[webdev] Web Design Update: February 20, 2009

[Laura Carlson]

w+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 7, Issue 34, February 20, 2009.

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

++ISSUE 34 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: EVALUATION & TESTING.
04: EVENTS.
05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
06: JAVASCRIPT.
07: PHP.
08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
09: TOOLS.
10: TYPOGRAPHY.
11: USABILITY.
12: XML.

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

[Contents ends.]


++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Call for Review: ATAG 2.0 Working Draft
By Shawn Henry.
"The Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines Working Group invites you to 
comment on the updated Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 2.0 
Working Draft..."
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/2009JanMar/0033.html

ATAG, HTML5 Canvas, Accessible Social Networking and You
By Henny Swan.
"...As a developer or site owner make sure you source authoring tools 
with accessible interfaces so that colleagues can also safely use them. 
Often the back-end is left behind and forgotten when procuring new 
software so getting ATAG 2.0 written into procurement contracts and 
tenders is essential and in my opinion as important as WCAG..."
http://www.iheni.com/put-in-a-good-word-for-atag-20/

Adding Captions to YouTube: Resource Links
By Bill Creswell.
"ProudGeek Reviews of some captioning methods..."
http://billcreswell.wordpress.com/tag/youtube-captions/page/2/

Example Canvas Element Use - Accessibility Concerns
By Steven Faulkner.
"The recently released code editor Bespin...is a great example of the 
utility of the canvas element, its also a worrying example of the 
barriers to accessibility its use will produce. "
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Feb/0425.html

Use and Abuse of @summary
By Steven Faulkner.
"In conclusion: @summary is well supported by AT, its misuse at whatever 
level (though I would say claims are overstated) has little effect upon 
users. Therefore I suggest that it would be useful to talk to the screen 
reader users (its intended audience) that are on the W3C HTML working 
group and the W3C WAI groups and heed their advice on the utility of the 
@summary."
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Feb/0420.html

The Importance Of Headings In HTML
By SAWSAG.
There is currently a real conflict and many discussions going on 
regarding heading in HTML5 and XHTML2 and this is for good reason. Using 
headings in HTML, and using them correctly, to mark-up your content can 
make a huge difference to how screen reader users access the content on 
your site.
http://www.sawsag.co.za/2009/02/11/the-importance-of-headings-in-html/

Accessibility Beyond the Screen Reader
By DuctTape.
"Accessibility is always in the front of our minds when we embark on a 
Web project. But as we start to consider our features, accessibility 
starts to slip by the way side. 'As long as a screen reader can read it, 
we'll be fine, right?' Not really..."
http://www.olmblog.com/?p=5652

A Cloak of Accessibility
By Brian Panulla.
"I don't know if you've ever noticed, but Twitter.com is not the most 
accessible site on the Web. I find that somewhat odd, give the relative 
simplicity of the user interface..."
http://ghostednotes.com/index.cfm/2009/2/16/A-Cloak-of-Accessibility

Accessible Twitter
By Nick DeNardis.
"...A great site created by Denis Lembree which is currently in alpha 
stage aims to fix these issues. Using purely the public twitter API 
Dennis has created an accessible version of Twitter..."
http://doteduguru.com/id2215-accessible-twitter.html

WebAIM Survey Shines Light on Screen Reader Usage
By Victor Tsaran.
"...The recent WebAIM screen reader survey of 1121 screen reader users is 
a great step towards understanding how blind, deaf-blind, or visually 
impaired users *actually* interact with the web..."
http://yuiblog.com/blog/2009/02/12/webaim-survey/


+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Wanted: Layout System
By Eric A. Meyer.
"...Turning a bunch of divs or list items or whatever into table-role 
boxes is no better than just using table markup in the first place, and 
it's arguably worse. Using element names other than table and td to 
create layout tables, and then claiming it's not using tables for layout, 
borders on self-deception. Not to mention doing things that way means 
you're doing your layout in a highly source-order-dependent fashion, 
which was one of the things about table layout we were trying to get away 
from in the first place..."
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2009/02/17/wanted-layout-system/

CSS3 Feedback: Selector Blocks
By Eric A. Meyer.
"Out of all the selector feedback, selector blocks was the part that 
really caught my attention..."
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2009/02/12/selector-blocks/

CSS3 Feedback: Layout
By Eric A. Meyer.
"In this round, layout. Not all of it, but the bits that struck me as 
either really useful or really, really way too long overdue..."
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2009/02/16/css3-feedback-layout/

CSS3 Feedback: Animated Shapes
By Eric A. Meyer.
"The portion of the feedback devoted to shapes had two overarching 
themes, as I saw it. That makes this entry a bit short, but when I tried 
to combine it with my feedback on “Graphical Effects“, it quickly got too 
long. So, a little amuse cerveau, as it were..."
http://tinyurl.com/bdfww5

CSS Doesn't Suck
By Nicole Sullivan.
"The cascade is something like a new data structure, and the ways for 
dealing with it are algorithms you never learned in school. You couldn't 
have, because traditional engineering school poo-poos the front-end and 
web engineering in favor of stale (but still valuable) traditional 
software engineering..."
http://tinyurl.com/c3apce

When can I use...
By Alexis Deveria.
Compatibility tables for features in CSS3, HTML5, SVG and other upcoming 
web tech.
http://a.deveria.com/caniuse

Pure CSS Line Graph
By Alen Grakalic.
"...My intention was not only to enable data visualization to people that 
don't feel comfortable with using various scripting languages but also to 
demonstrate the power of css and present a way of using css a bit 
differently. If you are not a fan of line graphs and data visualization 
in general, you may still read this article and think of it as css 
experiment and perhaps learn a thing or two about css sprites and 
positioning..."
http://cssglobe.com/post/4175/pure-css-line-graph


+03: EVALUATION & TESTING.

