[webdev] Web Design Update: July 19, 2007

Thu Jul 19 06:26:13 CDT 2007

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 6, Issue 04, July 19, 2007.

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

++ISSUE 04 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: COLOR.
04: EVALUATION & TESTING.
05: EVENTS.
06: MISCELLANEOUS.
07: PHP.
08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
09: TYPOGRAPHY.
10: USABILITY.

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

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Beijing 2008 Part One: Accessibility
By Henny Swan.
"...What follows is a snapshot look at the Beijing 2008 site to see how 
accessible it is for users with hearing, mobility, cognitive and visual 
impairments. Unable to look at the site in detail I decided to see what 
insight I could get from looking at the home page and a couple of other 
keys pages such as results pages..."
http://tinyurl.com/26k8f7

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Conflicting Absolute Positions
By Rob Swan.
"All right, class. Using CSS, produce a liquid layout that contains a 
fixed-width, scrolling side panel and a flexible, scrolling main panel. 
Okay, now do it without JavaScript. By chucking an assumption about how 
CSS works in browsers, Rob Swan provides the way and means."
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/conflictingabsolutepositions

Using CSS 3 Selectors to Apply Link Icons
By Peter Gasston.
"I mentioned earlier this year a tutorial which shows how to use CSS 3 
selectors for marking up hyperlinks. Of course, you don't need to limit 
yourself to just hyperlinks; with CSS 3 attribute selectors, you can 
use the same technique for any tag which has an attribute. I'm going to 
give a couple of quick examples, which will output the following result 
(of course, you'll need a browser better than IE6 to see them!)..."
http://www.css3.info/using-css-3-selectors-to-apply-link-icons/

CSS3 Properties Tests for Webkit Based Browsers, Including the iPhone
By John Allsopp.
"While the assumption has been that the version of Safari in the iPhone 
is very close to Safari 3 for the Mac and Windows in terms of support 
for CSS, that does not seem to be the case. While Safari 3 supports 
just about all of the following properties, at least in "experimental" 
form with the prefix '-webkit-' added to the property name, Safari on 
the iPhone (at least when it was released) has much more limited 
support (see support tables). You can see for yourself by visiting this 
page with an iPhone, or Safari 3. This page has tests for a small 
subset of CSS3, chosen because these features are in part supported by 
at least one browser. Still to come, tests for mozilla's and opera's 
experimental support for features (property names with -moz- and -o- 
prepended), and CSS 3 selectors..."
http://westciv.com/iphonetests/

+03: COLOR.

Effective Colour Contrast
By S.R. Emerson.
"Have you taken a serious look at the colour scheme your website uses? 
Are all parts of your web page visible to everyone? Some times when we 
pick a colour scheme for our website we forget that there are people 
with poor vision and colour deficiencies. Even website visitors with 
'normal' vision can have difficulties reading a web page that has poor 
contrast between the colours used. For a person with poor eyesight or 
colour blindness, certain colour combinations are hard to see. If there 
isn't enough contrast between the colours used, they just meld together 
for these visitors. This also happens for visitors with normal sight. 
The colours you have picked may appear in enough contrast to you but 
they might not be for another person..."
http://www.webpagemistakes.ca/effective-colour-contrast/

+04: EVALUATION & TESTING.

In-House Recruitment of Users for Research
By Patrick Kennedy.
"Getting participants for website research can be difficult, but a few 
simple steps can help make the process go much more smoothly. This 
article outlines steps modeled on the approach taken to recruiting 
users for a recent website redevelopment project for a tertiary 
education institution. The research activities included interviews, 
focus groups and usability testing..."
http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/cmb_recruitingusers/index.html

+05: EVENTS.

php|works 2007
September 12-14, 2007.
Atlanta Georgia, U.S.A.
http://works.phparch.com/c/p/index

+06: MISCELLANEOUS.

A Video Interview with Shawn Henry, From California to Japan
By Kazuhito Kidachi.
"As part of the Mitsue-Links 'Meet the Professionals' video series, 
Shawn Henry of W3C WAI talks with Kazuhito Kidachi about shared 
responsibilities between web site developers, browsers, and assistive 
technologies; the importance of different types of authoring tools 
supporting accessibility; how WCAG 2.0 and WAI-ARIA address the more 
difficult aspects of Web accessibility; WAI's outreach resources; and 
what led Shawn to accessibility years ago."
http://videocast.mitsue.co.jp/english/archives/2007/000056.html

@media 2007 Podcasts and Presentation Materials
http://www.vivabit.com/atmedia2007/europe/schedule/

5 Points of Advice that You May, or May Not, Want to Hear
By Armin Vit.
"1.) Its not you, its me and its definitely not art...2.) Lose some 
battles, win the war...3.) Can you hear me now?...4.) Be nice... 5.) Do 
good work..."
http://www.graphicdefine.org/issue3/advice

A Low-Fi Solution to E-Mail Overload: Sentenc.es
By Mike Davidson.
"I've written about e-mail overload issues in the past, and today I'm 
presenting what I believe is a simple, low-fi solution: sentenc.es..."
http://tinyurl.com/3x9se4

+07: PHP.

