[webdev] Web Design Update: November 21, 2007

[Laura Carlson]

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 6, Issue 22, November 21, 2007.

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

++ISSUE 22 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: JAVASCRIPT.
06: MISCELLANEOUS.
07: NAVIGATION.
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.

Use the Label Element to Make Your HTML Forms Accessible
By Roger Johansson.
"There are plenty of articles and tutorials that describe how to create 
accessible HTML forms out there. Despite that it is common to come 
across forms that do not use a single label element and forms that use 
label elements but do so incorrectly..."
http://tinyurl.com/ysju7g

Cherished Lies of the Blind
By Joe Clark.
"New year's resolution for 2008: Every blind person with an interest in 
technology should vow never to reiterate these lies."
http://blog.fawny.org/2007/11/19/blindlies/

An Example of Automated Accessibility Testing
By Joe Dolson.
"...On the whole, I find the Functional Accessibility Evaluator to be 
quite interesting and to provide good value. It's a great 
natural-language approach to identifying potential accessibility 
problems. However, despite this, the automated nature of the testing 
exposes numerous of the standard difficulties with any kind of 
automated results. Namely, at any point where they deviate from precise 
guidelines, they expose private bias on the issues; and they are not 
capable of making fine distinctions between pass and fail."
http://tinyurl.com/yo9nvy

Business Reasons for Web Accessibility
By Dennis Lembree.
"An accessible web site decreases costs, increases sales, and increases 
positive image."
http://tinyurl.com/2x34jt


+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

CSS3 and the Death of Handheld Stylesheets
By Russell Beattie.
"...By choosing to default to non-handheld views, I have to agree with 
Phil that Opera seems to have given up the fight on this particular 
battle, and is instead banking on more sites using CSS3 instead..."
http://tinyurl.com/2b4wbt

How Many CSS Properties Can You Name in 5 Minutes?
By justsayhi.
A quiz.
http://www.justsayhi.com/bb/css_quiz

What's Not to Love About CSS Frameworks?
By Jeff Croft.
"Over the past several weeks, I've been bombarded (in e-mail, in 
person, and over IM) with questions about CSS frameworks. I guess I 
wrote the book on this topic (and contributed, if inadvertently, to one 
of the most notable CSS frameworks out there), so it's completely 
understandable people would come to me with these questions. The 
question almost always sounds something like this..."
http://tinyurl.com/2qrjk7


+03: DREAMWEAVER.

Adobe Spry 1.6 Improves Standards Support, Adds Progressive Enhancement
By Roger Johansson.
"...Spry 1.6 has in fact improved support for both Web standards, 
accessibility and progressive enhancement..."
http://tinyurl.com/24a6ap

Spry and Web Standards
By Adobe.
"The 'Web 2.0' world presents a leap forward in web functionality and 
user experience. The bar has officially been raised, and the rapid 
adoption of Ajax is proof that "next-generation" web interfaces are in 
high demand. In many ways, this trend is an "of course" moment. Of 
course Google Maps is the way that mapping is supposed to work. When 
you first experience, when first experienced, make you wonder why it 
took so long to be. While the underlying technologies of Ajax have been 
around for a while now, the recent explosion of Ajax-powered pages and 
applications has brought to light some limitations of XHTML, browsers, 
assistive technologies and standards."
http://tinyurl.com/27na9z

Progressive Enhancement with Spry
By Adobe.
"...This document will give examples of how to use the various 
components within Spry in a progressive enhancement scenario and 
introduce some techniques and utilities that will hopefully make it 
easy.."
http://tinyurl.com/ytdsku

Separating Behavior from Structure - Unobtrusive Spry
By Adobe.
"...This document will give you a brief introduction of the 
"unobtrusive javascript" technique and some utilities within Spry that 
aid with separating behavior from structure..."
http://tinyurl.com/2epacq

Validating Spry
By Adobe.
"Code validation is gaining more importance these days. HTML coders and 
their clients want to know that their code is done correctly. While the 
debate over standards and validation is a large one, the Spry team has 
taken steps to ensure that Spry pages will pass W3C validation."
http://tinyurl.com/2b3vgq

Hash Those Passwords
By Pete Freitag.
"Spry recently had an embarrassing security breach, in which several 
email addresses and passwords were stolen..."
http://www.petefreitag.com/item/660.cfm


+04: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Personas vs. User Descriptions; Apples vs. Tomatoes
By Jared Spool.
"In my mind, Christopher is clearly confusing Personas with User 
Descriptions. User descriptions are what-we-think-we-know-now writeups 
of who uses our design and why. Personas, on the other hand, are 
carefully researched and crafted personalities we create to focus the 
design energy..."
http://tinyurl.com/yuzaak


+05: JAVASCRIPT.

The AxsJAX Framework for ARIA
By Gez Lemon.
"Charles L. Chen and T. V Raman announced an open source framework 
called AxsJAX. The framework inserts ARIA properties into web 
applications to make them accessible to assistive technologies."
http://juicystudio.com/article/axsjax-framework-aria.php

AxsJAX Frequently Asked Questions
By Google.
http://code.google.com/p/google-axsjax/

Advanced JavaScript III
By Howard Feldman.
"Howard Feldman completes his voyage through the world of JavaScript 
hacking with this article. This time around, he tackles dynamic tables, 
switching out form elements, and putting prompting text in text boxes."
http://tinyurl.com/24qpvd


+06: MISCELLANEOUS.

