[webdev] Web Design Update: March 13, 2009

Fri Mar 13 02:20:06 CDT 2009

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 7, Issue 37, March 13, 2009.

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

++ISSUE 37 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: EVALUATION & TESTING.
05: EVENTS.
06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
07: JAVASCRIPT.
08: MISCELLANEOUS.
09: NAVIGATION.
10: PHP.
11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
12: USABILITY.
13: XML.

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

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

WCAG 2.0 Made Easy. One Guideline a Day.
By Olga Revilla.
"On December 11th, 2008, after 5 years of working, the W3C WAI released 
the WCAG 2.0 . They are an evolution of the WCAG 1.0, released on May 
5th, 1999, that became a little bit obsolete due to technological 
advances. Despite this obsolescence, many laws still stand on these 
guidelines. WCAG 2 follows the spirit of trying to bring a most 
accessible Web, but with some changes with the previous ones. In this 
site, we will see that resemblances and differences..."
http://www.oneguidelineaday.com/table-of-contents/

Accessibility and Learning Theories
By Martyn Cooper.
"...The paper seeks to review the interrelation between accessibility and 
learning theory as it relates to eLearning.  Here I give some key points 
from the paper for comment if you wish..."
http://tinyurl.com/coo3vk

IMS AccessForAll Meta-data Specification
By Inovation Adoption Learning (ISM) Consortium.
"The AccessForAll Meta-data specification is intended to make it possible 
to identify resources that match a user's stated preferences or needs. 
These preferences or needs would be declared using the IMS Learner 
Information Package Accessibility for LIP specification. The needs and 
preferences addressed include the need or preference for alternative 
presentations of resources, alternative methods of controlling resources, 
alternative equivalents to the resources themselves and enhancements or 
supports required by the user. The specification provides a common 
language for identifying and describing the primary or default resource 
and equivalent alternatives for that resource..."
http://www.imsglobal.org/accessibility/

Captioning Video with 'World Caption'
By University of Wisconsin.
"World Caption is a program for adding captions to a QuickTime compatible 
video, using a transcript of that video. While World Caption cannot be 
used to generate a transcript, it makes the process of synchronizing a 
transcript to video simple, and allows quick and easy generation of 
captions."
http://kb.wisc.edu/helpdesk/page.php?id=6525

No Fuss Accessibility
By Antonio DaSilva.
"This article describes how you can quickly and easily create documents 
with enhanced accessibility options for vision-impaired users using 
Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat..."
http://www.writersua.com/articles/accessibility/index.html

Alt-erations
By Markku (Mark) Hakkinen.
"The section on the alt attribute in the current HTML5 working draft that 
begins with 'What an img element represents depends on the src attribute 
and the alt attribute' really seems to miss the point.  This is the 
semantic Web era, correct?  Isn't the conditional logic of the current 
draft really trying to affix a meaning or purpose to an image in all the 
wrong ways? Ambiguity is not the way..."
http://www.talkinginterfaces.org/2009/03/06/alt-erations/

Connection
By William Loughborough.
"...Are people who provide materials for the Web, but ignore the 
'everyone' part ('after all, I'm not writing this for blind people') 
bigots, or just uninformed, but well-meaning?..."
http://william-loughborough.blogspot.com/2009/03/connection.html

Does Your Grandfather Surf the Web?
By William Loughborough.
"...Dismissing old folks as pitiful fools is a poor plan for the 
continued growth towards universal connection."
http://www.boobam.org/webgeezermild.htm

Web Accessibility as a Political Movement
By David Baron.
"...I think the attitude that evil Web authors need to be forced to care 
about accessibility leads to technically worse solutions that require 
more work for authors and leave the Web less accessible to disabled users 
as a result..."
http://dbaron.org/log/20090311-accessibility

Web Accessibility as a Political Movement IRC Discussion
By Karl Dubost and others.
"hmmm not sure I 100% agree with david..."
http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/html-wg/20090312#l-67

Is Web Accessibility a Human Rights Issue?
By Wendy Chisholm.
"It's important for us to recognize each other's concerns. On the one 
hand we have technologists who want to create things to help make the 
world better?help people communicate more richly and quickly, to create 
technologies for self-expression and commerce. Rock on. We want you to 
innovate because you're changing the world.  On the other hand we have 
people who want to use the technologies and to participate in society. 
When the technologists say, 'Don't make me think about accessibility, I 
want to be innovative.' The response from people with disabilities can be 
hostile because the message from the technologists is, 'I do not value 
you enough to include you in my innovation.'"
http://sp1ral.com/2009/03/is-web-accessibility-a-human-rights-issue/

