[webdev] Web Design Update: March 14, 2008

Fri Mar 14 06:19:16 CDT 2008

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 6, Issue 38, March 14, 2008.

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

++ISSUE 38 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: PHP.
08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
09: USABILITY.
10: XML.

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

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

IE 8: Alt Change and Longdesc Weirdness
By Steve Faulkner.
"...IE 8 falls into line with the HTML 4.01 specification and other 
major browsers in regards to not using alt attribute content as a 
tooltip - good news. Then it starts to get strange 'instead the target 
of the longdesc attribute is used as the tooltip if present'. So now we 
have support for longdesc in IE8?? But how is that going to work... 
Does the tooltip show the text content of the target file? Does it show 
structure and formatting? Just when it was thought that the longdesc 
had been assigned to HTML heaven by Troy McClure and those wacky HTML5 
guys, Microsoft have decided to support it..."
http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/?p=43

A WCAG 2.0 Implementation Site
By Mike Cherim.
"...I was asked to make the site officially conform to the WCAG 2.0 so 
it could be featured by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as an 
exemplary implementation site conforming of the soon-to-be-finalized 
guidelines..."
http://green-beast.com/blog/?p=221

Practical Accessibility Tips
By Mike Davies.
"One of the major benefits of working alongside world-class web 
developers in Yahoo! Europe is the thought and attention to detail 
applied to building websites. The combined experience and knowledge of 
the team vastly exceeds that of one web developer, or a small team of 
web developers..."
http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/access/PracticalAccessibilityTips

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

CSS3 Features in IE8
By Peter Gasston.
"I'm I began writing this post in IE8*, something I didn't think I'd be 
doing just a short while ago; the IE team have certainly been busy in 
the last 18 months! As it's beta software there are obviously quite a 
few rough edges and we can't consider it feature complete, but I 
thought I'd take a look at what features of CSS 3 have made it in 
already. The short answer: not many!..."
http://www.css3.info/css3-features-in-ie8/

Basic Tests for IE8 Given Various Values of X-UA-Compatible
By Alex Robinson.
"Standards mode is XHTML 1.0 strict, Quirks mode has no doctype, and 
Quirks mode 2 is HTML 4.0 Transitional without a URL."
http://www.fu2k.org/alex/css/cssjunk/ie8/xua

Combating Classitis with Cascades and Sequential Selectors
By Rob Glazebrook.
"There is a disease out there in the CSS world. It can afflict anything 
from the meanest weblog (or the nicest ones too, I suppose) to the 
greatest of corporate websites. It's called Classitis, and I've 
encountered it far too often in my professional work. Perhaps you've 
seen it too..."
http://www.cssnewbie.com/combating-classitis/

8 Premium One Line CSS Tips
By Alen Grakalic.
"The best solutions are often the simplest. Here's a list of 8 tips 
that contain only one css property..."
http://www.cssglobe.com/post/1392/8-premium-one-line-css-tips

Liquid Expandable Section With Rounded Corners Using CSS
By Antonio Lupetti.
"This tutorial explains how to design a nice liquid expandable section 
with rounded corners (top-left, top-right, bottom-left, bottom-right) 
using some lines of CSS, HTML and JavaScript code..."
http://tinyurl.com/3blsk4

Great CSS Techniques and the Simple Truth Behind Them
By Jens Meiert.
"There is a simple recipe to judge CSS techniques: Does the method in 
question require HTML additions and modifications beyond introducing 
certain IDs or classes?..."
http://meiert.com/en/blog/20080311/great-css-techniques/

Margins and Paddings, Part 4 - Solution 2
By Niels Matthijs.
"Last week we looked at a first solution concerning the margins and 
paddings problem. This try-out provided some good information on the 
problems we are facing when dealing with margins and paddings. 
Especially IE6 was acting up in it's failure to target first-child 
elements. So let's try to fix that this time around."
http://www.onderhond.com/blog/work/margins-paddings-solution2

+03: EVENTS.

2008 South Carolina IT and Web Accessibility Conference
March 19, 2008.
Columbia, South Carolina, U.S.A.
http://www.access-sc.org/2008conference.shtml

Don't Make Me Think: The Discount Usability Testing Workshop
April 3, 2008 in Boston Massachusetts, U.S.A.
May 16, 2008 in Chicago, U.S.A.
http://www.sensible.com/workshops.html

Site Search Analytics for a Better User Experience
April 4, 2008 in Boston Massachusetts, U.S.A.
May 15, 2008 in Chicago, U.S.A.
http://louisrosenfeld.com/presentations/seminars/site_search_analytics/

Singularity
October 24-26, 2008.
Large-scale online web conference.
http://singularity08.com/

Higher Ground Conference
November 11-14, 2008.
Boulder, Colorado, U.S.A.
http://www.colorado.edu/ATconference/

+04: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

Wireframing in a Web 2.0 World
By Richard Rutter.
"Here's the links you'll need from mine and James's wireframing 
presentation at South by Southwest."
http://www.clagnut.com/blog/2104/

+05: JAVASCRIPT.

