[webdev] Web Design Update: May 17, 2007

[Laura Carlson]

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 5, Issue 48, May 17, 2007.

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

++ISSUE 48 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: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
05: JAVASCRIPT.
06: MISCELLANEOUS.
07: NAVIGATION.
08: PHP.
09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
10: TOOLS.
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.

Too Much Accessibility - Title Attributes
By Bim Egan.
Time to vent some steam about the Title attribute. This, almost more 
than any other item in the web author's toolbox, seems to be 
misunderstood and overused..."
http://tinyurl.com/25lf7a

I'm Not Blind. Why Should I Tag?
By Adobe.
"The structure in tagged PDFs offers everyday functionality to any 
Acrobat user..."
http://tinyurl.com/26v4d4

PDF/A: PDF for Archiving
By Adobe.
The PDF archiving standard requires tags.
http://blogs.adobe.com/acrolaw/2007/01/pdfa_pdf_for_ar.html#more


+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Formal Weirdness
By Eric A. Meyer.
"...the handling of form control styling is going to be a very unstable 
branch of our field for the foreseeable future. Herein, I scratch the 
surface of this entire mess. Fair warning up front: this is going to be 
a long one..."
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/05/15/formal-weirdness/

Breaking Out of the Box
By Jina Bolton.
"One of the most commonly used arguments regarding CSS that I hear from 
designers who don't like web standards is, 'CSS designs are so boring. 
They're too boxy.' I can't help but find this statement to be a bit 
silly. To me, that's like saying buildings built with wood are boxy. An 
architect can create a boring-looking building. But, using the same 
tools, an architect can create a stunning work of art. It all depends 
on creativity and experimentation..."
http://www.sitepoint.com/print/breaking-out-of-the-box

Make Your Site Mobile Friendly
By Virginia DeBolt.
"...Clean, semantic markup is crucial when you consider the variety 
found in mobile devices. Some phones may only understand WAP. More 
capable phones may understand WAP2, which opens them up to rendering 
websites with XHTML and CSS. Some devices may display only 
monochromatic screen colors, while others may have full color. Some 
devices support CSS, some do not. Some only understand HTML 3.2, while 
others understand XHTML. Some devices understand tables, floats, 
frames, JavaScript, and dynamic menus, but many do not. Most devices 
don't support cookies. Devices at the high end of the mobile market 
such as Black Berry, Palm, or the upcoming iPhone are highly capable 
and support nearly as much as a standard computer..."
http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/css/make-your-site-mobile-friendly

How CSS Benefits in SEO
By Harry Smith.
"...When a search engine, such as Google, sends a spider to crawl your 
website, it looks through the code of your webpage they actually read 
certain elements of your HTML code. Certain HTML code holds more weight 
than other tags. So it is necessary to have a clean and readable code 
which is easy to understand by spiders, if there are unnecessary text 
and tags in your HTML file, spiders will have to struggle to understand 
that page is related to a particular search keyword. Using CSS you will 
be able to change the code layout without destroying the actual visual 
layout and will get an clean html code which will result to better 
search engine rankings..."
http://blog.webhosting.uk.com/2007/04/12/how-css-benefits-in-seo/


+03: EVENTS.

Accessibility, Beyond the Basics
June 28, July 28, August 30, and September 27, 2007.
London, United Kingdom
http://tinyurl.com/k65n3

Demystifying Accessibility
July 19, September 13, and November 15, 2007.
London, United Kingdom
http://tinyurl.com/jqdeh

BlogHer Conference '07
July 27-29, 2007.
Chicago, Illinois U.S.A.
http://www.acteva.com/booking.cfm?bevaID=132405

CHI 2008
April 5-10, 2008.
Florence, Italy
http://www.chi2008.org/


+04: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

Anyone for a Game of Cards?
By Ruth Stalker-Firth.
"Although a computerized version of card sorting might help you to 
quickly analyze the results, it is much better from a user point of 
view to sort physical cards. Users enjoy the tangible aspect of sorting 
cards; they like to move the cards around, scribble on them, chew them, 
and throw them away. Don't deprive them of this feeling."
http://www.digital-web.com/articles/game_of_cards/


+05: JAVASCRIPT.

I Object
By Douglas Crockford.
"One of the two really clever ideas in JavaScript is that objects are 
dynamic collections with differential inheritance..."
http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/05/10/i-object/

Sorting Javascript Arrays
By Bas.
"Well, it's been a while since my last post. I couldn't find any 
interesting subjects to write about. Anyway, today I'll write about 
sorting arrays. I'll start with sorting arrays numerically and 
alphabetically, to introduce you some basic techniques. After that I'll 
show you how to sort a multidimensional array..."
http://solutoire.com/2007/05/02/sorting-javascript-arrays/


+06: MISCELLANEOUS.

Five Pertinent Questions for John Allsopp
By Carolyn Wood.
"John Allsopp, well-known developer and web standards man, just came 
out with a new book, Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0. 
If you are a web designer, do you need this book? Is working with 
microformats the next essential step in your development as a web 
professional? What difference will microformats really make in the web 
world? We pressed John for the answers until he cried out for mercy in 
this, the first short and incisive interview in our Five Pertinent 
Questions column."
http://www.digital-web.com/articles/5_questions_john_allsopp/

Giants Talk
"Well known experts from all over the world, in a series of interviews 
about usability conducted by UPA Israel members."
http://www.wudisrael.com/giants.htm

Creating for the Web
By Adriana de Barros and Nuno Martins.
Lynda Weinman, Todd Purgason, Jakob Nielsen and others answer questions 
about "creating for the web."
http://www.scene360.com/ARTdirect_webdesign_function_part01.html


+07: NAVIGATION.

