[webdev] Web Design Update: October 17, 2008

Fri Oct 17 06:17:53 CDT 2008

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 7, Issue 16, October 17, 2008.

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

++ISSUE 16 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: EVENTS.
03: JAVASCRIPT.
04: NAVIGATION.
05: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
06: TYPOGRAPHY.
07: USABILITY.

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

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Making Video Accessible
By Jeroen Wijering.
"With the increasing popularity of online video comes the increasing 
need to maximize the accessibility of its content. If your video 
contains relevant information, deaf or blind people should be able to 
get to it. And people who use exotic browsers or platforms should too. 
This doesn't mean you have to offer 20 different versions of your 
piece. A clever combination of the right formats, the SWFObject 
javascript and the Flash-based FLV Media Player 3 can do the job as 
well. (currently the 4.0 player has no audio description. The 4.1 
will!)..."
http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=Making_Video_Accessible

Mozilla Launches Video Accessibility Drive
By Nathan Willis.
"Video and audio support will soon be built directly into Firefox, by 
way of the free Vorbis and Theora codecs, and Mozilla is using the 
opportunity to advance multimedia accessibility for hearing-impaired 
and seeing-impaired users. Although HTML 5 does not officially include 
Ogg Vorbis and Theora as baseline codecs for the new VIDEO and AUDIO 
tags, Mozilla has adopted them for its own implementation. Researcher 
Silvia Pfeiffer is leading a Mozilla Foundation-funded effort to 
integrate support for closed captioning and other multimedia 
accessibility features into the Ogg formats and their implementation in 
Firefox..."
http://www.linux.com/feature/149988

Accessibility/Video Accessibility
By Mozilla.
"...Video on the Web is a complex topic, not only from a technical, but 
also from a political and patent viewpoint. Even HTML5 and the WHATWG 
haven't figured out what baseline codec to recommend yet..."
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Accessibility/Video_Accessibility

Accessibility/Caption Formats
By Mozilla.
"This is a list of existing caption formats..."
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Accessibility/Caption_Formats

Accessible Implementation of Video and Audio on Websites
By Eric Velleman.
http://www.accessibility.nl/internet/artikelen/audiovideo?languageId=2

Video Accessibility, Closed Captions, and Video SEO
By Mark Robertson.
"Many videos on the net simply aren't seen because they cant get 
discovered..."
http://www.reelseo.com/video-accessibility-closed-captions-video-seo/

New Captions Feature For Videos
By YouTube.
"You can add captions to one of your videos by uploading a closed 
caption file using the "Captions and Subtitles" menu on the editing 
page..."
http://www.youtube.com/blog?entry=mi8D3ntPgFQ

YouTube Offers Captioning for Increased Accessibility and Indexing
By Mark Robertson.
"YouTube has been working hard to expand the offerings at the site and 
make the videos more accessible to everyone. One of the features they 
just recently rolled out was the ability to include captions in 
videos...Not only will this allow for greater accessibility, but it 
will give YouTube excellent data for searching videos and targeting 
advertising to them. If you think about it, a complete set of subtitles 
for captions is basically the same as a transcript of the video itself, 
and we know how transcripts can help with video indexing."
http://www.reelseo.com/youtube-captioning-accessibility/

+02: EVENTS.

Scripting Enabled Seattle
November 1-2, 2008.
Seattle, Washington, U.S.A.
http://ses.eventwax.com/scripting-enabled-seattle

World Usability Day
November 13, 2008.
Everywhere
http://www.worldusabilityday.org/

PHPNW08 Conference
November 22, 2008.
Manchester, United Kingdom.
http://conference.phpnw.org.uk/phpnw08/

Web Directions North
February 2-8, 2009.
Denver Colorado, U.S.A.
http://north.webdirections.org/

WebAIM Accessibility Training
February 18-19, 2009.
Logan, Utah, U.S.A.
http://www.webaim.org/training/

CHI (Computer-Human Interaction) 2009
April 4-9, 2009.
Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
http://www.chi2009.org/

+03: JAVASCRIPT.