JavaScript in Internet Explorer 8
By John Resig.
"Our day has finally come. CSS coders got some love with Internet 
Explorer 7 - us JavaScript folk got absolutely nothing. In fact, at 
last count, all we got were a couple new bugs to deal with (file:// 
requests not working via XMLHttpRequest and 
<object>.getElementsByTagName("*") always returning no elements)..."
http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-in-internet-explorer-8/

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 Whitepapers, W3C's ARIA Support
By Microsoft.
"The W3C defines ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) as a 
syntax for making dynamic Web content and custom UI controls 
accessible. Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for Developers uses ARIA role, 
state, and property information to communicate with assistive 
technologies. Instead of building separate simplified Web pages for 
accessibility, you can use ARIA to markup your rich Web applications 
with roles, states, and properties."
http://tinyurl.com/2hvf9d

Screen Readers and Javascript
By Steve Faulkner.
CSUN 2007 presentation slides.
http://www.paciellogroup.com/CSUN/

IE8 Beta 1 - First Tests
By Peter-Paul Koch.
"...There's a lot to be said about its CSS and JavaScript support, and 
I'm going to say it all. My readers, as well as the IE team, expect 
that..."
http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2008/03/ie8_beta_1_firs.html

+06: MISCELLANEOUS.

2008 SXSW Podcasts
http://2008.sxsw.com/blogs/podcasts.php

SXSW Videos
By viddler.com.
http://sxswvideos.com/

Successful Teams Use Web Standards  (Video)
By Chris Heilmann.
"The lovely people at Paris Web just released all the videos of the 
2007 conference on dailymotion. My talk is the only English one and 
deals with the topic of how following web standards helps your team to 
be more successful."
http://tinyurl.com/yqfdn9

+07: PHP.

Calculating Date Difference More Precisely in PHP
By Hasin Hayder.
"This function is production ready and you can use it in any of your 
application which mainly works with these date difference. I have found 
it somewhere in web, just forgot the source. Thanks to the unknown 
author of this excellent function..."
http://tinyurl.com/ypf7fo

+08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

Warning! This Book Could Be Hazardous to the Web!
By WaSP Street Team.
"How many outdated web design and development books are lurking in your 
local library, school or college, waiting to corrupt an innocent mind? 
Want to warn the unsuspecting of these hazardous materials while 
encouraging librarians to update their shelves? Join the WaSP Street 
Team by downloading and printing copies of these bookmarks (PDF 3.4MB). 
Then place these bookmarks in harmfully outdated books..."
http://tinyurl.com/36oe9v

Design By Attrition
By Sam Ruby.
"...That WHATWG has consistently made it abundantly clear that the W3C 
is but one of many sources of input for HTML5.  What IE actually 
implements is another source.  Both clearly view namespace support as 
important.  Yet the WHATWG seems to assign no urgency to this issue. 
The prevailing attitude is one of YAGNI..."
http://intertwingly.net/blog/2008/03/07/Design-By-Attrition#c1205077041

Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Kit
By Microsoft.
"How do I make my site 'light up' with Internet Explorer 8?..."
http://tinyurl.com/2s5mwu

IE8: The Bad
By Anne Van Kesteren.
"There are quite a few good things about the Microsoft release, such as 
showing that HTML5 is looked at, Acid2 is (almost) being passed, and 
CSS support is improving, but there are quite a few evil things as 
well..."
http://annevankesteren.nl/2008/03/ie8-bad

SXSW: Browser Wars Become Browser Peace? Not Quite
By AppScout.
"Last year's Browser Wars panel wasn't very well attended, considering 
the subject matter (maybe it was the 10 am start time). But the powers 
that be have moved the panel to the afternoon, kept the same cast of 
characters, and this year's Part II of the panel has a capacity crowd. 
And, as it was last year, it's the best SXSW panel I've seen this 
year..."
http://www.appscout.com/2008/03/sxsw_browser_wars_become_brows.php

Templating Language for Authoring Tools
By Karl Dubost.
"wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) authoring tools are very rarely 
wysiwym (what you see is what you mean) tools. When reading a book we 
leverage the meaning from the layout and the style of the text. We know 
that this little number at the bottom right is the number of the page, 
and not part of the flow of the text. Computers don't. Computers are 
dumb. Really they are..."
http://www.w3.org/QA/2008/03/web-templating-language.html

HTML WG Members Working Together
By Karl Dubost.
"...It is encouraging to see W3C as forum where people can discuss, 
innovate and share issues."
http://www.w3.org/QA/2008/03/html-wg-working-together.html

+09: USABILITY.

The Design of Internal Enterprise Applications
By Jesper Ronn-Jensen.
I really fell in spontaneous love with this drawing, that shows the 
relation between the simplest and the most complex of all known 
products and websites. Apple and Google representing the first. 
Internal Enterpricey applications representing the latter..."
http://tinyurl.com/2fx8ux

Two More Usability Challenges for Designing  Web Apps
By Jared M. Spool.
"...spending time watching users interact with the application will 
help identify places where its life in the browser may present a 
challenge. This is particularly effective if the team can spend time in 
the user's natural environment, such as their office or home, where 
they can see how they work and what equipment and software they're 
employing."
http://www.uie.com/articles/web_app_challenges_2/

+10: XML.

The Incredible, Scalable SVG
By Shelley Powers.
"One of the advantages of SVG over some other graphics capability is 
the fact that SVG is vector-based..."
http://realtech.burningbird.net/graphics/the-incredible-scalable-svg/

[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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+ 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.]