[webdev] Web Design Update: November 14, 2008

Fri Nov 14 06:25:23 CST 2008

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 7, Issue 20, November 14, 2008.

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

++ISSUE 20 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: COLOR.
04: EVALUATION & TESTING.
05: EVENTS.
06: FLASH.
07: JAVASCRIPT.
08: MISCELLANEOUS.
09: PHP.
10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
11: TOOLS.
12: TYPOGRAPHY.
13: USABILITY.
14: XML.

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

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

My WCAG 2.0 AAA Implementation
By Mike Cherim.
"A while back I mentioned I made a AAA web site that conformed to the 
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.0. The site was 
for California disability rights attorney, Lainey Feingold, who works 
primarily with the blind and visually impaired community on technology 
and information access issues. She is nationally recognized for 
negotiating accessibility agreements and for pioneering the 
collaborative advocacy and dispute resolution method known as 
Structured Negotiations. That's from her site -- a site which is one of 
just two AAA implementations (the other being Vision Australia)..."
http://green-beast.com/blog/?p=328

Writing Good alt Text
By Roger Johansson.
"I do quite a bit of quality assurance work, specifically looking at 
the accessibility and web standards use of websites. In many cases I 
make remarks about the use of alternative text for images and other 
graphic elements..."
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200811/writing_good_alt_text/

Are Accessibility Statements Useful?
By Leona Tomlinson.
"Leona examines recent thinking on accessibility statements and where 
they can still be a benefit to users.
http://www.digital-web.com/articles/are_accessibility_statements_useful

Keyboard-Accessible Google Maps
By Patrick Lauke.
"Google Maps is a powerful, free tool for adding maps to a site. 
Unfortunately, out of the box, these maps are reliant on mouse 
interaction; therefore, they are completely inaccessible to those using 
only the keyboard for Web interaction. In this article, we'll examine 
the problem and, step by step, make our way toward a possible 
solution..."
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/keyboard-accessible-google-maps/

'International Perspective'
By Joe Clark.
"I have been saying for a couple of years that the PDF/Universal Access 
Committee (slash in original, sadly) is a happy ship, stewarded by an 
erudite and urbane chair and staffed by a small core of constituents 
with good skills and an actual sense of humor. The goal is a standard 
for PDF accessibility that extends beyond the simplistic dictum 'Only 
use tagged PDF.” "
http://blog.fawny.org/2008/11/11/pdfu-ixnay/

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

What Would a New CSS Validator Look Like?
By Olivier Thereaux.
"A couple of weeks ago I attended, along with a few hundred other W3C 
participants, the yearly Technical Plenary meeting: a week's worth of 
meetings, encounters, ideas and exchanges. For many of us, this is the 
most exciting and exhausting time of the year: it takes quite a lot of 
stamina to survive through a week intellectual and geeky stimulation 
from breakfast to bedtime..."
http://www.w3.org/QA/2008/11/dreamimg_a_new_css_validator.html

5 CSS Tips Every Web Developer Should Know About
By Jens Meiert.
"Of all the many tips this site already shares, these might still be 
special, so let's quickly scan them that might be considered essential 
for every web developer when it comes to Cascading Style Sheets. Main 
focus: Maintainability, differently."
http://meiert.com/en/blog/20081111/5-css-tips/

Are You Making These 10 CSS Mistakes?
By Glen Stansberry.
"Working with CSS can seem like a constant battle. Browsers are always 
changing they way they read the code (*cough* Internet Explorer 
*cough*), and it seems that there are lots of tiny little CSS 
'gotchas'. While it's an incredibly powerful language, it can easily be 
used incorrectly, which will doom your development to a lifetime of 
imperfections."
http://tinyurl.com/6r6ddz

CSS3 box-sizing Attribute
By Helen Emerson.
CSS3 is going to include a new attribute called box-sizing so we can 
choose whether the width set on an element will include borders and 
padding or whether borders and paddings will be added to the width.
http://www.helephant.com/article.aspx?ID=1259

+03: COLOR.

