[webdev] Web Design Update: December 11, 2008

Thu Dec 11 15:26:42 CST 2008

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 7, Issue 24, December 11, 2008.

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

++ISSUE 24 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: EVENTS.
05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
06: JAVASCRIPT.
07: MISCELLANEOUS.
08: NAVIGATION.
09: PHP.
10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
11: TOOLS.
12: TYPOGRAPHY.
13: USABILITY.

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

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

A New Era for Web Accessibility: WCAG 2.0 is Finalized
By Shawn Henry.
"WCAG 2.0 was published today as a final Web Standard 'W3C 
Recommendation'".
http://www.w3.org/QA/2008/12/wcag_20_is_finalized.html

WCAG 2.0 is Official - But is That All You Need to Make a Site 
Accessible?
By Henny Swan.
"...If you really want to make your site accessible then you need to 
not only reference the WCAG 2.0 guidelines but also: Use open web 
standards.  Avoid proprietary technologies. Ensure your site validates 
where possible..."
http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/2008/12/11/wcag-2-0-is-now-official-2

Website Accessibility and the Economic Downturn
By Ted Page.
"I want to focus principally on the many business benefits of 
accessible websites and why exploiting these makes more sense than ever 
before - not despite - but because of the current economic climate..."
http://tinyurl.com/5uszq4

Technology Helps Shatter Limits of Disability
By Meris Stansbury.
"NCTI conference urges developers, educators to find tools that ease 
disabilities--and increase chances for success..."
http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/index.cfm?i=56181

Legislation Makes Texas Web Designers Do Due Diligence
By Jordan FeRoss.
"...Under House Bill 2819 (79th Regular Legislative Session), state 
agencies are required to ensure that disabled person have the same 
access to electronic information resources as those who are not 
disabled..."
http://tinyurl.com/6y8vcl

Accessibility Testing Tips and Tools Presentation
By Henny Swan.
"I thought I'd post my slides here for you to have a look through. They 
give an overview of testing methodologies as well as point to some 
tools and some examples of how to test images, heading structure, 
keyboard accessibility and so on. I've added in links and references 
where possible so that it can work as a stand alone tutorial but if you 
do have a question let me know."
http://tinyurl.com/6qy73c

Eating an Elephant: Lost in the Supermarket
By Chris Hofstater.
'I'm all lost in the supermarket, I can no longer shop happily, I came 
in here for a special offer, guaranteed personality?'  The Clash
http://tinyurl.com/5tfbg3

24ways.org: A Sacred Cow?
By Steven Clark.
"the same site produced by someone of less stature would be caned"
http://stevenclark.com.au/2008/12/10/24waysorg-a-sacred-cow/

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

The IE6 Equation
By Jeremy Keith.
"It is the destiny of one browser to serve as the nemesis of web 
developers everywhere. At the birth of the Web Standards movement, that 
role was played by Netscape Navigator 4; an outdated browser that 
refused to die. Its tenacious existence hampered the adoption of modern 
standards. Today that role is played by Internet Explorer 6..."
http://24ways.org/2008/the-ie6-equation

Re: The IE 6 Equation
By Jens Meiert.
"Alas, I'm afraid there are three issues (not just the two I briefly 
mentioned in my comment that never appeared) with Jeremy's 
suggestion..."
http://meiert.com/en/blog/20081209/re-the-ie-6-equation/

In the Woods - 15 CSS Tricks That Must be Learned
By Drew Douglass.
"As web designers and developers, we have all come to learn many css 
tricks and techniques that help us achieve our layout goals. The list 
of these techniques is an ever expanding one, however, there are 
certain tricks that are essential to achieve your goal. Today, we will 
review 20 excellent css techniques to keep in mind when developing your 
theme..."
http://blog.themeforest.net/general/15-css-tricks-that-must-be-learned/

Best of CSS Design 2008
By Nick La.
"Last December, I posted a list of the best designs in 2007. Now, it is 
time for - Best of CSS Design 2008 (a new list of 50 websites 
hand-picked from Best Web Gallery)..."
http://www.webdesignerwall.com/trends/best-of-css-design-2008/

+03: DREAMWEAVER.