MIT Tops Rankings of University Web Sites
By Steve Kolowich.
"The Cybermetrics Lab, a research group based in Spain, has released the 
latest edition of its biannual Webometrics Ranking of World Universities, 
which seeks to measure 'the performance and impact of universities 
through their Web presence.'"
http://tinyurl.com/bnojpe

Samples and Stats
By Lyle Kantrovich.
"We have an ethical responsibility to our clients, and to our users, to 
report accurate statistics from our research. You don't have to kill your 
clients with stats...just be accurate with the stats you report."
http://tinyurl.com/cdkz2b

How to Create Effective Personas for Your Projects
By Ron Akanowicz.
"Creating personas that are a reflection of real people helps us as web 
designers and developers to empathize with our end users and more easily 
consider needs, goals, and priorities that may be different than our own. 
These are critical skills to have since we may not be part of the target 
audience for the site we're developing."
http://tinyurl.com/dkl46c


+04: EVENTS.

The Multipack Presents Emerging Standards
February 21, 2009.
Birmingham, United Kingdom
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1502474

Web Tools and Rules
April 6, 2009.
Washington, D.C., U.S.A.
http://www.webtoolsrules.com/

Institutional Web Management Workshop
July 28-30, 2009.
University of Essex, Colchester, United Kingdom
http://iwmw.ukoln.ac.uk/iwmw2009/

Designing For All
March 17, 2009.
London, United Kingdom
http://www.headstar-events.com/dfa/

Design Secrets of digg.com's User Interface
September 8, 2009.
London, United Kingdom
http://carsonworkshops.com/2009/danielburka/index.html

E-Learn 2009
October 26-30, 2009.
Vancouver, Canada.
http://www.aace.org/conf/elearn/

ATIA 2009 Chicago
October 28-31, 2009.
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.
http://www.atia.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=3294


+05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

Industry Trends in Prototyping
By Dave Cronin.
"Prototype is one of those words that can mean something different to 
everyone. Before I get too far along in a discussion of prototyping, it's 
probably worth exploring what I'm talking about."
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/fireworks/articles/cooper_prototyping.html

20 Steps to Better Wireframing
By Clive Howard.
"...Wireframing is one of the first steps in your planning process and 
arguably it's one of the most important ones. This is when the idea 
starts to take shape as an application, becoming boxes and buttons that 
users will interact with. This article will take you through a 
wireframing process; who should be involved, the tools to use and tips to 
enable you to make better wireframes..."
http://thinkvitamin.com/features/20-steps-to-better-wireframing/


+06: JAVASCRIPT.

Embedding Twitter Status
By Jonathan Snook.
"In building this iteration of the blog, I decided to follow that 
trendiest of trends and embed my latest Twitter status on my sidebar..."
http://snook.ca/archives/javascript/embed-twitter-status


+07: PHP.

Fosdem 2009 In Review
By Michelangelo van Dam.
"On days like these, we're a central point for information and people 
used the opportunity to ask us a lot of questions regarding PHP. Here is 
a top 5 of most asked questions..."
http://www.dragonbe.com/2009/02/fosdem-2009-in-review.html


+08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

HTML 5 Working Draft Updated (Feburary 2009)
By Shawn Medero.
"Once again, the cogs at the W3C have cranked out an updated HTML 5 
Working Draft. There's also been an update to the non-normative HTML 5 
differences from HTML 4 notes, which are particularly useful for authors 
new to HTML 5..."
http://tinyurl.com/asnhs2

HTML5 (Spec Without All the New Features)
By Robert Sayre.
http://people.mozilla.com/~sayrer/2009/02/15/html5.html
Discussion is Mozilla Bug 478665
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=478665

Add a Little HTML5 to Your Websites
By Kilian Valkhof.
"It will be a while before we can start using real HTML5, but because 
HTML5 is as much about defining current behaviour as it is about adding 
new, there is already a very large part available to us today. Here are 
the parts you can use today..."
http://tinyurl.com/cznsm5

The Road to HTML 5: Character Encoding
By Mark Pilgrim.
"The feature of the day is character encoding, specifically how to 
determine the character encoding of an HTML document. I am never happier 
than when I am writing about character encoding. But first, here is my 
standard "elevator pitch..."
http://blog.whatwg.org/the-road-to-html-5-character-encoding