The Electronic Curb-Cut Effect
By Steve Jacobs.
"Unusual things happen when products are designed to be accessible by 
people with disabilities..."
http://www.icdri.org/technology/ecceff.htm

Understanding the Effects of Cognitive Disorders: Parts 1 -3
By Kyle Lamson.
"On the baseline, cognitive disorders are about the brain and problems 
understanding things. So there is no easy fix like slapping an alt 
attribute in code, increasing color contrast and we will not understand 
something whether written or read in a screenreader, using flexible 
widths where the content paragraphs are to long can even cause more 
trouble for us even though free flexing sizes are considered 
accessible..."
http://tinyurl.com/ba6xg7
http://tinyurl.com/bkrpt2
http://tinyurl.com/amevlg

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Practical, Maintainable CSS
By Natalie Downe.
"Continuing my new years resolution to get better at public speaking, I 
have now given two talks in 2009 and am signed up to two more. It really 
does get easier! The last one I gave was (in hindsight) really quite 
fun..."
http://natbat.net/2009/Mar/10/practical-maintainable-css/

Go Green With CSS Print Stylesheets
By Neal Grosskopf.
"...print stylesheets should be used on every website, whether you care 
go green or not. It will help your end users save money on printing costs 
and will also give you users a more useful printout."
http://www.nealgrosskopf.com/tech/thread.asp?pid=39

Why A Mobile Version Of Your Website Is A Necessity
By Chris Boudy.
"...Using the One Web approach you can look at your existing website and 
use mobile style sheets that will highlight commonly used areas while 
giving a visitor a reasonable experience while browsing from their mobile 
device..."
http://tinyurl.com/cvqhrh

The Shallowness of CSS Evangelism
By Mike Davies.
"...CSS evangelists, consider the merits of your arguments thoroughly. 
You'll find that CSS isn't better than tables for layout; it's just 
different. Just a different set of trade-offs and compromises. Deepen 
your understanding of CSS, especially it's shortcomings, limitations and 
it's compromises...."
http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/standards/TheShallownessOfCssEvangelism

+03: DREAMWEAVER.

Creating a Simple Three-Column Design
By Stephanie Sullivan.
"..., I'll start this article with that two-column layout, change it to 
three columns, and look at some simple techniques that can make your site 
more attractive..."
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/css_3c_tableless.html

An RDFa Extension for Dreamweaver
By Virginia DeBolt.
"I'm really excited about this Dreamweaver extension. I think it answers 
a need. But I'm not seeing an effective way to make use of it at this 
point."
http://tinyurl.com/cd5o9j

Is Dreamweaver Being Beaten by Drupal?
By Kurt Cagle.
"...My recommendation to Adobe - study Drupal very closely, not just as a 
product but as the harbinger of a wave of products that are developed via 
crowdsourcing and community involvement..."
http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/03/is-dreamweaver-giving-way-to-d.html

Dreamweaver is Dying
By Tom Arah.
"...The bottom line is that the old model of the central webmaster 
hand-spinning every page of every website and, worse, manually adding the 
navigation necessary to help users find it, just isn't scalable or 
viable. The only feasible course for the future is for content to be 
posted by the content contributor, whether that's the site owner or site 
visitors, and for the best possible navigation to be constructed around 
that content on the fly..."
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2009/03/05/dreamweaver-is-dying/

+04: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Writing Usability Requirements and Metrics
Janet M. Six.
"In this installment of Ask UXmatters, our experts discuss how to write 
effective usability requirements and metrics for the redesign of a legacy 
public sector system."
http://tinyurl.com/bjanrq

What Counts: Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Design
By Dana Chisnell.
"...tracking data for every session can keep the whole team honest. When 
there are numbers, the team can decide together what to do with them..."
http://tinyurl.com/aeph5r