Adapting Dreamweaver CSS layouts to display:table rules
By Virginia DeBolt.
"With the upcoming release of IE8, which will support CSS display:table 
and other table related display properties, I'm expecting changes in 
the way web pages are laid out. I just finished an intensive experience 
with Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 and the built-in CSS layouts that come 
prepackaged with the product. Naturally, my mind veered in the 
direction of those layouts. Okay, the truth. Actually, I've been having 
visions of Stephanie Sullivan (who created the Dreamweaver CS4 built-in 
CSS layouts) madly adapting all those page layouts to add display:table 
layout options..."
http://tinyurl.com/57typk

Building Scalable Websites with Dreamweaver CS4
By Chris Converse.
"Learn about the core concepts that help ensure your site's long-term 
success..."
http://tinyurl.com/66molw

+04: EVENTS.

Web With Molly
January 1-February, 2009.
Online Class.
http://webwithmolly.com/

Managing Design Projects
February 5, 2009.
San Francisco, California, U.S.A.
http://adaptivepath.com/events/2009/feb/

+05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

Easier Page States for Wireframes
By Richard Rutter.
"When designing wireframes for web sites and web apps, it is often 
overlooked that the same ‘page' can look wildly different depending on 
its context. A logged-in page will look different from a logged-out 
page; an administrator's view may have different buttons than a regular 
user's view; a power user's profile will be more extensive than a new 
user's..."
http://24ways.org/2008/easier-page-states-for-wireframes

+06: JAVASCRIPT.

Testing ARIA User Input Control's Navigation Support
By Steve Faulkner.
"Assistive technology such as screen readers provide keyboard short 
cuts for navigating the content of web pages. For user input controls 
such as radio buttons and edit boxes the user can navigate the controls 
sequentially using assigned 'form field' or 'form control' navigation 
keys..."
http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/?p=101

YUI Theater - Todd Kloots: 'Developing Accessible Widgets with ARIA'
By Eric Miraglia.
"...In this talk, delivered at Yahoo! on December 3, 2008, YUI engineer 
and accessibility specialist Todd Kloots introduces you to ARIA and 
provides some insights gleaned from his work in bringing ARIA support 
to a host of YUI widgets..."
http://yuiblog.com/blog/2008/12/08/video-kloots-aria/

Code Talks Wiki
"Can JavaScript widgets be made accessible? What about live AJAX 
regions and other Web 2.0 wizardry?
Yes, via a new standard from W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative. The 
Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) specification provides 
a way to pepper page markup with the additional accessibility 
information needed by users of assistive technologies such as screen 
readers..."
http://wiki.codetalks.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Introduction to WAI ARIA - available in Spanish and French
By Henny Swan.
"Accessibility genius Gez Lemon recently published An Introduction to 
WAI ARIA on Dev.Opera...The article is now available in both Spanish 
and French."
http://tinyurl.com/6fpb9d

+07: MISCELLANEOUS.

A Logic Named Joe
By Dann Berkowitz
"At dinner this evening my younger son asked me a question to which I 
did not have a ready answer - and as usual my response was to inform 
him that if he is still interested after dinner we will look up an 
answer on the Internet. He agreed, paused for a moment, and asked me 
how the Internet knows all this stuff..."
http://athenpro.blogspot.com/2008/12/logic-named-joe.html

Amnesia
By Joel Spolsky.
"...Using timesheets as a performance metric can lead to only one 
thing: bad data in timesheets...."
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/12/10.html

20 Signs You Don't Want That Web Design Project
By Jeffery Zeldman.
"Most clients are good clients, and some clients are great clients. But 
some jobs are just never going to work out well. Herewith, a few 
indicators that a project may be headed to the toilet. Guarantee: All 
incidents taken from life..."
http://tinyurl.com/654v72

Interview with John Resig, jQuery Creator
By Ara Pehlivanian.
John Resig is the mastermind behind the popular JavaScript library, 
jQuery. In this interview, John talks to Ara Pehlivanian about the 
future of JavaScript, online privacy, and the evolution of jQuery.
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/interview-john-resig/

Web Forward (Video)
By Douglas Crockford.
"Yahoo JavaScript Architect Douglas Crockford argues that to take the 
web forward we need to look back - to the days of the great browser 
wars when innovation lit up the web. Standards have stagnated, and only 
a new browser war can break us loose..."
http://video.yahoo.com/mypage/video?s=33385

