[webdev] Web Design Update: May 9, 2008

[Laura Carlson]

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 6, Issue 46, May 9, 2008.

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

++ISSUE 46 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: EVENTS.
06: JAVASCRIPT.
07: NAVIGATION.
08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
09: USABILITY.

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

[Contents ends.]


++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Action 54: First Draft
By Steven Faulkner, Joshue O Connor, and Laura Carlson.
"The following draft text is based on the February 6, 2008 PFWG finding 
that the HTMLWG "...re-work the <img> element section to bring it into 
line as techniques for implementing WCAG 2.0.We say 2.0 because of the 
strong likelihood that WCAG 2.0 will precede HTML5 to Recommendation 
status..."
http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/misc/uc/
Related email:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2008May/0121.html

@alt and the Flickr Defense
By Matt May.
"Alt text matters to users. When an image is not visible, due either to 
a user's own visual or cognitive disability, or their use of a 
low-bandwidth or intermittent connection to the web, @alt is there to 
provide the necessary, missing semantics. This is a good thing. So 
good, in fact, that @alt is a required attribute in HTML 4.01 and all 
flavors of XHTML. If you omit alt text, your code is not valid HTML. 
However, as of today, alt is not a required attribute for the img 
element in HTML5..."
http://tinyurl.com/5mozpz

Best Practices: Writing for Accessibility
By Joe Dolson.
"...Disregarding issues concerning the use of abbreviations, 
typography, headings, and other semantic structures in HTML, the simple 
use of punctuation can be a significant barrier. This is a problem 
which applies to all text content for any user of a screen reader, in 
particular, although following these suggestions will benefit any 
reader of your content..."
http://tinyurl.com/3fgtc5

WCAG 2 Requirements at Risk
By Lisa Herrod.
"Since April 30, when the WCAG 2.0 Candidate Recommendation (CR) was 
released, there has been a ton of posts across the web telling us the 
WCAG 2 is almost, almost complete. I'm not here to do that. The news is 
5 days old and I have no intention of clogging up your RSS by 
regurgitating the same content? as important as it is. What I do want 
to highlight is that there are a number of WCAG 2 requirements at 
risk..."
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/05/04/wcag-2-requirements-at-risk/

Accessibility Evaluators Aren't Worthless
By Mike Cherim.
"As seen on our Resources page, there are a number of web accessibility 
evaluation tools available to developers. Most accessible web 
developers fall into three groups as it pertains to the value of these 
tools. Either they love them, hate them, or don't really understand how 
to use them. The purpose of this article is to encourage those who love 
them to not overly depend on them, those who hate them to stop being 
haters, and those who don't understand them to come away with an open 
mind."
http://tinyurl.com/5w2bxu


+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Improving Code Readability With CSS Styleguides
By Vitaly Friedman and Sven Lennartz.
"This article presents 5 coding techniques which can dramatically 
improve management and simplify maintainability of your code. You can 
browse through the references listed under the article ? they contain 
further information about how you can achieve a well-organized and 
well-structured code."
http://tinyurl.com/6n6a3w

Using CSS to Do Anything
By noupe.
"CSS can powerfully open the doors to a lot of rich and unique 
techniques. Today we are presenting a round-up of CSS coding, creative 
approaches and techniques. Definitely worth taking a very close look 
at! We also included some basic techniques you can probably use in 
every project you are developing. This is just the third article in 
this series , the forth part will be coming soon, stay tuned and 
Enjoy!..."
http://tinyurl.com/3w3r6p

Understanding CSS Positioning, part 1
By Kilian Valkhof.
"Without a doubt, positioning, or the layout, is the hardest part of 
CSS. Not only because it ever so often varies between browsers, but 
also because CSS has a lot of ways to position an element, all with 
various (dis) advantages. This series of articles will thrive to 
explain the possibilities you have in positioning. It doesn't only 
cover positioning, but also properties that define layout such as 
display and float, and a preview of the new CSS3 layout modules..."
http://tinyurl.com/5d7gfo


+03: DREAMWEAVER.

Use Dreamweaver CS3 Templates to Save Time
By Stefan Mischook.
"Dreamweaver has a nice collection of bare-bones web templates. One 
thing I found cool about these templates, is that they contain a lot of 
notes that describe why they (the web-nerds at Adobe) have certain 
things in place - like the specific code they used to deal with a given 
CSS layout issue...."
http://www.killersites.com/blog/2008/dreamweaver-cs3-templates/


+04: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Are Your Website Metrics Reliable?
By Gerry McGovern.
"Not only do many websites have unreliable metrics; they're usually 
measuring the wrong things."
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2008/nt-2008-05-05-metrics.htm

Use Scenarios and Use Cases
By Celeste Lyn Paul.
"Some of the most common questions I have received in relation to the 
KDE User Research Profiles have been what are use scenarios, how are 
they different from use cases, and why do I need them. Hopefully some 
of this information will clarify the difference between use cases and 
scenarios and why use scenarios are so important."
http://weblog.obso1337.org/2008/use-scenarios-and-use-cases/


+05: EVENTS.

An Introduction to W3C's Mobile Web Best Practices
May 26 - June 20 2008.
Online course.
http://www.w3.org/2008/03/MobiWeb101/Overview.html


+06: JAVASCRIPT.