Command Links
By Jakob Nielsen.
"Application commands can be presented as buttons or as links, which 
offer more room for explanation. For primary commands, however, buttons 
are still best."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/command-links.html

Search Engine Friendly vs. Search Engine Optimized
By Joe Dolson.
"The links between accessibility and search marketing are frequently 
explored: creating a universally accessible website has a number of 
significant benefits for search marketing. After all, many of the 
features which make a website accessible (using text instead of images, 
ensuring the ability of non-visual tools to fully access content, etc.) 
are also characteristics of a website which has been optimized for 
search. However, there's a huge difference between search engine 
optimization and search engine friendly. What most accessible 
developers create are search engine friendly sites, not optimized 
sites..."
http://tinyurl.com/3c9oa2

Should All Links be Underlined?
By Beth A. Martin
"...Links should be organized and presented in such a way that users 
should be able to intuit 'clickability.' The specific solution, 
underlined or not, is less important than consistently using one or the 
other. For example, if no underlining is preferred, this can be 
accomplished with (unlinked) bulleted text below a title with blue 
text."
http://www.usability.gov/pubs/052007news.html

Improve Usability With Friendly URLs
By Tony Patton.
"Web addresses that are lengthy are harder for users to remember and 
can be difficult to type. Tony Patton discusses mapping URLs, dealing 
with dynamic content, and using a third-party service to shorten the 
URL for you."
http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-6183568.html

How to Professionally Manage Search
By Gerry McGovern.
"To manage search on your website, don't manage the technology or
the content. Manage the task. Success is about finding, not
searching."
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2007/nt-2007-05-14-search.htm


+08: PHP.

Security Techniques
By Larry Ullman.
"With more and more personal information being stored on the Web, such 
as credit card data, social security numbers, etc. - today's PHP 
developer cannot afford to be ignorant when it comes to security, but 
many programmers fail to understand it's importance. This week you'll 
learn how to make your applications more secure."
http://www.webreference.com/programming/php/php5-advanced/index.html


+09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

Is HTML 5 a Slippery Slope?
By Roger Johansson.
"... realize that standardized error handling in HTML is a good thing 
for browser vendors. But I doubt it will do anything to encourage web 
developers to produce better (as in cleaner, more accessible, easier to 
maintain) markup. In fact, it may have the opposite effect..."
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200705/is_html_5_a_slippery_slope/

Another Look at HTML 5
By Roger Johansson.
"...a potentially dangerous principle is 'Pave the cowpaths', which 
says: 'When a practice is already widespread among authors, consider 
adopting it rather than forbidding it or inventing something new.' 
Depending on how you interpret that, it can lead to insanity...Some of 
my previous worries and complaints are no doubt caused by me misreading 
the HTML 5 specification. My only excuse is that I find it very, very 
difficult to read since information that is only intended for browser 
developers is mixed with information that is important to authors 
(designers, developers, writers, CMS developers, etc.)...Specifications 
and design principles aside, I think a more disturbing issue is the 
really poor attitude some members of the HTML Working Group have. I'm 
not going to quote anyone or name any names, but it is something I felt 
from the moment I joined the working group mailing list..."
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200705/another_look_at_html_5/


+10: TOOLS.

'Quick' and dirty JSON Editor
"Click one of the sample buttons to load a JSON sample into the 
textarea, next..."
http://braincast.nl/samples/jsoneditor/


+11: USABILITY.

Web 2.0 'Neglecting Good Design'
By BBC News.
"Hype about Web 2.0 is making web firms neglect the basics of good 
design, web usability guru Jakob Nielsen has said."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6653119.stm

Visual-Syntactic Text Formatting:
A New Method to Enhance Online Reading
By Stan Walker, Phil Schloss, Charles R. Fletcher, Charles A. Vogel, 
and Randall C. Walker.
"A new process, visual-syntactic text formatting (VSTF), transforms 
block-shaped text into cascading patterns that help readers identify 
grammatical structure. The new method integrates converging evidence 
from educational, visual, and cognitive research, and is made feasible 
through computer-executed algorithms and electronic displays. Among 
college readers, the VSTF method instantly increased reading 
comprehension and efficiency of reading online text, while reducing 
eyestrain. Among high school students, who read with the format over an 
entire academic year, the VSTF method increased both academic 
achievement and long-term reading proficiency by more than a full 
standard deviation over randomized controls."
http://www.readingonline.org/articles/r_walker/


+12: XML.

Why Microsoft Might Not Embrace XHTML (and then again they might)
By Mark Birbeck.
"As usual I've had my thoughts provoked by Kurt Cagle. I missed the 
post originally, but T. V. Raman pointed out to me that a month or so 
ago Kurt wrote about why Microsoft should embrace XHTML. Actually, the 
post is entitled Why XHTML Can Save Internet Explorer, but since I'm 
not really sure what IE is being saved from, I'm sticking to Kurt's 
main point which is that IE developers have an opportunity to move 
their browser on, but only if they embrace XHTML..."
http://tinyurl.com/224str


[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.

WEB DESIGN UPDATE is available by subscription. For information on how 
to subscribe and unsubscribe please visit:
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 
guideline information please visit:
http://www.headstar.com/ten


+ 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.]