An Introduction to Screen Readers (video)
By Victor Tsaran.
"Victor Tsaran is an accessibility engineer at Yahoo! who focuses on 
developing best practices for the creation of websites that work well 
with screen readers. In this video, he provides an introduction to some 
of the things that work well in the world of screen readers and others 
that fare more poorly."
http://video.yahoo.com/watch/514676/2686894

An Introduction to Screen Magnification Software (video)
By Karo Caran.
"Karo Caran takes you on a tour of screen magnification software -- 
tools used by partially sighted users to enhance their experience of 
screen-based user interfaces. Karo shows you the basic toolkit and then 
applies those tools to some typical web sites to give you some 
perspective on how she uses magnification software while she browses 
the web."
http://video.yahoo.com/watch/633844/2985804

+08: NAVIGATION.

How Web is Different from Print
Gerry McGovern.
"Of all the things that make the Web different from print,  linking is 
the most important."
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2008/nt-2008-12-08-web-print.htm

Designing The Holy Search Box: Examples And Best Practices
By Gyorgy Fekete.
"On content-heavy websites, the search box is often the most frequently 
used design element. From a usability point of view, irritated users 
use the search function as a last option when looking for specific 
information on a website. If a website's content is not organized 
properly, an efficient search engine is not only helpful but crucial, 
even for basic website navigation. In fact, search is the user's 
lifeline to mastering complex websites. The best designs offer a simple 
search box on the home page and play down advanced search and 
scoping..."
http://tinyurl.com/6s2jxw

+09: PHP.

Don't Commit That Error
By Travis Swicegood.
"It's easy to get caught up in testing patterns, frameworks, and other 
'correct' ways to  handle testing, but we often overlook some of the 
simple things PHP can do to make sure we aren't making basic mistakes. 
This article covers one of those overlooked tools: php -l. Running the 
PHP executable from the command line with the -l tells PHP to check the 
syntax of the provided PHP file, or 'lint' the file..."
http://phpadvent.org/2008/dont-commit-that-error-by-travis-swicegood

Use Responsibly
By Matthew Weier O'Phinney.
"...But what happens when you hit a snag? Say, for instance, the code 
isn't doing what you think it should; then what do you do?..."
http://phpadvent.org/2008/use-responsibly-by-matthew-weier-ophinney

Commenting on Commenting
By Eli White.
"Everyone knows the standard programming mantra 'Document your code' 
(though some people seem to still not follow it), but today I want to 
talk specifically about three types of documentation that can exist for 
a project, and how each of them is important."
http://phpadvent.org/2008/commenting-on-comments-by-eli-white

The Wonderful World of "includes"
By Tedd Sperling.
"The most important technique I found in doing web development over the 
last 15 years has been knowing how to use the "include()" statement. If 
you can grasp how to use php-includes, then it will simplify your 
coding considerably..."
http://sperling.com/examples/include-demo/

+10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

W3C Validators in Jeopardy
By Molly E. Holzschlag.
As many folks who follow the W3C are aware, financial and bureaucratic 
issues have challenged the organization for many years. But one thing 
the W3C has held steady with is its validators, which are regularly and 
freely utilized by Web designers and developers world over.
http://www.molly.com/2008/12/11/w3c-validators-in-jeopardy/

Will 2008 Prove the Year the Web Grew Up?
By Bruce Lawson.
"If the tit-for-tat tantrums of the Microsoft-Netscape browser wars 
were the web's pimply adolescence, then the dot-com bust of 2000 was 
its traumatic entry into adulthood. Perhaps 2008 will turn out to be 
the year the web grew up, says Bruce Lawson."
http://tinyurl.com/6oysd7

Elements of an EmotionML 1.0
Marc Schroder, Editor.
"As the web is becoming ubiquitous, interactive, and multimodal, 
technology needs to deal increasingly with human factors, including 
emotions. The present Final Report of the Emotion Markup Language 
Incubator Group provides elements for an Emotion Markup Language 
striking a balance between scientific well-foundedness and practical 
applicability. The language is conceived as a "plug-in" language 
suitable for use in three different areas: (1) manual annotation of 
data; (2) automatic recognition of emotion-related states from user 
behaviour; and (3) generation of emotion-related system behaviour..."
http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/emotion/XGR-emotionml/