ARIA Momentum and Internet Explorer
By Jared Smith.
"...Perhaps the biggest barrier to ARIA implementation is that it is 
not yet supported in Internet Explorer. It's difficult to truly 
recommend a technology that does nothing in the most popular web 
browser. The standards and accessibility community was thrilled to hear 
that Internet Explorer 8 will support ARIA. However, this excitement is 
being tempered by the fact that Microsoft is currently implementing 
ARIA in a non-standard way..."
http://webaim.org/blog/aria-momentum-and-ie/

Explaining JavaScript Scope and Closures
By Robert Nyman.
"I thought I'd try to explain something which many people struggle 
with: JavaScript scope and closures..."
http://tinyurl.com/4fjlwa

How to Get Private, Privileged, Public and Static Members (Properties 
and Methods)
By Robert Nyman.
After reading JavaScript inheritance - how and why and Explaining 
JavaScript scope and closures, I thought we'd combine the knowledge 
gained to talk about private, privileged, public and static members 
(properties and methods) for objects in JavaScript..."
http://tinyurl.com/453k5x

Beware of JavaScript Semicolon Insertion
By Robert Nyman.
"One of most tricky behaviors by JavaScript interpreters is semicolon 
insertion..."
http://tinyurl.com/4aajoz

+04: NAVIGATION.

Choosing the Right Classification Words
By Gerry McGovern.
"Climate change or global warming? Pandemic flu or bird flu? Learning 
or training? Should we choose the 'correct' words or the words people 
actually use?"
http://tinyurl.com/3oyw9x

+05: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

W3C Standardization Process: Breaking Through the FUD (Fear, 
Uncertainty, Doubt)
By Lachlan Hunt.
"While at Web Directions South, Lachlan caught up with Mike(tm) Smith, 
co-chair of the W3C's HTML Working Group, to talk about the process of 
standardization at the W3C. Mike(tm) Smith, who is also a W3C team 
contact, describes what is standardization and how it relates to HTML5. 
Mike brings some reality to how standardization of HTML5 is happening 
from someone who is actually there on the ground helping it all 
happen..."
http://standardssuck.org/w3c-standardization-process

Structure Your Webpages with HTML 5
By Peter Davison.
"... The life of Hypertext on the web has gone through several stages 
to try and provide proper webpage semantic (meaningful) structure.
Tim Berners-Lee created the initial development of HyperText Markup 
Language (HTML) and then the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) 
updated it to HTML 2 and then the language continued from HTML 3.2 by 
the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (directed by Tim Berners-Lee). 
Beginning the path to Web Standards, the W3C HTML 4 and 4.01 
specifications provided a strict edition and two other editions 
(transitional and frameset) for backwards compatibility of the 
depreciated code. But all three added internationalization and 
accessibility..."
http://www.legendscrolls.co.uk/webstandards/html5

HTML5 DOCTYPE
By John Resig.
"Remember the whole crazy Internet Explorer 8 meta http-equiv hub-bub, 
yesterday? There was one post in all of that mess that was really, 
really, important. To sum it up: Internet Explorer 8 will support 
DOCTYPE switching for new DOCTYPEs (like HTML5)..."
http://ejohn.org/blog/html5-doctype/

This Week in HTML 5 - Episode 9
By Mark Pilgrim.
"...Shelley Powers pointed out that I haven't mentioned the issue of 
distributed extensibility yet..."
http://blog.whatwg.org/this-week-in-html-5-episode-9

+06: TYPOGRAPHY.

Zoom
By Dave Shea.
"Somehow over the last year or two we've landed in a situation where 
most browsers now default to full page zoom instead of traditional 
text-resizing..."
http://mezzoblue.com/archives/2008/10/07/zoom/

+07: USABILITY.

The Most Annoying Yet Almost Most Important Task in Professional 
Website Management
By Jens Meiert.
"...is link checking. There are tools out there, en masse, however, it 
is just annoying to run after so-called professionals who neither know 
about simplest online rules nor how to set up redirects (but dare to 
waste other people's time)..."
http://meiert.com/en/blog/20081016/the-most-annoying-task/

[Section one ends.]

++ SECTION TWO:

+08: 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.]