[webdev] Web Design Update: July 24, 2008

Thu Jul 24 06:13:22 CDT 2008

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 7, Issue 04, July 24, 2008.

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

++ISSUE 04 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: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
07: JAVASCRIPT.
08: MISCELLANEOUS.
09: PHP.
10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
11: TYPOGRAPHY.
12: USABILITY.

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

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Spam vs. Accessibility
By Joe Dolson.
"The whole world of spam is an accessibility nightmare. The concept 
behind web accessibility is to ensure that users can access the 
complete functionality of your web site but how do you cope with the 
fact that spambots will happily take advantage of any hole you leave..."
http://www.joedolson.com/articles/2008/06/spam-vs-accessibility/

W3C Recently Posts Updated Docs on Relationship Between Usability and 
Accessibility
By Shawn M. Lauriat.
"The W3C posted an update to the Relationship between Mobile Web Best 
Practices (MWBP) and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), 
something which I (for some reason) don't remember seeing go by in 
January when they posted the initial draft..."
http://tinyurl.com/6klpyy

The Biggest Barrier to Accessibility and Inclusive Design Is Us
By Christian Heilmann.
"...Accessibility and inclusive design has one massive enemy: bad 
communication..."
http://tinyurl.com/6alpcw

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Better Foreground Sprites
By Martin Kliehm.
"A while ago I wrote about using CSS Sprites in img tags, calling it 
Foreground Sprites. Thus you avoid performance-eating HTTP requests, 
but the page turns really ugly when CSS is switched off because the 
sprite image will be displayed in its full size..."
http://learningtheworld.eu/2008/better-foreground-sprites/

Smart CSS Ain't Always Sexy CSS
By Martin Ringlein.
"The web industry has never been short of zealots. Since the age of the 
spacer-gif, there have always been designers ready to fight for their 
preferred technique--and none more so than CSS nerds. If you've ever 
agonized over finding the perfect semantic class name, this is the 
article for you. Martin Ringlein tells us why being sexy is 
overrated..."
http://www.digital-web.com/articles/smart_CSS_aint_always_sexy_CSS/

CSS Type Selectors/Designing the Semantic Web
By Niels Matthijs.
"html and css are closely connected, no doubt about that. When we style 
a web document we do it through the mark-up of the document. It's one 
of the pillars of modern web design and we all take it for granted. But 
take a closer look and you'll find that this way of working isn't 
always as logical as it sounds. This article will focus on the way html 
and css coexist and the effect this should have on the way we write our 
css..."
http://www.onderhond.com/blog/work/leaving-out-css-type-selectors

CSS For Absolute Beginners - Part 1: Syntax and Type Selectors
By Adrian Senior.
"Welcome to the first in a series of CSS Absolute Beginners articles 
and tutorials. My aim throughout this series will be to introduce the 
complete CSS novice to the exciting world of CSS. This will be achieved 
by starting with the very basics of the language and building from 
there. The aim will be to bring you to a good level of ability and 
provide the under-pinning knowledge to make well informed decisions as 
you begin to write your own style sheets."
http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=89985

+03: DREAMWEAVER.

Dreamweaver CS4 Video Tutorial
By Stefan Mischook.
"Dreamweaver CS4 is sporting a brand new interface that bring 
Dreamweaver up-to-speed with the other Adobe products. In this video I 
give you a quick tour looking at how the new user interface works..."
http://www.killersites.com/blog/2008/dreamweaver-cs4-video-tutorial/

New Features in Dreamweaver CS4 Video Tutorial
By Stefan Mischook.
"I just released a video that goes over my top 3 favorite new features 
in Dreamweaver CS4..."
http://tinyurl.com/6enksf

+04: EVALUATION & TESTING.

User Interviews - A Basic Introduction
By Alistair Gray.
"...Interviews are a great way to find in-depth information about your 
users. They're fairly easy to organize, need very little facilities, 
and can be a lot of fun! Without understanding your users, how can your 
site possibly fulfil their needs?"
http://tinyurl.com/5jfhe4

+05: EVENTS.

Oz-IA 2008
September 20-21 2008.
Sydney, Australia.
http://www.oz-ia.org/2008/

Second Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval
October 23, 2008
Redmond, Washington, U.S.A.
http://research.microsoft.com/~ryenw/hcir2008/

+06: FLASH.