Deconstructing Analysis Techniques
By Steve Baty.
"Analysis is that oft-glossed over, but extremely important step in the 
research process that sits between observation (data gathering) and our 
design insights or recommendations. In many respects, analysis is crucial 
to realizing the value of our research since good analysis can salvage 
something from bad research, but the converse is not so true. This is 
where the literature tends to fall a little silent, jumping over the 
analysis techniques straight to a discussion of how best to document and 
communicate the findings from analysis. This article seeks to begin to 
redress that imbalance by breaking down the analysis black box into its 
major sub-techniques..."
http://tinyurl.com/alj48e

Setting Up a Screen Reader Test Environment
By Henny Swan.
"...some tips to get you started when setting up a screen reader testing 
environment...."
http://www.iheni.com/screen-reader-testing/

+05: EVENTS.

SXSW Interactive 2009 High Ed Web Meetup/TweetUp
March 15, 2009.
Austin, Texas, U.S.A.
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/2112189/

JavaScript: The Good Parts with Douglas Crockford
March 30, 2009.
University of California, San Francisco, California, U.S.A.
http://training.oreilly.com/javascript/

Handcrafted Bulletproof CSS with Dan Cederholm
November 23, 2009.
London, United Kingdom
http://carsonworkshops.com/2009/dancederholm/index.html

+06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

For Cardsorting, 20 is Enough
By Kath Straub.
"Tullis and Woods conducted a real data simulation study to determine the 
practically optimal number of participants need for cardsorting..."
http://connect.humanfactors.com/profiles/blogs/researchdriveby-1

+07: JAVASCRIPT.

JavaScript Best Practices
By Christian Heilmann.
"...I've decided to make it easier for you by creating this article, 
which is a compilation of best practices and good advice I've amassed 
over the years, much of it learnt the hard way (experimentation and 
suchlike). Take the advice below to heart and keep it in a part of your 
brain that has a quick access route so you can apply it without thinking 
about it. I am sure you will find things to disagree with, and that is a 
good thing - you should question what you read, and strive to find better 
solutions. However, I have found that following these principles has made 
me a more effective developer and allowed other developers to build upon 
my work more easily..."
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/javascript-best-practices/

More Accessible YUI Grids Layouts with ARIA Landmark Roles
By Todd Kloots.
"...ARIA Landmark Roles improve the content parsability of Grids for 
users of screen readers. By allowing developers to declare the intended 
purpose of each section of a layout, Landmark Roles provide semantic 
meaning to each section of a Grid, giving users of screen readers a 
high-level summary of how a page is organized..."
http://yuiblog.com/blog/2009/03/05/aria-grids/

When Will Developers Be Able to Rely on ARIA?
WebAIM Thread.
"...Since the accessibility benefits of ARIA are so revolutionary, do we 
expect the adoption rate to be high? WAI-ARIA is in last call working 
draft, so we don't know how long that will take to finalize, but there 
seems to be good support for major browsers and major screen readers. The 
question is will it be soon enough?"
http://webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread.php?thread=3793

Server-side JavaScript Will Be as Common as PHP
By Andrew Tetlaw.
"Reading through the comments on Craig Buckler's blog post, Will 
Server-side JavaScript ever catch on?; confirms what Douglas Crockford 
wrote about JavaScript: it's been typecast..."
http://tinyurl.com/an8jrr

When You Can't Count On Your Numbers
By Douglas Crockford.
"JavaScript has a single number type: IEEE 754 Double Precision floating 
point. Having a single number type is one of JavaScript's best features. 
Multiple number types can be a source of complexity, confusion, and 
error. A single type is simplifying and stabilizing..."
http://yuiblog.com/blog/2009/03/10/when-you-cant-count-on-your-numbers/

+08: MISCELLANEOUS.

How To Be a Program Manager
by Joel Spolsky.
"Having a good program manager is one of the secret formulas to making 
really great software. And you probably don't have one on your team, 
because most teams don't..."
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/03/09.html

Sharpening the Saw
By Jeff Atwood.
"Sharpening the saw is shorthand for anything you do that isn't 
programming, necessarily, but (theoretically) makes you a better 
programmer...?
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001236.html

Stage Directions Meet Functional Specifications: They Have a Lot in Common
By Traci Lepore.
"When it comes to modern theater, stage directions?the descriptive text 
that appears within brackets in a script?are an important piece of the 
puzzle. They speak for the playwright when he is not there. They provide 
details about how the playwright has imagined the environment and 
atmosphere. They describe critical physical aspects of the characters and 
settings. Stage directions can also be critical in dictating the intended 
tempo and rhythm of the piece. Whether they establish a production's 
overall tone or elucidate particular actions of characters, stage 
directions help tell the complete story that is in the playwright's mind. 
Stage directions accomplish all of this, using a simple convention that 
structurally separates them from the actual story."
http://tinyurl.com/c3czod

+09: NAVIGATION.

