[webdev] Web Design Update: April 20, 2007

Fri Apr 20 06:23:29 CDT 2007

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 5, Issue 44, April 20, 2007.

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

++ISSUE 44 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: FLASH
07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
08: JAVASCRIPT.
09: MISCELLANEOUS.
10: NAVIGATION.
11: PHP.
12: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
13: TYPOGRAPHY.
14: USABILITY.

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

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Initiative Spurs User-Friendly Technology
By Sacramento State University.
"Sacramento State is stepping up efforts to make its information 
technology services and instructional materials accessible to persons 
with disabilities. The move is part of the CSU system's Accessible 
Technology Initiative. The three priorities of the initiative are: web 
accessibility, which will bring all campus web pages in compliance with 
accessibility standards; instructional materials accessibility, which 
will provide for textbooks and printed material, as well as electronic 
presentations, to meet accessibility standards; and accessible 
electronic and information technology procurement, which ensures that 
all products purchased will adhere to accessibility standards.'Our goal 
is to have these services ready for all students, faculty, staff and 
the campus community, regardless of disability, before they need to ask 
for them'..."
http://tinyurl.com/yv8exu

Taking Accessibility to an International Level
By Henny Swan.
"Over the last few months I've been closely watching the progress of 
the December 2006 United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of 
Persons with Disabilities. This marks an exciting shift in the 
accessibility arena as it is the first time that accessibility is 
mentioned in an international human rights initiative. While the Web 
Accessibility Initiative (WAI) publishes technical guidelines on how to 
make websites accessible there has been no global movement to date that 
outlines the framework of what must be done..."
http://tinyurl.com/yuj24k

It Pays to Play by the Rules - Compliance, Accessibility and SEO
By Mark Jackson.
"If you can deliver an accessible website, you may have just created a 
tremendous market growth opportunity for yourself..."
http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3625527

Adding Value: Providing Transcripts for Podcasts
By Sharon Perry.
"I've just listened to a podcast by EASI (Equal Access to Software and 
Information) on RSS/Podcast Basics.  As well as covering the basics of 
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds and podcasting, it also briefly 
touched on podcast accessibility..."
http://tinyurl.com/2et9ak

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Reset Styles
By Eric A Meyer.
"...here's my version of reset.css, based off of the YUI styles."
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/04/12/reset-styles/

Reworked Reset
By Eric A Meyer.
"Here's the latest version of my 'baseline' style sheet, with some 
changes based on feedback from readers on the original post..."
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/04/14/reworked-reset/

What Happens in Quirks Mode?
By Jukka K. Korpela.
"In Quirks Mode, browsers have been observed to behave in the following 
ways, though not all browsers exhibit all of these features..."
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/quirks-mode.html

Create a Teaser Thumbnail List Using CSS: Part 1 - Updated
By Zoe Gillenwater.
"Teaser thumbnail lists are those lists of items made up of a title, 
short description, and thumbnail. They're often used to provide short 
teasers that link to more information about the products, articles, or 
sections of the site being listed. This tutorial will go over one way 
to structure the XHTML and CSS to create such a list that maximizes 
flexibility for the site owner and accessibility for the end user. The 
resulting list will feature a fixed-width, grid-like design, with the 
thumbnails aligned to the left and the title and description for each 
item sitting to the right. All with only 23 lines of CSS! This updated 
version of the original tutorial, published in March 2006, includes 
slightly modified CSS to allow the list to accept text that is very 
short or images that are very tall without overlaps occurring. 
Fortunately, the CSS required for this enhancement is not significantly 
more than the CSS required for the first version, so even if you don't 
anticipate having short text or tall images, it's best to use this new 
version from now on."
http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=8885A

Positioning
By Tommy Olsson.
"In the first article in a brand new column here at Digital Web, we 
begin our series examining the fundamental skills that any web designer 
should master. Online veteran and markup expert Tommy Olsson takes a 
detailed look at the sometimes confusing art of CSS positioning."
http://www.digital-web.com/articles/web_design_101_positioning/

+03: DREAMWEAVER.