PHP 4 End of Life Announcement
By php.net.
"Today it is exactly three years ago since PHP 5 has been released. In 
those three years it has seen many improvements over PHP 4. PHP 5 is 
fast, stable & production-ready and as PHP 6 is on the way, PHP 4 will 
be discontinued. The PHP development team hereby announces that support 
for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 
2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. We will continue 
to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until 
2008-08-08. Please use the rest of this year to make your application 
suitable to run on PHP 5. For documentation on migration for PHP 4 to 
PHP 5, we would like to point you to our migration guide. There is 
additional information available in the PHP 5.0 to PHP 5.1 and PHP 5.1 
to PHP 5.2 migration guides as well."
http://www.php.net/index.php#2007-07-13-1

PHP 4 on Death Row
By Stephen Shankland.
"Support for PHP 4 will cease by year's end, forcing developers to move 
to the less popular PHP 5."
http://tinyurl.com/2hfca2

How to (and how not to) Pass an Array from PHP to the Database
By Maggie Nelson.
"In a new post today, Maggie Nelson starts with the wrong way to do 
something - passing an array from PHP to a database - and works 
backward to make it all right."
http://tinyurl.com/2xx4rp

+08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

WHATWG HTML5 Specification Comment
By Tom Morris.
"...For something to become part of the HTML WG's recommendation it has 
to be in use. This is a deeply conservative movement, and it makes it 
difficult for things to change - because it'll 'break compatibility'. 
Yes, the HTML WG demands that HTML 5 be backwards compatible with HTML 
4. Which means if something is broken in HTML 4, it may stay broken in 
HTML 5..."
http://boagworld.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=2400#Item_2

Corporate Web Standards
By Scott Gledhill.
"Freelancers and hot-shot web agencies are only one side of the web 
development party. Behind the scenes of every company website, you're 
likely to find a frustrated in-house developer or two, wondering why 
exactly they bought all those shiny books when web standards seems to 
be a bad word in the weekly marketing meeting. If this sounds very much 
like your daily grind, new author Scott Gledhill has some advice on how 
to approach introducing standards in a corporate world."
http://www.digital-web.com/articles/corporate_web_standards/

Web Standards Do - The Way of Web Standards
By Olivier Thereaux.
"...this article is a humorous look at principles of Web quality, 
viewed through the filter of the Bushido, the Samurai's code of Honor. 
It is a companion to a talk given at the Days of Web Standards 
Conference, in Tokyo on July 15th, 2007. The metaphor should be taken 
with a smile, the principles of Web Architecture it showcases, 
seriously..."
http://www.w3.org/QA/2007/07/the_way_of_web_standards.html

Why Bother?
By Sean Fraser.
"Why bother with web standards adherence when error handling makes web 
development Life easy. Or, when Large Sites don't bother. I've written 
two articles about it: Error Handling in Browsers make Web Standards 
Difficult and this article which poses How widely tolerated is 
ill-formedness in existing browsers?. Those were merely observations. 
However, we have global examples..."
http://tinyurl.com/2g5ojo

+09: TYPOGRAPHY.

Helvetica and Alternatives to Helvetica
By FontShop.
"Helvetica is a classic. Helvetica is played out. Each of these 
statements is true to an extent..."
http://tinyurl.com/yq9yqr

+10: USABILITY.

Never Use a Warning When you Mean Undo
By Aza Raskin.
"Are our web apps as smart as they should be? By failing to account for 
habituation (the tendency, when presented with a string of repetitive 
tasks, to keep clicking OK), do our designs cause people to lose their 
work? Raskin's simple, foolproof rule solves the problem."
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/neveruseawarning

Web Usability
By Mel Pedley.
"The dividing line between web accessibility and web usability is often 
blurred and difficult to distinguish. Whilst there is no doubt that the 
two topics do overlap to a significant degree, it is important to 
differentiate between them. Usability is not the same thing as 
accessibility. Unlike web accessibility which impacts directly upon 
disabled users, web usability affects all users, and can be defined as 
a measure of how easy it is for a generic site visitor to carry out a 
task such as finding a given piece of information or buying a certain 
product. However, there are accessibility benefits to be gained from 
applying web usability principles to your designs. So let's take a few 
simply usability concepts, look at why they are important and see what 
effect they may have on overall accessibility..."
http://accessites.org/site/2007/07/web-usability/

Web Design is the Design of Words
By Gerry McGovern.
"...On the Web, before you can get to the product or service of the 
organization, you have to use the website. What you are essentially 
using is words. Words can make you wait or speed you on your journey. 
Words can make you more confused or answer a
question you had. A website designer is a designer of words. Website 
usability is
the principle measure of success. The Web turns design on its head. 
Everything builds from the word."
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2007/nt-2007-07-16-words.htm

Government Websites 'Too Complex'
By British Broadcasting Corporation.
"Many government websites are still too complicated and difficult to 
use, says the National Audit Office."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6896614.stm

[Section one ends.]

++ SECTION TWO:

+11: 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.]