Re: proposed change to dialog example in HTML5 section 4.6.26
By Gregory J. Rosmaita.
"...the means of conveying EmotionML is limited only by one's 
imagination; using CSS-Speech, one can set a voice change or aural icon 
to express the emotional state; visually, one could have EmotoinML 
expressed using an emoticon or an iconic equivalent (as happens on some 
wikis to identify external, mailto, and other non-http-request links); 
one could use CSS' :before to indicate that the following line is a 
lie; the exposition method offered by EmotionML, therefore, is FAR 
morerobust, and far more specific, than using SPAN to indicate 
emotional states; or you can ignore it as a red herring or wishful 
thinking..."
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2008Dec/0094.html

Ian Hickson on Editing HTML5 (Video)
By Marcos Caceres.
"During TPAC, Lachlan caught up with Ian Hickson (Hixie), editor of the 
HTML 5 specification. Hixie discusses the tools he uses to gather and 
respond to feedback, which is fundamental to the open development of 
the standard. Hixie clarifies the whole 'when will HTML5 be ready?!' 
thing and gives us some details about what part of the spec he is 
working on now..."
http://standardssuck.org/ian-hickson-on-editing-html5

Web Standards: Where the ROI is
By Molly Holzschlag.
"...Web designers and developers seem to talk a lot about 'Web 
Standards', but what about the people who sign the contracts and pay 
the bills? Are Web Standards just another tax that businesspeople are 
being asked to pay, or is there truly sustainable business value in 
adopting Web Standards? Why is Microsoft investing so heavily in 
improving Web Standards support in our line of products. We asked Molly 
to write this article to succinctly explain the business value of Web 
Standards to business decision makers..."
http://visitmix.com/Articles/Web-Standards-Where-the-ROI-is

This Week in HTML 5 - Episode 15
By Mark Pilgrim.
"...The big news this week is the disintegration of HTTP authentication 
from HTML forms (which was last week's big news). As I predicted, the 
proposal generated a healthy discussion, but a combination of security 
concerns and concerns about tight coupling ultimately did in the 
proposal..."
http://blog.whatwg.org/this-week-in-html-5-episode-15

+11: TOOLS.

Smush it
By Stoyan Stefanov and Nicole Sullivan.
"Smushit.com is a service that goes beyond the limitations of 
Photoshop, Fireworks and Company. It uses image format specific 
non-lossy image optimization tools to squeeze the last bytes out of 
your images - without changing their look or visual quality. You'll get 
a report of how many bytes you can save by optimizing your images and 
all the changed images as a single zip for download."
http://www.smushit.com/

+12: TYPOGRAPHY.

Typography and Accessibility
By Craig Nugent.
"...The challenge then for the designer is to meet the criteria of 
typography and design while creating user centered functionality ie 
resizable text on demand. Is it possible to reconcile typographic 
criteria with accessibility requirements? Well almost. Let's look at a 
solution I use frequently, though it's not without compromise..."
http://21picas.co.uk/?p=364

For and Against Standardizing Font Embedding
By Bert Bos.
Co-inventor of CSS, has a detailed summary of the issues around font 
embedding and standardization.
http://www.w3.org/Fonts/Misc/eot-report-2008

@font-face in IE: Making Web Fonts Work
By Jon Tan.
Who, what, where how and when of Web fonts
http://tinyurl.com/5a7hvn

+13: USABILITY.

The Nielsen Guide to Spelling
By Joe Clark.
"...Nielsen's posting does what his postings usually do - gives no firm 
advice and leads into an ad for a seminar his company is running. It 
also mixes up the issues of spelling and word choice. Fundamentally, 
the posting reiterates the lie that there is such a thing as an 
international English. There isn't - not in speech and not in 
writing..."
http://blog.fawny.org/2008/12/05/nielsen-spelling/

Don't Put the Weather on the Intranet Homepage
By James Robertson.
"...There's probably no real harm in including the weather on the 
homepage, as long as it doesn't get in the way of more important 
features. Consider it a low priority, however, and focus on more 
important improvements to the usability or usefulness of the intranet 
homepage..."
http://tinyurl.com/62mwst

[Section one ends.]

++ SECTION TWO:

+14: 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.

WEB DESIGN UPDATE is available by subscription. For information on how 
to subscribe and unsubscribe please visit:
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 
accessible Text Email Newsletter (TEN) guidelines.  Please let me know 
if there is anything else we can do to make navigation easier. For TEN 
guideline information please visit:
http://www.headstar.com/ten

+ 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.]