Is Your (Website's) Underwear Showing?
By Jeffery Zeldman.
"It's astounding how many web designers forget to specify a background 
color on their site..."
http://www.zeldman.com/2008/11/07/is-your-websites-underwear-showing/

Optimizing by Color: How Color Can Affect Site Activity and Performance
By Boudewijn Vahrmeijer.
"...At LeerWiki.nl, I have tested how different color schemes affect 
visitor behavior with regards to site goals, in order to optimize my 
use of color. This article outlines my research process and results..."
http://evolt.org/node/61431

+04: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Making Decisions About User Research
By Donna Spencer.
"Importance to the business: Just how important is the 
project/application in meeting organizational/business goals? 
Importance to users: What will happen to users if you mess up. Will 
they be harmed, or will they just go elsewhere? $$: How much is the 
project going to cost? (i.e. how much will be wasted if you mess up)"
http://maadmob.net/donna/blog/2008/user_research_decisions

+05: EVENTS.

Interaction|09
February 5-8, 2009.
Vancouver, Canada
http://interaction09.ixda.org/

Gel 2009
April 30 - May 1, 2009.
New York, New York, U.S.A.
http://gelconference.com/c/gel09.php

WebVisions
May 20-22, 2009.
Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.
http://www.webvisionsevent.com/

+06: FLASH.

Providing Alternative Content for SWF Files
By Bobby van der Sluis.
"Traditional publishing mechanisms for rich media content created for 
Adobe Flash Player often rely on the twice-cooked method to embed SWF 
files into HTML pages. One major drawback of this method is that it is 
based on old-fashioned, vendor-specific markup that doesn't comply with 
modern web standards and also doesn't allow you to nest fallback 
content inside of it..."
http://tinyurl.com/5d22hc

+07: JAVASCRIPT.

Multi-Threading in JavaScript
By James Edwards.
"Okay, before we begin, let me come clean and admit that the title of 
this article is a little sensationalist! JavaScript doesn't really have 
multi-threading capabilities, and there's nothing a JavaScript 
programmer can do to change that. In all browsers?apart from Google 
Chrome?JavaScript runs in a single execution thread, and that's just 
how it is. However, what we can do is simulate multi-threading, insofar 
that it gives rise to one of the benefits of a multi-threaded 
environment: it allows us to run extremely intensive code."
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/multi-threading-javascript/

+08: MISCELLANEOUS.

The Speaker Interviews - Russ Weakley
By Mike Brown.
"The first of our speaker interviews is with Russ Weakley. Russ is a 
designer, one of the world's leading experts on HTML and CSS, and 
co-founder of the Web Standards group and mailing list. He's been an 
influential figures in the development and spread of web standards 
globally..."
http://tinyurl.com/6ecmtw

Clarifying a Web Standards Workflow
By Molly E. Holzschlag.
"During a session this week at the fantastic MexicoWeb2.0, an attendee 
asked me if I had any recommended process for working with Web 
standards..."
http://www.molly.com/2008/11/06/clarifying-a-web-standards-workflow/

+09: PHP.

How to Expose PHP's Private Parts
By Troels Knak-Nielsen.
"I've been tinkering with dumping PHP objects, and have found myself 
constantly running into a brick wall. The output from print_r and 
friends is fine in some contexts, but for larger structures, it would 
be nice to tidy the output up a bit and wrap it in some HTML..."
http://tinyurl.com/6dbsru

+10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

Content Drives Demand
By Sam Ruby.
"Mark Pilgrim: 'The <section> element is a very straightforward HTML 5 
feature that you can't actually use yet.' Jeff Schiller: 'These days, 
Internet Explorer is the last browser I look at... as long as all my 
textual content is actually visible, then that's just fine by me.' With 
apologies to Mark (and I truly understand where he is coming from), it 
seems to me that we would all be a lot better off if less people 
listened to him and more listened to Jeff."
http://intertwingly.net/blog/2008/11/07/Content-Drives-Demand

