[webdev] Web Design Update: April 18, 2008

Fri Apr 18 06:10:27 CDT 2008

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 6, Issue 43, April 18, 2008.

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

++ISSUE 43 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: EVALUATION & TESTING.
04: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
05: JAVASCRIPT.
06: NAVIGATION.
07: PHP.
08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
08: TYPOGRAPHY.
10: USABILITY.
11: XML.

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

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

SharePoint and Web Accessibility
By Bruce Lawson.
"I work in the legal sector, so occasionally read the industry magazine 
Internet Newsletter for Lawyers. Last month they had an article 
bringing up the wonders of SharePoint, so I wrote in to the editor 
asking why they hadn't mentioned its accessibility problems. The editor 
asked me to write them an article; as their mag is subscription-only, I 
reproduce it here..."
http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2008/sharepoint-and-web-accessibility/

Avoiding Redundant title Attributes
By Mike Davies.
"The title attribute is one of the overlooked attributes in the HTML 
collection. It's most often used to mark up abbreviations with their 
expanded forms. Sometimes it's used to rout around Internet Explorer's 
tooltip behavior of image alt attributes..."
http://tinyurl.com/3g8gxl

Blind Users Still Struggle With 'Maddening' Computing Obstacles
By Lamont Wood.
" Put your graphical user interface to this test: Adjust the contrast 
on your display until the screen is completely black. Now, perform 
basic e-mail, word processing and Web-browsing tasks. What? Having a 
problem? Welcome to the world of the 1.3 million Americans who are 
blind..."
http://tinyurl.com/66ou8m

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Naming id's With Numbers
By Russ Weakley.
"...The simple answer is that the ID name must be unique in a document 
and it must begin with a letter - not a number..."
http://www.maxdesign.com.au/2008/04/10/naming-ids-with-numbers/

No CSS Reset
By Jonathan Snook.
"When asked recently about using a CSS reset stylesheet, I readily 
admitted that I don't use them. I don't use them for my blog or for any 
project that I work on. Admitting such can raise an eyebrow or two. 
Reset stylesheets are definitely becoming commonplace ? as you'd expect 
with companies like Yahoo and industry leaders like Eric Meyer actively 
using them. So, why haven't I jumped on board? "
http://snook.ca/archives/html_and_css/no_css_reset/

CSS: Top Secret Classification
By James Payne.
"This article will self-destruct in twenty seconds. Okay, not really; 
it will probably take you longer than that to read it, and you may even 
want to use it as a reference. In this mind-blowing episode, we discuss 
the many classification properties in CSS, all of which give you the 
ability to determine how and where your elements are displayed."
http://tinyurl.com/3jqa24

Pretty Up Your Forms with CSS
By Andrew Rowls.
"Let's face it: form elements au natural are NOT pretty. So what do we 
do with them?..."
http://techknack.blogspot.com/2008/04/pretty-up-your-forms-with-css.html

+03: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Sample Size Calculator for a Completion Rate
By Jeff Sauro.
"Use this calculator to understand how sample size changes will affect 
the confidence interval around a completion rate."
http://www.measuringusability.com/comp_sample.php

+04: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

IA Summit 2008 Slides
By NLC Internet Marketing Blog.
"There have been some absolutely phenomenal presentations at the IA 
Summit in Miami so far. If you didn't happen to make it out to the 
conference or you'd like to revisit the material, I've amassed a list 
of IA Summit podcasts and PowerPoint slides. Not all presentations have 
been made available online yet so I'll make a follow-up post in a 
couple of days to capture any new presentation links."
http://tinyurl.com/48vj7r

+05: JAVASCRIPT.

