[webdev] Web Design Update: Feburary 6, 2009

Fri Feb 6 06:13:23 CST 2009

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 7, Issue 32, Feburary 6, 2009.

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

++ISSUE 32 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: FLASH.
06: JAVASCRIPT.
07: MISCELLANEOUS.
08: NAVIGATION.
09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
10: TOOLS.
11: USABILITY.

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

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Screen Reader Survey Results
By Jared Smith.
"The initial results of our survey of preferences of screen reader users 
are now available. With over 1100 respondents, these results provide a 
unique and detailed insight into screen reader users and web 
accessibility."
http://webaim.org/blog/screen-reader-survey-results/

Accessibility Basics
By Tom Hughes-Croucher.
"...in this article I'll now look at accessibility explicitly, so you can 
understand fully what it is, why it is important, how to ensure that 
sites are accessible, and what guidelines exist to define accessible 
sites..."
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/25-accessibility-basics/

Accessibility Testing
By Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis.
"Web accessibility testing is a subset of usability testing where the 
users under consideration have disabilities that affect how they use the 
web. The end goal, in both usability and accessibility, is to discover 
how easily people can use a web site and feed that information back into 
improving future designs and implementations..."
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/26-accessibility-testing/

Null alt Text
Web Accessibility Initiative Educational Outreach Thread Initiated by 
William Loughborough.
"So the classic argument becomes 'But what if the choice is between 
terrible poetry and silence?' That choice should be pre-settable within 
the screen reader, not an escape hatch for authors who suck at providing 
an alternative to any unwanted voicings. It's all in the hands of the 
authoring tool and the design of the assistive technology."
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-eo/2009JanMar/0030.html

Headings in HTML 5 and Accessibility
By Bruce Lawson.
"This description of headings was originally part of a post unveiling the 
part two redesign, but I'm splitting it out because there has been a lot 
of talk lately about headings in HTML 4 and 5..."
http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2009/headings-in-html-5-and-accessibility/

Captioning, Transcripts and a Teachable Moment
By John Foliot.
"...For those of you reading this and who are involved in teaching, alt 
media production or a related endeavor, I ask that maybe you help push 
that ball along as well. NASA has given us a great starting point, but 
we, accessibility advocates, need to help highlight that great start, and 
help other educators seize that start point and work it..."
http://webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread.php?thread=3761

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Headers, Footers, Columns, and Templates
By Ben Henick.
"...This article takes on broader focus; its purpose is to show the 
reader how to take the material covered so far, and use it to build a 
complete site template..."
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/38-headers-footers-columns-templates/

How to Solve :first-child CSS Bug in IE 7
By Robert Nyman.
"...The key was the HTML comment preceding the first LI item, incorrectly 
interpreted by IE to be the first child element of the UL..."
http://tinyurl.com/dmp48s

+03: DREAMWEAVER.

Simple Styling With CSS
By Stephanie Sullivan.
"...The purpose of this article is to take you on the initial journey-one 
that gives you an idea of how easy it is to separate your content from 
its presentation. I'll show you techniques that reduce your page-load 
time and file size tremendously by using CSS to create background colors, 
borders, and font styling These techniques enable you to cut the images 
used in your web pages down to a minimum. The page you'll create isn't 
beautiful. It's silly and fun. But it will teach you techniques and give 
you ideas to create your own, much more attractive pages..."
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/css_simple_styling.html

+04: EVENTS.

XML Prague 2009
March 21-22, 2009.
Prague, Czech Republic
http://www.xmlprague.cz/index.html

TechEd 2009 - The New Face of Technology
March 22-25, 2009.
Ontario, California, U.S.A.
http://www.techedevents.org/2009/

3d European eAccessibility Forum
March 30, 2009.
Paris, France
http://tinyurl.com/5r8enz

Internet User Experience 2009
March 30-April 2, 2009.
Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.A.
http://www.iue2009.com/

Mobile Usability
April 10, 2009 in Washington D.C., U.S.A.
May 22, 2009 in London United Kingdom.
June 27, 2009 in San Francisco, California, U.S.A.
August 1, 2009 in Sydney Australia.
http://www.nngroup.com/events/tutorials/mobile.html

CSS Mastery Workshop with Andy Budd
April 16, 2009.
Brighton, United Kingdom
http://clearleft.com/does/teach/css/

The John Slatin Access U
May 11-13, 2009.
Austin, Texas, U.S.A.
http://www.knowbility.org/conference/

+04: FLASH.

WebAIM Screen Reader Survey: A Closer Look at Flash and PDF Results
By Andrew Kirkpatrick.
"WebAIM released the results of a survey of screen reader users and the 
results are interesting for what they tell us about HTML use, but the 
commentary around user's thoughts on Flash content and PDF documents is 
of particular interest at Adobe. The results state that 71% of screen 
reader users responding feel that Flash content is very difficult (34%) 
or somewhat difficult (37%) to use, and 48% of screen reader users 
responding feel that PDF documents are very difficult (17%) or somewhat 
difficult (31%) to use. I think that it is worth putting some additional 
context around these numbers..."
http://tinyurl.com/ckxu8u

+06: JAVASCRIPT.

