[webdev] Web Design Update: April 6, 2007

Fri Apr 6 06:30:01 CDT 2007

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 5, Issue 42, April 6, 2007.

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

++ISSUE 42 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: JAVASCRIPT.
06: MISCELLANEOUS.
07: PHP.
08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
09: TOOLS.
10: TYPOGRAPHY.
11: USABILITY.

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

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Amazon.com and National Federation of the Blind Join Forces to Develop 
and Promote Web Accessibility
By National Federation of the Blind.
"The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) and Amazon.com announced 
today that they have agreed to work together to promote and improve 
technology that enables blind people to access and use the World Wide 
Web. In a cooperation agreement, Amazon.com pledged its commitment to 
continue improving the accessibility of its Web site platform, while 
the NFB committed to contribute its expertise in Web accessibility 
technologies to help further Amazon.com's efforts..."
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/news_press_release,81373.shtml

Amazon.com to Enhance Its Accessibility
By Bruce Lawson.
"...We urge Amazon to enhance their web accessibility to all people 
with disabilities, not just blind people, and to use valid, semantic 
html to achieve it..."
http://tinyurl.com/2d96pt

Web Accessibility System Change: The Myths, Realities, and What We Can 
Learn From Two Large Scale Efforts
By Cyndi Rowland and Heather Mariger.
"As web accessibility garners increased importance and attention, there 
is greater emphasis on making system-wide, rather than individual 
changes in our efforts to create a more accessible world. This is 
accomplished through policy setting and implementation that places the 
importance of web accessibility alongside other web considerations. In 
the early years of web accessibility, individual developers made the 
commitment to create accessible web content. When it became evident 
that leaving accessibility up to individual developers was not 
efficient, entire systems began making web accessibility a priority and 
a policy. Since then, many educational institutions, states, and the 
U.S. Federal government have implemented policies that require the web 
be accessible to individuals with disabilities, in line with accepted 
standards. The highest profile, large-scale, system change efforts 
since those from the California Community Colleges and the U.S. Federal 
government (i.e., Section 508) have come again from a California 
educational system (The California State University system), and from a 
governmental entity (the United Kingdom). Understanding the components 
involved in such large-scale change may aide others in their planning 
or execution of web accessibility policy."
http://ncdae.org/policy/systemchange.cfm

NCDAE Tips and Tools: Principles of Accessible Design
By National Center on Disability and Access to Education.
"This fact sheet outlines 10 principles of design that, if applied, 
will make web and electronic content more accessible."
http://ncdae.org/tools/factsheets/principles.cfm

CSUN 2007
By Jon Whiting.
"Jon Whiting and Aaron Anderson report on their experiences at CSUN 
2007. They also provide links to the slides for their four 
presentations: Accessibility Evaluation of Next-Generation Web 
Applications, Internet Delivery of Real-Time Captioning, Creating 
Accessible Content in OpenOffice.org, and Creating Accessible Files in 
Adobe Acrobat 8."
http://webaim.org/blog/2007/03/29/csun-2007/

Accessible Display: None
By Nathan Smith.
"From time to time, the necessity arises to have hidden content present 
in a page. In case you don't already know, simply using CSS for 
display: none on the content will not cut it, because assistive 
technologies such as screen readers will treat this content as if it 
does not even exist in the DOM..."
http://sonspring.com/journal/accessible-display-none

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Print Stylesheet - The Definitive Guide
By Trenton Moss.
"A print stylesheet formats a web page so when printed, it 
automatically prints in a user-friendly format. Print stylesheets have 
been around for a number of years and have been written about a lot. 
Yet so few websites implement them, meaning we're left with web pages 
that frustratingly don't properly print on to paper. Find out once and 
for all how to make the ultimate print stylesheet..."
http://tinyurl.com/2deawt

CSS 101: Locate and Style Web Elements with Selectors
By Tony Patton.
"In the previous installment of my Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) 101 
series, I discussed how to handle multiple rules for the same element. 
This article covers another important CSS feature: selectors, which are 
used to choose elements within a Web page for styling."
http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-6172464.html

Create Styled Sidebar Boxes
By Craig Grannell.
"Craig Grannell shows how to position content on your website in the 
form of sidebars, and also demonstrates how to style up page structure, 
headings, paragraphs, lists and links."
http://www.netmag.co.uk/zine/home/create-styled-sidebar-boxes

Why Clearance Sometimes Needs to be Negative
By David Baron.
"At the CSS working group meeting in Oslo in August 2003, we came up 
with a concept called clearance to describe the offset used to change 
the position of a non-floating element that is moved by the clear CSS 
property. (Previously, the clear property was defined as increasing the 
margin.) At our meeting earlier this week in Mountain View, we 
discussed a test case where the current rules cause very strange 
behavior. The simplest form of this test case is the following..."
http://dbaron.org/log/2007-03#e20070329a

CSS Tips
By Philipp Lenssen.
"1) Color shortcuts and color conversions... 2) CSS bug hunting... 3) 
Media separation... 4) Center the thing... 5) Anti-aliased PNG files... 
6) Quick 'n' dirty rounded box corners... 7) Opacity... 8) 
Cross-browser padding... 9) CSS hacks... 10) Moving layers"
http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2007-03-30-n51.html

+03: DREAMWEAVER.