Draft Documentation for Flash Accessibility Implementation
By Andrew Kirkpatrick.
"Accessibility in the Flash Player and in products that depend on it is 
very important, and there is a lot more built in support for 
accessibility than most people are aware of. The Flash Player supports 
over 60 different role constants and has mechanisms for developers to 
set role and state information for controls, has methods for getting 
and setting values, and allows developers to define the accessibility 
location information for a control to help screen magnification tools 
restrict the magnified viewport, control the accessibility API focus 
and selection, and more..."
http://tinyurl.com/6ekotd

+07: JAVASCRIPT.

Easy ARIA Tip 3: aria-invalid and role "alert"
By Marco Zehe.
"I know, I know, it's been a while since I posted my last Easy ARIA 
tip. But I'm hoping that this one will find you all excited and willing 
to play with it some more..."
http://tinyurl.com/6pj6ga

Again with the Ajax Accessibility
By Christian Heilman.
Christian AbilityNet presentation slides.
http://www.slideshare.net/cheilmann/again-with-the-ajax-accessibility

JavaScript Event Delegation is Easier than You Think
By Andrew Tetlaw.
"If you're into adding a little JavaScript interactivity to your web 
pages you may have heard of JavaScript event delegation and thought it 
was one of those convoluted design patterns only hardcore JavaScript 
programmers worry about. The truth is, if you already know how to add 
JavaScript event handlers, it's a snap to implement..."
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/?p=2684

+08: MISCELLANEOUS.

Stephanie Sullivan Interview
By Christopher Schmitt.
"For a Web geek, Stephanie Sullivan is always in motion. As a CSS 
expert, international speaker and corporate trainer, she is in demand 
and shows no signs of slowing down..."
http://tinyurl.com/6cmfzy

Interview: Roberto Scano on IWA/HWG and Promoting Web Standards
By Ian Jacobs.
"As part of a series of interviews with W3C Members to learn more about 
their support for standards and participation in W3C, I asked Roberto 
Scano (IWA/HWG Advisory Committee Representative at W3C) some 
questions..."
http://www.w3.org/QA/2008/07/interview_roberto_scano_on_iwa.html

How To Communicate Design Decisions To Clients
By Brian D. Armstrong.
"...This article provides you with 5 guidelines you can use as a 
designer to 'speak business'..."
http://tinyurl.com/63dpde

+09: PHP.

Debugging PHP with Firebug and FirePHP
By Akash Mehta.
"FirePHP is a plugin for Firebug, the web development plugin for 
Firefox, that allows PHP scripts to talk to a Firebug panel. FirePHP 
installs alongside Firebug, and provides a simple PHP library to bridge 
the two. FirePHP provides a window of insight into your PHP 
applications, with a simple debugging interface that won't interfere 
with your page content. If you already use Firebug on PHP-powered 
applications, FirePHP is definitely worth a look."
http://tinyurl.com/6zpesf

+10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

URI Error-handling in HTML5, and Documenting the (real) Web vs. 
Reinventing it
By Michael(tm)Smith.
"Ian Hickson, the editor of the current HTML5 draft posted an Error 
handling in URIs message to the uri at w3.org mailing list outlining some 
issues related to browser error handling behavior for URIs, and to IRIs 
and character encodings other than UTF-8 ? and asking, 'Is there any 
chance that the URI and IRI specifications might get updated to handle 
these issues?'..."
http://sideshowbarker.net/2008/06/25/html5-uris/

11: TYPOGRAPHY.

How Not to Advance the Discussion of Web Fonts
By Joe Clark.
"Bill Hill has a post up a the IE blog entitled 'Font Embedding and the 
Web.' It's a textbook example of how not to attract doubters to your 
cause..."
http://blog.fawny.org/2008/07/22/billhillsite/

+12: USABILITY.

What is Usability?
By John Rhodes.
"Here's the short story. I created a short (4 minute) video answering 
this question: What is usability..."
http://www.webword.com/wp/2008/07/16/what-is-usability/

[Section one ends.]

++ SECTION TWO:

+13: 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.

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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.]