Web Standards Gone Wild
By Joshua Allen.
"...that normal people are no longer comfortable reading specs. This is a 
tragedy, IMO, and the blame rests squarely on the shoulders of 
specification authors..."
http://visitmix.com/Opinions/Web-Standards-Gone-Wild

Compatibility View Improvements to Come in IE8
By Scott Dickens.
"When users install Windows 7 Beta or the next IE8 update, they get a 
choice about opting-in to a list of sites that should be displayed in 
Compatibility View. Sites are on this list based on feedback from other 
IE8 customers: specifically, for what high-volume sites did other users 
click the Compatibility View button? This list updates automatically, and 
helps users who aren't web-savvy have a better experience with web sites 
that aren't yet IE8-ready."
http://tinyurl.com/5ohohw

IE8 Compatibility View Controversy Articles:

IE8 Blacklist: Forcing Standards Rendering Opt-In
By Mike Davies.
http://tinyurl.com/anwwtm

How I Might Deal with IE6
By Dan Cederholm.
http://www.simplebits.com/notebook/2009/02/13/iegone.html

Pajamas
By Andy Clarke.
http://forabeautifulweb.com/blog/about/pajamas/

Just The Facts: Recap of Compatibility View
By Scott Dickens.
http://tinyurl.com/bryprh

IE's Compatibility View
By Shelley Powers.
http://realtech.burningbird.net/web/standards/ies-compatibility-view

IE8 Blacklist: Forcing Standards Rendering Opt-In
By Mike Davies.
http://tinyurl.com/anwwtm

The IE8 Blacklist Minefield
By Mike Davies.
http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/standards/TheIe8BlacklistMinefield

IE8: Standards Mode Opt-In is Back From the Dead
By Craig Buckler.
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/02/19/ie8-standards-mode-opt-in/


+09: TOOLS.

Dublin Core Metadata Generator
By Stanford Online Accessibility Program.
http://soap.stanford.edu/plugins/dublincore/


+10: TYPOGRAPHY.

Font Sizing: em, pixel, point, percent and keywords
By Stephanie Sullivan.
"When I write and speak, I often talk about using em units to size 
layouts giving the user the ability to resize the entire layout if they 
change their font size..."
http://www.communitymx.com/blog/index.cfm?newsid=941


+11: USABILITY.

Mobile Web 2009 = Desktop Web 1998
By Jakob Nielsen.
"Mobile phone users struggle mightily to use websites, even on high-end
devices. To solve the problems, websites should provide special mobile 
versions."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mobile-usability.html

Let the Mobile Web Learn From and Not Repeat the Mistakes of Desktop 
Development
By Henny Swan.
"...I couldn't disagree with him more on his proposed solution of 
building a separate .mobi site. To me this just extends the problems of 
walled gardens for users and leads developers down the road of additional 
and unnecessary work..."
http://www.iheni.com/mobile-desktop-development/

Why the Mobile Web Must Mirror the Desktop
By Bruce Lawson.
"Opera's Bruce Lawson on the importance of web standards..."
http://tinyurl.com/csrg2n

Generic Work Process
By Bas Leurs, Peter Conradie, Joel Laumans, Rosalieke Verboom.
"This toolkit offers an overview of the methods and techniques which can 
be used throughout the user-centered design process."
http://project.cmd.hro.nl/cmi/hci/toolkit/

Why Some Content is Deliberately Complex
By Gerry McGovern.
"Deliberately complex content still has the power to impress some of us 
some of the time. But societies are becoming less  susceptible to the 
language of deception, and the Web is at the forefront of that changing 
reality."
http://tinyurl.com/de3km4

Don't Treat your Website Like a Commodity
By Andy Budd.
"...Because there is little difference between the majority of online 
products, product managers resort to old school commodity marketing and 
focus their attention of driving traffic to their site in the hope that a 
few people will stick..."
http://www.andybudd.com/archives/2009/02/dont_treat_your/

In Defense of Readers
By Mandy Brown.
"Readers flourish when they have space-some distance from the hubbub of 
the crowds-and as web designers, there is yet much we can do to help them 
carve out that space."
http://alistapart.com/articles/indefenseofreaders

Your Target Audience and Your Users
By Patrick Kennedy.
"...if you have to spend big on marketing to trick people to use your 
website, there's nothing worth using on that website..."
http://tinyurl.com/dzsax7


+12: XML.

RDFa is to Structured Data, Like Canvas is to Bitmap and SVG is to Vector
By Dan Brickley.
Dan Brickley summarizes the origins of RDF.
http://tinyurl.com/9jfo32

RDFa in HTML5
By Sam Ruby.
http://intertwingly.net/blog/2009/02/14/RDFa-in-HTML5

A Battle of Beliefs: RDF, Natural Language Processing, and the Future of 
the Web
By Shelly Powers.
"...It is a debate about the fundamental nature of the web, at its most 
general and profound level, while HTML5 is really nothing more then the 
next generation of HTML. However, we are fighting this macro battle out 
in the micro lists of HTML5, but deceptively so..."
http://tinyurl.com/ah9sue


[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.


+ 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.]