Choosing the Right Search Results Page Layout: Make the Most of Your Width
By Greg Nudelman.
"When deciding on the layout for your search results pages, clearly 
define the appropriate page behavior at all screen sizes your audience 
uses."
http://tinyurl.com/d3y7bf

+10: PHP.

PHP: Sorting arrays randomly with array_randsort()
By Tiffany B. Brown.
"A custom PHP function. This function will return an array that's been 
resorted in a random order. Supports both numerically-indexed and 
associative arrays. Uses PHP's native array_rand() function..."
http://tinyurl.com/bm9ukm

+11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

Marking Up a Blog with HTML 5 (part 2)
By Bruce Lawson.
"Further refining the HTML 5 structure..."
http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2009/marking-up-a-blog-with-html-5-part-2/

HTML4.2
By Douglas Crockford.
Douglas Crockford finds HTML5 misguided. Proposes starting HTML4.2 
effort. He says, "...Doing research and standards together is very bad. 
Standards must be stable and reliable. Research is destabilizing and 
risky. Doing both together is a recipe for disaster..."
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-TBPekxc1dLNy5DOloPfzVvFIVOWMB0li?p=978

Challenging Times for HTML 5
By Shawn Medero.
"Douglas Crockford, perhaps best known for standardizing JSON, launched 
another shot across the bow of HTML 5 on his Yahoo! 360 blog titled 'HTML 
4.2'..."
http://tinyurl.com/djb5nb

This Week Day in HTML 5 - Episode 24
By Mark Pilgrim.
"...virtually anything can be focusable, because HTML 5 standardizes a 
crucial accessibility feature that most modern browsers now implement, 
namely that any element can have a tabindex attribute..."
http://blog.whatwg.org/this-week-day-in-html-5-episode-24

Sweetness Follows?
By David Sloan.
"...the standards-based approaches are the way to go - as far as 
possible. But in the messy world of the Web, this may - for valid reasons 
- not be all the way. Just like that 50 MPH speed limit on an open, 
straight stretch of rural road is no more making it safe than the 30 mph 
limit on the city road outside a school at 3 PM when it's raining, your 
wiper blade has stopped working properly, you're tired, and stressed by 
the white van in your rear view mirror."
http://58sound.wordpress.com/2009/03/10/sweetness-follows/

Why Validate?
By Olivier Thereaux.
"This document attempts to answer the questions many people have 
regarding why they should bother with Validating their web sites and 
tries to dispel a few common myths."
http://qa-dev.w3.org/wmvs/HEAD/docs/why

Progress on Captions for HTML5 Video
By Silvia Pfeiffer.
"Paul Rouget this week published another example implementation for using 
srt with HTML5 video with a javascript library. This is at least the 
fourth javascript implementation that I know of for attaching srt 
subtitles to the video element..."
http://tinyurl.com/cozpzh

+12: USABILITY.

5 Writing Tips for Web Designers
By Rick Sloboda.
"Poorly written web writing misleads visitors and wastes millions of 
hours daily..."
http://www.webdesignerwall.com/general/5-writing-tips-for-web-designers/

What Does Aesthetics Have To Do With Usability?
By Jon White.
"...Aesthetics and usability support each other and when they work 
together they can be the difference between a good website and a 
first-rate one."
http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article5483.asp

+13: XML.

XHTML Document Development Area
By W3C XHTML Working Group.
"The XHTML Working Group is developing a number of different documents. 
Editing of these documents goes on almost constantly. Rather than attempt 
to manage formal publication of interim 'Editor's Drafts', the working 
group has elected to automatically update its document development space 
each time an update is made..."
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Drafts/

RDFa on MediaWiki
By Toby A Inkster.
"I've written a quick patch to enable RDFa on MediaWiki..."
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdfa/2009Mar/0010.html

[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.]