JavaScript Loop Performance
By Robert Nyman.
"When developing JavaScript, performance is one of the vital things. 
Therefore, I thought I'd share the performance of loops with 
JavaScript, and give some advice..."
http://www.robertnyman.com/2008/04/11/javascript-loop-performance/

Javascript Cloning Objects
By Gareth Heyes.
"...When cloning a object in Javascript many of the examples I found 
used for(i in..) to traverse the properties and copy each of them. 
There is a nicer way to do this using the uneval function like this..."
http://www.thespanner.co.uk/2008/04/10/javascript-cloning-objects/

Do You Validate your JavaScript Code?
By Robert Nyman.
"Writing about whether people validate their CSS, it made me wonder 
about how/if people ensure the quality of their JavaScript code. When I 
wrote about validating CSS, some of the feedback was that if you 
validate/promote valid HTML, naturally you should validate your CSS. 
With that sentiment, I'd argue that it's as, if not more, important to 
also validate your JavaScript code (if you don't agree, skip to the 
question at the end of this post, and give me a reply to that)."
http://tinyurl.com/69tdx7

+06: NAVIGATION.

5 Reasons Why Search Engine Optimization is like Horse Racing
By Neerav Bhatt.
"Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of trying to improve a 
website's search engine rank to attract more people to it and ensure 
those people are provided with useful high quality information that 
solves their problems and answers their questions. I was trying to 
think of a good analogy to explain what SEO is like and I came up with 
horse racing because I see many similarities..."
http://www.bhatt.id.au/blog/5-reasons-why-seo-is-like-horse-racing/

+07: PHP.

PHP Header Can Only Be Called Once
By Jonathan Snook.
"I hate spending too much time just trying to solve one little problem. 
This was seriously one of those times..."
http://snook.ca/archives/php/header_called_once/

Better Object Handling with PHP Singletons
By Christian Montoya.
"Recently I was researching local caching options for PHP when I came 
across the XCache var cache - a file-based caching interface that comes 
with the XCache opcode cacher (and only requires a small change in the 
PHP config). While looking for example code to use in my project, I 
came across an OOP API wrapper that used a design pattern I hadn't seen 
before in PHP: the singleton. I'm going to repost the code that sparked 
my interest in using singletons consistently, which even includes 
examples for usage..."
http://tinyurl.com/69kmsb

+08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

A Validator is Not an Accessibility Evaluation Tool?
By Mike Smith.
"Currently, the most active discussion thread on the HTML working 
group's public mailing list, public-html, is one regarding the issue of 
whether in HTML5 the alt attribute should always be required on images. 
And Henri Sivonen is among the most active participants in that 
discussion, posting to that thread (among other messages), the 
following..."
http://www.w3.org/QA/2008/04/badges.html

+09: TYPOGRAPHY.

eXtreme Type Terminology
By Paul Dean.
"An invisible grid of parallel horizontal lines is used as a constant 
reference in the creation of a font..."
http://ilovetypography.com/2008/04/11/extreme-type-terminology-part-3/

+10: USABILITY.

Four Bad Designs
By Jakob Nielsen.
"Bad content, bad links, bad navigation, bad category pages... which is 
worst for business? In these examples, bad content takes the prize for 
costing the company the most money."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/bad-design.html

+11: XML.

SVG and MathML Annexes to HTML5
By Sam Ruby.
"As Anne previewed, HTML5 has recently added support for data 
attributes and MathML and SVG vocabularies..."
http://intertwingly.net/blog/2008/04/11/SVG-and-MathML-Annexes-to-HTML5

HTML5: SVG in text/html Dropped For Now
By Anne Van Kesteren.
"Because of a request from the SVG Working Group SVG support in the 
HTML parser has been commented out..."
http://annevankesteren.nl/2008/04/html5-svg

Will RSS Ever Go Mainstream?
By Brian Clark.
"...Over two years later, email is still very much alive? But the 
public at large either doesn't care about RSS, or doesn't know they're 
using it (a la My Yahoo, etc)..."
http://www.copyblogger.com/rss-mainstream/

[Section one ends.]

++ SECTION TWO:

+12: 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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+ TEXT EMAIL NEWSLETTER (TEN).

As a navigation aid for screen readers we do our best to conform to the 
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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.]