Understanding Web Design
By Jeffrey Zeldman.
"We'll have better web design when we stop asking it to be something 
it's not, and start appreciating it for what it is. It's not print, not 
video, not a poster-and that's not a problem. Find out why cultural and 
business leaders misunderstand web design, and learn which other forms 
it most usefully resembles."
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/understandingwebdesign

Web Customer Rejects Silo Mentality
By Gerry McGovern.
"Organizations have an overwhelming desire to own and control. Even 
within organizations, each unit/department is constantly trying to 
prove that it is important."
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2007/nt-2007-11-19-dell.htm

RFP, R.I.P.
By ideasonideas.
"As a studio matures, one of the nicest benefits is in the luxury of 
actively 'choosing' which projects to engage in and which ones to pass 
on. In our first years of business, I would have scoffed at such a 
notion, but after some experience, we've learned that some business 
isn't worth having. The worst kind of business, in my humble opinion, 
is that which beckons in the form of an RFP. For those who aren't 
familiar with RFPs ? I can't imagine many who aren't ? the acronym is 
derived from 'Request For Proposals'. Talk to most experienced design 
managers and they'll feel similarly: RFPs simply don't work when it 
comes to purchasing design services..."
http://www.ideasonideas.com/2007/11/rfp-rip/

Bruce Tognazzini on Human-Computer Interaction
By e-consultancy
"Bruce Tognazzini was Apple's 66th employee, developing the company's 
first usability guidelines and founding its Human Interface team. 
Almost thirty years later, he's a principal at Nielsen Norman Group and 
still making his feelings known when companies commit design errors. 
Here, 'Tog' gives us a variety of thoughts on interface design, 
freedom, the future of computing, the iPhone's place in world history 
and why he travels around in a 400 sq ft motorhome while towing a 4x4 
and two Segways..."
http://tinyurl.com/2q3dwp

Dilbert Does Usability
By Peter J. Meyers.
"...One of these days, we network engineers, security specialists, 
designers, marketers, SEOs, and usability folks need to wake up and 
realize we all need each other..."
http://www.usereffect.com/topic/dilbert-does-usability


+07: NAVIGATION.

Improving the Usability of Within-Page Links
By Bruce Lawson.
"...None of the techniques above can be classed as advanced, but in 
combination they show that good document structure combined with CSS 
and JavaScript can enhance the user experience with some visual 
reinforcement. Users with screenreaders get no visual reinforcement, of 
course, but the most poplar screenreaders already prefix within-page 
link with an announcement of "this page link" so the user understands 
the context. And, of course, those people using older, less advanced 
browsers are not disadvantaged in any way."
http://tinyurl.com/2hla52

Search Engine Spam
By Frederick Townes.
"Most of us think of spam as junk email. Search engine spam is 
different. Search engine spam is any means of manipulating search 
engine spiders to artificially boost a website's page rank or 
positioning on search engine results pages. In other words, search 
engine spam is any tactic employed by site owners to fool search engine 
spiders. Not a good idea..."
http://tinyurl.com/2y9khk


+08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

Keep Browser Lock-Out a Thing of the Past
By Roger Johansson.
"...even if your site uses technology that is not supported by all 
browsers, don't actively prevent people using other browsers from 
entering. Build your website with web standards and progressive 
enhancement in mind instead..."
http://tinyurl.com/2zxkvz


+09: TYPOGRAPHY.

How to Size Text in CSS
By Richard Rutter.
"It's a tug-of-war as old as web design. Designers need to control text 
size and the vertical grid; readers need to be able to resize text. A 
better best practice for sizing type and controlling line-height is 
needed; and in this article, Richard Rutter obligingly supplies one."
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/howtosizetextincss

Text Sizes and Screen Resolution
By Mel Pedley.
"According to clickdensity, there appears to be a link between user 
screen resolutions and text size settings..."
http://tinyurl.com/yp5gac


+10: USABILITY.

Web Form Design Best Practices
By Luke Wroblewski.
"In my Web Form Design Best Practices talk at User Interface 12 in 
Boston, MA, I walked through the importance of Web forms and a series 
of design best practices culled from live to site analytics, usability 
testing, eye-tracking studies, and best practice surveys. My Slides 
from the talk..."
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?602

Procedures: The Sacred Cow Blocking the Road
By Mike Hughes.
"Users do not remain in online Help for long periods of time. So, not 
only must Help topics be modular and self-contained, elements within 
topics must be directly accessible and self-contained as well. 
Procedural information must accommodate a reader, for example, who has 
already figured out how to complete steps 1 through 4 before ever going 
to Help and would be discouraged from continuing to read the Help if 
she felt she must wade though instructions on how to do stuff she has 
already done or information she already knows."
http://uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000242.php

Trust in the Little Things
By Steve Baty.
"When we embed a link in our content, our aim is to encourage visitors 
to explore beyond the bounds of the information on the current page by 
following the link we've provided. By doing so, we provide both a 
richer experience for visitors and greater value to them through their 
relationship with us. However, abbreviated URLs do have some 
disadvantages..."
http://uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000240.php


[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.

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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 
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.]