myopic approach for applications that are more utilitarian in 
nature..."
http://tinyurl.com/ynz8tp

+12: XML.

Ducks and Ducklings, An (X)HTML allegory
By Daniel Glazman.
"I am going to tell you a short story of the World Wide Web, a story of 
ducks, ducklings and swans. It's an allegory about our most
important specification, HTML." Daniel Glazman's presentation slides 
and text from the November W3C meeting in Tokyo.
http://tinyurl.com/yln5sq

XSLT as Pretty Printer
By Hew Wolff.
"Hew Wolff discusses some of the issues surrounding an XSLT style sheet 
that will pretty print arbitrary XML and includes the style sheet 
itself."
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2006/11/29/xslt-xml-pretty-printer.html

[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.

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+ TEXT EMAIL NEWSLETTER (TEN).

As a navigation aid for screen readers we do our best to conform to the 
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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.]