Understanding the New Dreamweaver CS3 CSS Layouts
By Stephanie Sullivan.
"Jumpstart your web designs by basing them on the starter CSS Layouts 
that ship with Dreamweaver CS3."
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/css_starter_pages.html

Migrating from Adobe GoLive CS2 to Adobe Dreamweaver CS3
By Adobe.
"Learn what you need to do to get your GoLive sites to work in 
Dreamweaver CS3."
http://tinyurl.com/239yef

+04: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Cue: A Usability Testing Bake-Off
By Jared Spool.
"...Because we're often working by ourselves, having an external 
reference point to compare our work to is important. For apple pie 
bakers, the bake-off is where we can learn from others. In the world of 
usability testing, the CUE studies are quickly becoming the focal point 
for these comparisons."
http://tinyurl.com/27kzsy

+05: EVENTS.

Todcon: The Other Dreamweaver Conference
June 11-13, 2007.
Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S.A.
http://www.todcon.org/

AusWeb 07
June 30-July 4, 2007.
Charlesworth Bay, Australia.
http://ausweb.scu.edu.au/

IADIS: International Conference WWW/Internet 2007
October 5-8, 2007
Vila Real, Portugal.
http://www.internet-conf.org/

UI12: User Interface 12 Conference
November 5-8, 2007.
Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
http://www.uie.com/events/uiconf/2007/

+06: FLASH.

Captioning in Flash CS3
By Andrew Kirkpatrick.
"want to highlight my favorite new feature in Flash CS3 - Flash 
captioning. There is a new component, named FLVPlaybackCaptioning, 
which works in cooperation with the FLVPlayback component to make 
delivering captioning in Flash really easy."
http://tinyurl.com/2zd8nc

+07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

IA Summit Sessions
"Here's the full list of presentations and panels..."
http://www.iasummit.org/2007/conferenceProgram.htm

Enterprise IA Methodologies
By James Robertson.
"Information architects working within enterprises are confronted by 
unique challenges, relating to organizational culture, business 
processes, and internal politics. James Robertson pulls the strands of 
situational spaghetti to get to the root of the project."
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/enterprise-ia

+08: JAVASCRIPT.

Accessing Form Data via JavaScript and the DOM
By Tony Patton.
"Accessing and manipulating the various elements on a Web page is a 
common endeavor that is easily accomplished with JavaScript and the 
HTML Document Object Model (DOM). In this article, I examine the 
various ways to access page elements and describe how to create them..."
http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-6175942.html

+09: MISCELLANEOUS.

Ten Questions for Lachlan Hunt
By Russ Weakley.
"Lachlan Hunt is a freelance, front-end web developer, primarily 
developing with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. He has been working 
professionally in the industry for 3 years. As a developer and advocate 
of web standards, he is well known for his involvement with the 
community through his blog, Lachy's Log, participation in various 
mailing lists, including WSG, and involvement with the development of 
web standards including HTML and CSS through public mailing lists and, 
more recently, as a W3C Invited Expert. Lachlan talks about HTML5, 
XHTML2, WHATWG, specs, top posting, JavaScript, XBL and more! "
http://webstandardsgroup.org/features/lachlan-hunt.cfm

+10: NAVIGATION.

Styling Links
By Jonathan Nicol.
"A couple of months back I wrote a post about the importance of making 
links look like links. From the comments left by readers it was clear 
that peoples opinions differ widely on the best way to style links, so 
I thought I'd follow up with a brief survey of the various ways it is 
possible to make links stand out on a page. I won't be talking in this 
article about links in navigation menus, headings, or buttons, only 
inline links that appear within the body copy of a web page. We cannot 
rely on visual context to make it obvious to users that inline links 
are clickable, and therefore their appearance is crucial."
http://f6design.com/journal/2007/04/14/styling-links/

Sitemaps are Stupid
By Lyle Kantrovich.
"I've thought that sitemaps are a Bad Idea for about 10 years now. Ten 
year later I finally got around to writing a blog post about why I 
think they are stupid. Here are a few things to consider..."
http://tinyurl.com/yt4zwo

+11: PHP.

PHP 5 Security Techniques
By Larry Ullman.
"Most beginning programmers fail to understand the truth about 
security: there is no such thing as "secure" or "insecure." The wise 
programmer knows that the real question is how secure a site is. The 
focus in this sample chapter is therefore how to make your applications 
more secure."
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=712187&f1

Why Are PHP Books and Videos Hard for People?
By Stefan Mischook.
"I've read 20+ books on PHP and have watched many videos. One thing 
that I found consistent about all of them was how they were not 
'friendly' to non-nerd types..."
http://tinyurl.com/32ofdj

