[webdev] Web Design Update: March 20, 2008

[Laura Carlson]

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 6, Issue 39, March 20, 2008.

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

++ISSUE 39 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: JAVASCRIPT.
05: MISCELLANEOUS.
06: PHP.
07: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
08: USABILITY.

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

[Contents ends.]


++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

User Testing with Intellectually Disabled Users
By George Ornbo.
"Two days of user testing with a group of users from Ellingham 
Employment Services was invaluable in learning about how intellectually 
disabled users use the internet."
http://tinyurl.com/2yt32a

Accessibility and Business Value Study
By The Customer Respect Group.
"A new study by The Customer Respect Group finds that companies 
strategically invested in removing barriers to customer interaction are 
deriving significant hard and soft benefits from accessibility 
initiatives..."
http://www.customerrespect.com/default.asp?hdnFilename=bwaccq108np.htm

UPA Needs a Lesson in Accessibility
By Celeste Lyn Paul.
"For an organization which is trying to push Accessibility as a 
complement to Usability, the Usability Professionals' Association (UPA) 
fails..."
http://weblog.obso1337.org/2008/upa-needs-a-lesson-in-accessibility/


+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Styling Buttons, and Achieving Sliding Doors with Them
By Robert Nyman.
"As you all know, form elements aren't that easy to style, especially 
not consistently. At a first glance, the button element seems like a 
sure winner, but once you delve into it..."
http://tinyurl.com/2slrej

Progressive CSS Enhancement
By John Resig.
"A common - and desirable - technique for constructing JavaScript-based 
web applications is that of progressive enhancement: only providing 
capable browsers with the features that they are capable of utilizing - 
but providing incapable browsers with an adequate, albeit degraded, 
experience otherwise..."
http://ejohn.org/blog/progressive-css-enhancement/

Style Tables With CSS
By Emil Stenstrom.
"I don't deal too much with tables. Not because I don't want to but 
because clients hardly ever want to use them. My guess is that they are 
too hard to create with today's WYSIWYG editors, and therefore get left 
out. It happens though that I have one or two static tables I need to 
style, and then I get to use a couple of my tricks..."
http://friendlybit.com/css/style-tables-with-css/

Write a Well Structured CSS File Without Becoming Crazy
By Antonio Lupetti.
"This is a descriptive post about how to write a well structured CSS 
file..."
http://tinyurl.com/37f9z3

CSS Adjacent-Sibling Selector
By Fabian van Luyn.
"Most CSS selectors are well known, but there are some interesting 
selectors that are not common used, like the adjacent-sibling selector. 
An adjacent sibling selector will select the sibling immediately 
following an element, with the same parent. In this example, I will 
show you how to use the adjacent-sibling selector to style this list..."
http://www.onyx-design.net/weblog2/css/css-adjacent-sibling-selector/

Revisiting Progressive Enhancement in CSS
By Jonathan Christopher.
"In my opinion, progressive enhancement is by far one of the most 
important things to embrace as a Web developer. Browser inconsistencies 
are a thorn in the sides of anyone making websites, but at the end of 
the day, visitors don't care about the trouble you had making sure the 
design rendered well in all cases. It's our job to ensure transparency 
in as many cases as possible..."
http://tinyurl.com/ysssec

Margins and Paddings, Part 5 - Final Solution
By Niels Matthijs.
"After my first  two attempts I haven't made any real progress yet, and 
I have only one attempt left to find a good, solid solution. Time to 
get serious and see how we can fix the issues we've been having with 
our previous attempts. Time for a change of tactics. Here comes the 
third and final solution to our margins and paddings problem."
http://www.onderhond.com/blog/onderhond/margins-paddings-solution3


+03: EVENTS.

Creating Customer-Centric Websites
May 5-6, 2008.
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
http://neoinsight.com/workshops/mcgovern-overview.html

Open Tech 2008
July 5, 2008.
London, United Kingdom.
http://www.ukuug.org/events/opentech2008/

SVG Open 2008
6th International Conference on Scalable Vector Graphics
August 26-28, 2008.
Nuremberg, Germany
http://www.svgopen.org/2008/index.php


+04: JAVASCRIPT.