Syntax for ARIA: Cost-benefit analysis
By Henry S. Thompson.
"...In preparing this analysis, I have reviewed the available concrete 
evidence bearing on the matter, and have carried out a considerable 
amount of work to replicate and, in some cases, correct or extend, 
testing which has been done in the past. The details are available in a 
report entitled Some test results concerning ARIA attribute syntax...."
http://www.w3.org/QA/2008/05/syntax_for_aria_costbenefit_an.html

Safari Gets Support for ARIA
By Gez Lemon.
"WebKit, the open source application framework behind Safari and other 
browsers, announced that they have started to add support for 
WAI-ARIA..."
http://juicystudio.com/article/safari-support-aria.php

Event Delegation with JavaScript
By Robert Nyman.
"There has been a fair share about JavaScript and event delegation, but 
since a lot of people doesn't seem to have read it, I thought I'd 
re-iterate the point here. The more the merrier, right?..."
http://www.robertnyman.com/2008/05/04/event-delegation-with-javascript/

Free Chapter from Douglas Crockford’s 'JavaScript: The Good Parts'
By Eric Miraglia.
"...Douglas and his editors at O'Reilly were kind enough to let us 
offer a sneak preview of JavaScript: The Good Parts here,,,"
http://yuiblog.com/blog/2008/05/05/crockford-inheritance/

Improve Your Page Performance With Lazy Loading
By Jakob Heuser.
Today's web applications can necessitate a huge weight of both
JavaScript and CSS--but in many application designs huge sections
can be delayed, speeding up the total page response time to the
user. Jakob Heuser shows us how to create a lazy loading utility,
and start cutting down on your load times.
http://tinyurl.com/5dyfxe


+07: NAVIGATION.

Image Replacement + Google
By Dave Shea.
"...it appears that, short of a set of stone tablets carried down from 
the hills of Mountain View, we do have a fairly clear answer. Using CSS 
image replacement in a responsible way, where the image truthfully 
represents the content it’s replacing, is safe to use. The simple act 
of hiding text from users is not enough to get your site banned from 
Google’s index."
http://mezzoblue.com/archives/2008/05/05/image_replac/

Where SEO and Accessibility Collide
By Alastair Campbell.
"...As an SEO specific cheat sheet, it is doing what it is supposed to. 
However, I wouldn't give it to a developer or content author without 
the caveat that keywords should be included where applicable, that is 
not the purpose of those attributes. (And just skip the title attribute 
on text links.)"
http://alastairc.ac/2008/05/where-seo-and-accessibility-collid/

What SEO/SEM Professionals Should Know About Website Usability
By Shari Thurow.
"...Both website usability and SEO/SEM are iterative processes, meaning 
that methodology based on a cyclic process of prototyping, testing, 
analyzing, and refining a work in progress...At the heart of iterative 
design is the objective observation of interaction between users and an 
interface: not focus groups, not web analytics, and not an SEO 
professional's personal opinion about website usability."
http://searchengineland.com/080410-142200.php

What SEO/SEM Professionals Should Know About Website Usability - Part 2
By Shari Thurow.
"...For this installment, website usability guru Jakob Nielsen and Kim 
Krause Berg share their observations and perspectives..."
http://searchengineland.com/080501-115858.php


+08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

When the Fall is All That's Left
By Mark Pilgrim.
"...I refer, of course, to the Acid 3 test cooked up by the inimitable 
Ian Hickson and his motley crew of meddling minions. The test gives a 
numerical score that purports to rank a browser’s compatibility with a 
potpourri of well-established web standards. Of course any such test is 
guaranteed to be unfair to somebody, but this one was especially unfair 
to everybody since the makers intentionally sought out bugs in major 
browsers to highlight their incompatibilities. That, by itself, is not 
the story...C'mon, guys. It’s not the score that matters, it’s the 
follow up. It’s the conversation you have, the promises you make, the 
progress you show the next day and the day after that and the day after 
that..."
http://tinyurl.com/62hayc

Information Design Patterns
By Niceone.
"A sophisticated online collection of about 48 design patterns that 
describe distinct methods for the display of interactive information 
graphics, their active behavior as well as the forms of user 
interaction with them."
http://niceone.org/infodesign/


+09: USABILITY.

How Little Do Users Read?
By Jakob Nielsen.
"On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the 
words during an average visit; 20% is more likely."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/percent-text-read.html

Volume Doesn't Matter
By Andy Rutledge.
"Despite what you've read, the volume of text on your page in and of 
itself has no impact on the success of your site. Statisticians will 
tell you otherwise, because they observe specific behaviors and 
perceive patterns and think that their perceptions easily translate 
into concrete conclusions. They're usually wrong on this score. The 
fact is it doesn't matter what volume of copy you have if the copy is 
well designed."
http://www.andyrutledge.com/volume-doesnt-matter.php

Zebra Striping: Does it Really Help?
By Jessica Enders.
"Just because a design convention exists doesn't mean it works. Our 
field runneth over with design patterns, but is low on evidence of 
their utility. Jessica Enders drops some science on the widespread 
belief that zebra stripes aid the reader by guiding the eye along a 
table row."
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/zebrastripingdoesithelp

Layering the Customer Experience
By Kath Straub.
"Humor helps, but only if it's not funny to start with..."
http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/apr08.asp#kath


[Section one ends.]


++ SECTION TWO:

+10: 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 
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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.]