This Week in HTML 5 - Episode 12
By Mark Pilgrim.
"...It has been suggested (1, 2, 3, &c.) that HTML 5 is trying to bite 
off more than it can metaphorically chew. It is true that it is a large 
specification, and it might benefit from being split into several 
pieces. But it is not true that it includes everything but the kitchen 
sink..."
http://blog.whatwg.org/this-week-in-html-5-episode-12

The Road to HTML 5: getElementsByClassName()
By Mark Pilgrim.
"The feature of the day is getElementsByClassName(). Long desired by 
web developers and implemented in Javascript libraries like Prototype, 
this function does exactly what it says on the tin: it returns a list 
of elements in the DOM that define one or more classnames in the class 
attribute. getElementsByClassName() exists as a method of the document 
object (for searching the entire DOM), as well as on each HTMLElement 
object (for searching the children of an element)..."
http://blog.whatwg.org/the-road-to-html-5-getelementsbyclassname

12 Principles For Keeping Your Code Clean
By Chris Coyie.
"...Let's take a look at some poorly written HTML, discuss its 
problems, and then whip it into shape! Bear in mind, we are not passing 
any judgment on the content or design of this page, only the markup 
that builds it. If you are interested, take a peek at the bad code and 
the good code before we start so you can see the big picture. Now let's 
start right at the top.."
http://tinyurl.com/5nqk45

+11: TOOLS.

Obtrusive JavaScript Checker
By Robert Nyman.
"Obtrusive JavaScript Checker is a tool to traverse through all 
elements in a web page, and when it finds a HTML element with inline 
events (which is bad, JavaScript should be unobtrusive), it highlights 
it with a red border. It also highlights javascript: links with a 
magenta border."
http://www.robertnyman.com/obtrusive-javascript-checker/

+12: TYPOGRAPHY.

Typography and Renaissance-Era Eroticism
By Brooke Marshall.
"Hold on tight, people: I'm about to take you way, way back..."
http://www.wpdfd.com/issues/87/typography-renaissance-era-eroticism/

Real Type on the Web?
By Jeffery Zeldman.
A proposal for a fonts working group is under discussion at the W3C. 
The minutes of a small meeting held on Thursday 23 October include a 
condensed, corrected transcription of a discussion between Sampo 
Kaasila (Bitstream), Mike Champion (Microsoft), John Daggett (Mozilla), 
Hakon Wium Lie (Opera), Liam Quin (W3C), Bert Bos (W3C), Alex 
Mogilevsky (Microsoft), Josh Soref (Nokia), Vladimir Levantovsky 
(Monotype), Klaas Bals (Inventive Designers), and Richard Ishida (W3C).
http://www.zeldman.com/2008/11/13/real-type-on-the-web/

+13: USABILITY.

How Reliable is Your Customer Feedback?
By Gerry McGovern.
"Listening to customers is not enough. You must listen to the
right ones...."
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2008/nt-2008-11-10-customer-feedback.htm

+14: XML.

Do Not Steal My SVG Semantics
By Karl Dubost.
"...I had the curiosity of looking at the source code? All my beautiful 
squares and circles were gone. All shapes were only defined by paths. 
Some shapes are rightfully defined by paths, but it should not be the 
case for all of them. I became curious about this issue..."
http://www.w3.org/QA/2008/11/authoring-svg-semantics.html

SVG Wireframe For Your Website Design
By Karl Dubost.
"Very often, when you are negotiating a new Web site for your 
organization or company, the Web designer will hand over a Photoshop 
mockup of your Web site. Personally, I have a tendency to ban this 
practice. I prefer to receive a solid xhtml/css mockup and sees how it 
is handled in different devices..."
http://www.w3.org/QA/2008/11/svg-wireframe-webdesin.html

[Section one ends.]

++ SECTION TWO:

+15: 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.]