WAI-ARIA Best Practices
By Lisa Pappas, Michael Cooper, and Richard Schwerdtfeger.
"This document specifies Best Practices for delivering accessible rich 
internet applications using WAI-ARIA [ARIA]. The principle objective is 
to produce a usable, accessible experience over the Web. It provides 
recommended approaches to create accessible Web content using WAI-ARIA 
roles, states, and properties to make widgets, navigation, and 
behaviors accessible. The document also describes considerations that 
might not be evident to most implementers from the WAI-ARIA 
specification alone. This document is directed primarily to Web 
application developers, but the guidance is also useful to user agent 
and assistive technology developers..."
http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria-practices/

Accessible Rich Internet Applications Update
By Martin Kliehm.
"So Gez Lemon and I had our core conversation at South by Southwest 
(SXSW) on Sunday, and it went really well. No wonder, we had Shawn 
Henry from W3C WAI in the audience as well as Lisa Pappas who is one of 
the authors or WAI ARIA, plus Becky Gibson from IBM who initiated the 
whole thing with Rich Schwerdtfeger a couple of years ago."
http://learningtheworld.eu/2008/wai-aria-update/

Applying WAI-ARIA to Yahoo! Mail
By Steve Faulkner.
Hans Hillen  and Victor Tsarin's  CSUN 2008 presentation slides.
http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/?p=45

Transparency in Ajax Applications
By Billy Hoffman and Bryan Sullivan.
"Myth: Ajax applications are black box systems, just like regular Web 
applications."
http://tinyurl.com/27nros


+05: MISCELLANEOUS.

Question Your Work
By Jason Fried.
"Why are we doing this? What problem are we solving? Is this actually 
useful? 4. Are we adding value? Will this change behavior? Is there an 
easier way? What's the opportunity cost? Is it really worth it?"
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/913-question-your-work


+06: PHP.

Object-Oriented Programming
By Paul Hudson.
"Paul Hudson takes the blood, sweat and tears out of mastering 
object-oriented programming, a powerful technique that's otherwise 
known as OOP."
http://www.netmag.co.uk/zine/home/object-oriented-programming


+07: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

A Kiss Chris Wilson Unconference
By Virgina DeBolt.
"...I think we should begin planning an unconference dedicated to 
delivering kisses to Chris Wilson when Microsoft finally gets the 
support for web standards in IE 8 done right..."
http://www.webteacher.ws/2008/03/16/a-kiss-chris-wilson-unconference/

Martian Headsets
By Joel Spolsky.
"You're about to see the mother of all flamewars on internet groups 
where web developers hang out. It'll make the Battle of Stalingrad look 
like that time your sister-in-law stormed out of afternoon tea at your 
grandmother's and wrapped the Mustang around a tree..."
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html

Joel Spolsky: Crap is Good
By Shelley Powers.
"Joel Spolksy just spent several thousand words and accompanying 
diagrams saying one thing: we did things crappy in the past, and we 
should continue doing things crappy in the future because crap is easy. 
Where do I start?..."
http://realtech.burningbird.net/standards/joel-spolsky-crap-is-good/

Reality Distortion Fields
By Henri Sivonen
"Joel Spolsky wrote an article about the IE8 engine modes. The article 
starts with good and insightful general technology strategy wisdom and 
then proceeds to make bad specific conclusions."
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/rdf/


+08: USABILITY.

Bridging the Designer User Gap
By Jakob Nielsen.
"Depending on how representative designers are of the target audience, 
a project might need more or less user testing. Still, usability 
concerns never go away completely."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designer-user-differences.html

Do You Make These User Experience Mistakes?
By Joanna Bawa.
"Online retailers and other website owners still have plenty of room 
for improvement, as some are still guilty of some avoidable usability 
problems."
http://tinyurl.com/2bocge

Why We're Powerless To Resist Grazing On Endless Web Data
By Lee Gomes.
"While there is a certain grand mystery to some aspects of human 
behavior, others can be easily explained. Just find yourself a 
garden-variety house cat, along with a $10 laser pointer..."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120527756506928579.html?mod=djemTECH

Closing the Communication Loop
By Steve Baty.
"What usability testing won't necessarily tell us are the ways in which 
an application fails to meet users’ expectations."
http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000270.php


[Section one ends.]


++ SECTION TWO:

+09: 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.]