Validating WAI-ARIA in HTML and XHTML
By Roger Johansson.
"WAI-ARIA has great potential to help developers make the Web more 
accessible to people with disabilities, especially those who are vision 
impaired or cannot use a mouse. There is currently a problem with adding 
WAI-ARIA attributes to your HTML or XHTML markup though..."
http://tinyurl.com/cwyvny

The JavaScript Ultimate Reference
By James Edwards.
"The JavaScript Ultimate Reference is an ongoing project to create the 
most comprehensive and up-to-date reference for JavaScript programming, 
anywhere on the web or in print, a complement to the already-published 
HTML Reference and CSS Reference..."
http://www.brothercake.com/site/portfolio/jsur/

The DOM is a Mess
By John Resig
"I gave a talk last week at Yahoo (at the request of the YUI team) all 
about the DOM. I outlined some of the reasons why the current situation 
is such a mess, outline some strategies for working around it, and then 
give some examples of real world code that's being implemented in 
libraries today."
http://ejohn.org/blog/the-dom-is-a-mess/

Advanced Debugging with JavaScript
By Chris Mills.
"JavaScript debuggers help find and squash errors in code. To become an 
advanced debugger, you'll need to know about the tools available to you, 
the typical JavaScript debugging workflow, and code requirements for 
effective debugging. In this article, using a sample web application, 
Steen and Mills share advanced techniques for diagnosing and treating 
bugs."
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/advanceddebuggingwithjavascript

JavaScript Variable Scope: Local and Global Variables
By Estelle Weyl.
"In writing JavaScript functions, variable functions can trip you up. A 
common error is overwriting a global variable because the variable in a 
function didn't have local scope. If that last sentence didn't make any 
sense, then this article is for you..."
http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=4E137

Lots of new JavaScript tutorials at Opera's Web Standards Curriculum this 
week including ones by Christian Heilmann, Peter Paul Koch, Mike West, 
Stuart Langridge, Greg Schechter, and Robert Nyman.
http://tinyurl.com/d65426

+07: MISCELLANEOUS.

The Details That Matter
By Kevin Potts.
"We no longer lay out pages with composing sticks and straight edges, and 
design is no longer a trade position requiring a lengthy apprenticeship, 
but an eye for details is every bit as important today as it was in the 
early days of graphic arts. Learn the habits of successful designers, who 
think critically as well as creatively, and who see the forest while 
never losing sight of the trees."
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/thedetailsthatmatter

Toward 2^W --- Beyond Web-2.0: The Rest Of The Story
By T.V. Raman.
"The Web has evolved from global hypertext system to distributed platform 
for end-user interaction. Users access it from a variety of devices and 
rely on late binding of the user interface to produce a user experience 
that is best suited to a given usage context. With data moving from 
individual devices to the Web cloud, users today have ubiquitous access 
to their data. The separation of the user interface from the data being 
presented enables them to determine how they interact with the data. With 
data and interaction both becoming URL-addressable, the Web is now 
evolving toward enabling users to come together to collaborate in ad-hoc 
groups that can be created and dismantled with minimal overhead. Thus, a 
movement that started with the creation of three simple building blocks 
'URL, HTTP, HTML' has evolved into the one platform that binds them all."
http://tinyurl.com/cxnz69

+08: NAVIGATION.

How Search Fits Into The Web Site Design Process
By Rob Garner.
"The important thing to remember here is that search should be a key 
consideration at every stage of the process, whether it is selecting a 
provider, setting requirements, producing comps, coding or site 
deployment."
http://tinyurl.com/aqg32b

+09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

This Week in HTML 5 - Episode 20
By Mark Pilgrim.
"The big news this week is the beginning of the non-normative section on 
rendering HTML documents."
http://blog.whatwg.org/this-week-in-html-5-episode-20

HTML 5 to the H1 Debate Rescue?
By Henny Swan.
"...What's interesting to see is that while HTML5 may have serious flaws 
with regards to accessibility in other areas it may be working to support 
accessible content in others. What is essential to its success however is 
that  screen reader vendors step up and work to include support for HTML5 
to complement efforts being made by browsers as well as the web 
development community..."
http://www.iheni.com/html-5-to-the-h1-debate-rescue/

+10: TOOLS.

W3C Validator for MAC OSX with Experimental WAI-ARIA Support
By Steve Faulkner.
"...you can check your (X)HTML files containing ARIA attributes without 
them being flagged as errors. You can also check whether ARIA attributes 
and attribute values used are correct."
http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/?p=108

Easy YouTube Caption Creator - A Very Rough First 'Build'
By Ian Lloyd.
"...I've put together a little tool that lets me create a caption file - 
suitable for YouTube - in what I think is a quite easy manner..."
http://tinyurl.com/ddg8p9

Community Captioner
By Project Possibility.
"Our project concept is an open source, community-driven online video 
closed captioning tool..."
http://www.projectpossibility.org/viewProject.php?id=10

+11: USABILITY.

Top 10 Higher-Ed Web Design Mistakes in 140
By Stewart Foss.
"While working on the book I had an idea for a presentation..."
http://www.edustyle.net/blog/?p=266

Getting Your Website Right - Uses and Misuses of Web Design Patterns
By Nathan Langley.
"...In the instances where you decide that it is appropriate put UI 
patterns into practice, you must ensure that you understand the context 
in which the pattern was conceived and its suitability for the proposed 
use. Without this you will not realize the potential of patterns to allow 
you to focus on more business critical design."
http://tinyurl.com/cpzhtv

Are You Focusing Too Much on Your Home Page?
By Christian Watson.
"...Your home page is Like a hotel lobby...the lobby should make it easy 
for the visitor to orient themselves...However, hotels are ultimately 
judged by the quality of their rooms...."
http://www.smileycat.com/miaow/archives/001514.php

[Section one ends.]

++ SECTION TWO:

+12: 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.]