The Joy of HTML
By Virginia DeBolt.
"...Is writing standards-compliant web pages is a worthy goal? Is work 
that will go anywhere, do anything and always make sense is a worthy 
goal? I certainly think so. If I'm right, we have admit that 
Dreamweaver's Code View is worth using, at least sometimes. We have to 
admit that using CSS instead of presentational HTML is easier in 
Dreamweaver if people can experience the joy of HTML."
http://www.webteacher.ws/2007/03/tip-joy-of-html.html

Introducing Adobe Dreamweaver CS3
By Kenneth Berger.
"Read about the upcoming features in Dreamweaver CS3 from Kenneth 
Berger, Dreamweaver product manager."
http://tinyurl.com/yraufh

Adobe Dreamweaver Tutorials
By Vitaly Friedman and Sven Lennartz.
List of Tutorials
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/04/04/adobe-dreamweaver-tutorials/

+04: EVENTS.

Web Accessibility 2.0?
National Center on Disability and Access to Education Webcast
May 16th, 2007.
3:00-4:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time
http://ncdae.org/webcasts/accessibility2.cfm

Web Accessibility Training with WebAIM
June 20-21, 2007.
Logan, Utah, U.S.A.
http://webaim.org/training/

+05: JAVASCRIPT.

Screen Readers and JavaScript
By Steve Faulkner.
One set of Steve Faulkner's CSUN presentation slides.
http://www.paciellogroup.com/CSUN/csun-javascript-presentation.html

Building Accessible Web Applications
By Steve Faulkner.
A second set of Steve Faulkner's CSUN presentation slides.
http://www.paciellogroup.com/CSUN/csun-basics.html

Simulating Attributes Selectors in IE6
By Sandra Clark.
"Especially now that IE7 supports attribute selectors, using classes in 
my HTML to reflect those items has become a real bummer. I really like 
the idea of not requiring people maintaining HTML to worry about 
classes. I think it makes for cleaner markup and for easier training. 
So, while I'm not a JavaScript maven by any means, I decided to play 
around with this and actually made it work..."
http://www.shayna.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.display_entry&id=176

JavaScript Keyboard Accessibility
By Kevin Yank.
"JavaScript accessibility is an issue fraught with controversy and 
imperfect solutions, particularly when it comes to supporting the 
screen reader software that many visually impaired users rely on. These 
difficulties have led many developers to give up on accessibility 
entirely, when making your JavaScript accessible to some users can be 
refreshingly straightforward!.."
http://tinyurl.com/2nyjbs

+06: MISCELLANEOUS.

Four Ways to Bypass Inertia
By Curt Cloninger.
"Sometimes we freeze up at the beginning of a project, and other times, 
we feel uninspired, or just can't move past our usual patterns or our 
frustration with a project's challenges. In this excerpt from the 
beautiful and inspiring design book by Curt Cloninger, Hot-Wiring Your 
Creative Process, the author stretches our minds and gives us four 
practical techniques for greasing those rusty little creativity wheels 
in our minds."
http://www.digital-web.com/articles/four_ways_to_bypass_inertia/

+07: PHP.

Avoiding Frustration with PHP Sessions
By Oscar Merida.
"PHP's support for sessions make adding 'state' to your web application 
super easy.  Bus because the illusion of state is maintained by storing 
a Session ID via a user's cookies, you might find yourself losing 
potentially productive hours chasing down bizarre client side bugs or 
opening up a potential security hole.  Here are 4 tips to help you 
avoid wasting your time and securing your site..."
http://tinyurl.com/24y73j

PHP Security Tip Number 20
By Cal Evans (editor).
"To paraphrase an American Patriot 'The price of security is eternal 
vigilance'. You have to keep watch over your system but you also have 
to keep learning."
http://devzone.zend.com/node/view/id/1877

+08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

Latest Update from Molly
By Molly E. Holzschlag.
"..Here's a synopsis of the conversations and issues we discussed, 
along with details as to how some of the challenges Microsoft is facing 
are being prioritized and addressed..."
http://tinyurl.com/2gapvw

+09: TOOLS.

Hex Color Picker
By Jesper.
"Lets you get and edit hexadecimal HTML color codes in the standard Mac 
OS X color panel."
http://wafflesoftware.net/hexpicker/

+10: TYPOGRAPHY.

The Problem With Pixels
By Wilson Miner.
"...The principle I've been operating from recently boils down to this: 
design for the first page load in an ideal environment, while allowing 
for flexibility in non-ideal, unintended and user-modified 
environments..."
http://www.wilsonminer.com/posts/2007/mar/16/problem-pixels/

+11: USABILITY.

Top, Right or Left Aligned Form Labels
By Luke Wroblewski.
"...As the question of top, right, or left aligned form labels comes up 
often for designers, here's a short overview of the pros and cons of 
each method..."
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?504

UX Methods
By Jess McCullin.
"The cards briefly describe 16 different methods, deliverables, and 
ideas that user experience professionals can use in their practice."
http://www.uxmethods.com/

[Section one ends.]

++ SECTION TWO:

+12: 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 
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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 
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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.]