ZCE (Zend Certified Engineer) Study Group
By phpwomen.org.
"Get ready to dive in to certification studies!  Join fellow phpWomen 
members in the new ZCE Study Group forum for some question and answer 
and a lot of test prep."
http://tinyurl.com/yus89x

+12: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

Virginia Tech Tragedy:  Lessons Learned in Crisis Communication a Day 
After the Unthinkable
By Karine Joly.
"...When a crisis occurs, immediately drop all images, flash, video, 
from your web site. The VT homepage crashed around 10 a.m. because of 
traffic. They went to an almost text-only page very early on and it 
still was difficult to get to the homepage for information....Post 
statements in print only first. Again, VT was trying to provide as much 
information as possible and they posted podcasts from their president. 
A great idea, but with the volume of traffic, I believe the bandwidth 
required dramatically slowed access to the site...Use an alternative 
source or site to distribute key information..."
http://tinyurl.com/2f9msw

Web Standards Documentary Project
By Aarron Walter.
"The Interactive Media Design department at The Art Institute of 
Atlanta has been teaching the merits of Web Standards in our curriculum 
since 2002. Over the years, we have seen many of our students 
evangelize the importance of Web Standards to their employers in and 
around Atlanta, Georgia. Below is a selection of audio interviews with 
some of our students who have introduced Web Standards to their 
employers, some with a successful outcome, and others not. By 
documenting students' experiences in the industry, my hope is to learn 
a bit about how changes are being made, and when their efforts are not 
successful discover why so we might address issues in the curriculum if 
possible. In some business situations, adopting Web Standards means 
tossing aside or rebuilding giant Content Management Systems, which may 
not currently be seen as a plausible option. Perhaps if the benefits 
are presented well enough, change is still possible..."
http://aarronwalter.com/teaching/web-standards.php

Semantics - Why Bother?
By Mel Pedley.
"A great deal has been written about semantic markup and its 
importance. Some of this material has been written by purists who 
defend semantics because they like the logic and structure that 
semantic markup can convey. That's all very well and good, but what 
does semantic markup mean? And what practical usage does it have?"
http://accessites.org/site/2007/04/semantics-why-bother/

Stop Writing Garbage Code, Please
By Mike Cherim.
"As most of my readers know, one of the things I do is make themes and 
templates for WordPress web logs and stand-alone sites. The themes and 
templates I make are accessible, universal, standards-compliant, and 
strictly valid. I take a lot of pride in what I produce and I try to 
turn out nothing but the highest quality stuff. Once users download the 
fruits of my labor, my responsibility of quality control ends and the 
users take the reigns. That's when things sometimes go awry. But in 
many instances, it's not the users' fault..."
http://green-beast.com/blog/?p=168

+13: TYPOGRAPHY.

Web Typography
By Rosie Sherry.
"...some small and simple steps that everyone can bear in mind..."
http://www.rosiesherry.com/blog/show/Web+typography

+14: USABILITY.

Scroll Stoppers at MensHealth.com
By Jared Spool.
"...Observing users reacting to scroll stoppers can give designers the 
mistaken belief that users don't like to scroll. However, all the 
evidence we've collected suggests that's not true at all. They love to 
scroll, assuming the page makes it clear there's something to scroll 
to."
http://tinyurl.com/yojkf5

Show Numbers as Numerals When Writing for Online
By Jakob Nielsen.
"It's better to use '23' than 'twenty-three' to catch users' eyes when 
they scan Web pages for facts, according to eyetracking data."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/writing-numbers.html

Poll Results: 50.4 Percent of Respondents Maximize Windows
By Roger Johansson.
"When I posted my recent poll on Web browser window size I was 
expecting at the very most a couple of hundred comments. I obviously 
underestimated my readers' willingness to participate, because when I 
finally closed comments the count was 1070, with the total amount of 
setups reported landing at 1385. 1070 comments. Wow..."
http://tinyurl.com/2f7umw

Why Simplicity is Essential to Web Design
By Gerry McGovern.
"A simple website charges you less time. A complex website charges you 
more time. Time is your most precious resource."
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2007/nt-2007-04-16-simplicity.htm

Where are the Women? Where are the Links?
By Jeffery Zeldman.
"...every time I think I can stop talking about these obvious, simple 
truths, some crazy bad 90s style train wreck hits me headlong and makes 
me weep anew."
http://www.zeldman.com/2007/04/18/cant-link-with-em/

[Section one ends.]

++ SECTION TWO:

+15: 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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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 
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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.]