[webdev] Web Design Update: July 31, 2009

[Laura Carlson]

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 8, Issue 05, July 31, 2009.

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

++ISSUE 05 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: EVENTS.
04: MISCELLANEOUS.
05: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
06: TOOLS.
07: TYPOGRAPHY.
08: USABILITY.

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

[Contents ends.]


++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

NFB Files Section 508 Complaint Against Small Business Administration
By 508portal.
"The National Federation of the Blind, the nation's oldest and largest 
organization of blind people and
the leading advocate for equal access by the blind to information 
technology, and Virgil Stinnett, a blind business owner from Honolulu, 
Hawaii, filed an administrative complaint today with the Small Business 
Administration (SBA). The complaint asserts that the SBA's Web site 
violates Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act because it is 
inaccessible to blind people who use text-to-speech screen access
technology or Braille displays to access information on the Internet. 
Because of the inaccessibility of the SBA Web site, blind people cannot 
fill out forms on the site or take online courses offered by the SBA..."
http://www.508portal.com/?q=node/668

Will Mozilla Blow it on Captioning?
By Joe Clark.
"...Sylvia Pfeiffer et al. have been exploring the issue of captioning, 
subtitling, and other forms of moving text as used on the Web. There's 
too much of an insistence on an open standard to guarantee a successful 
outcome (sometimes the best option is one somebody else owns), but for 
today, let's consider some warning signs from Pfeiffer's recent 
report..."
http://blog.fawny.org/2009/07/27/mozcc1/


+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

CSS Inheritance - A Simple Step-by-Step Tutorial
By Russ Weakly.
"Another company training session presentation - this time on CSS 
inheritance. A simple, step-by-step presentation on CSS inheritance 
that covers the document tree, rule sets, basic inheritance and 
font-size inheritance. Hope you find it useful..."
http://www.maxdesign.com.au/2009/07/27/css-inheritance/

The Definitive Guide to Using Negative Margins
By John Imbong.
"...Negative margins have a place in modern web design because of its 
ability to position elements without any additional markup. With more 
users switching to more updated browsers (IE8 included), the future 
looks very bright for sites which rely on this technique..."
http://tinyurl.com/n6ktat

Text Blocks Over Image
By Chris Coyier.
"Someone recently asked me about this technique and my first reaction 
was that it was probably a little too mundane to cover as a tutorial. 
But then I got to thinking that there is actually a few interesting 
things happening here and the style is trendy enough people might be 
interested..."
http://css-tricks.com/text-blocks-over-image/


+03: EVENTS.

Web Education Rock Summit
August 5-8, 2009.
Chattanooga, Tennessee, U.S.A.
http://webeducationrocks.com/page/the-summit

Understand and Use WAI-ARIA
August 14, 2009, in London, United Kingdom.
September 25, in Edinburgh, Scotland.
November 27, 2009 in London, United Kingdom.
http://tinyurl.com/kmoebq


+04: MISCELLANEOUS.

Interview: Bruce Lawson
By net.
"Opera's web evangelist Bruce Lawson foresees a future in which much of 
the world leapfrogs the desktop and jumps straight onto the mobile web, 
and standards are more important than ever. He tells Oliver Lindberg 
how we can create one web for all"
http://www.netmag.co.uk/zine/home/bruce-lawson


+05: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

The Most Pressing Accessibility issue in HTML5 Today?
By John Foliot.
"...finding a solution for <canvas> is going to be both vexing and 
messy, I suggested to Bruce that completing the <video> element to 
properly address accessibility before Last Call (currently scheduled 
for October, 2009) was likely even more pressing. Here's why..."
http://tinyurl.com/lnvr7o

Accessibility of HTML 5 Video
By Bruce Lawson.
"...If HTML 5 video is going to catch on (and we all hope plugin-less 
video that can be manipulated with scripting, integrate with canvas and 
SVG will catch on), it needs to be able to compete with captioning 
plugins, especially if The Twenty-first Century Communications and 
Video Accessibility Act of 2009 looks close to becoming law."
http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2009/accessibility-of-html-5-video/

HTML5: A Story in Progress
By Shelley Powers.
"...Technology should enable, not obfuscate..."
http://burningbird.net/node/28

When Deprecate is Obsolete
By Shelley Powers.
"...The HTML 5 working draft lists various ways a person can document 
the structure of a table, but none of these ways fulfill the same 
purpose of summary. If they did, we could deprecate the summary 
attribute, with a reference to the replacement. But since these 
alternatives don't serve the same purpose, summary has to continue as a 
viable, active attribute until replaced by something else..."
http://realtech.burningbird.net/deprecated-is-now-obsolete

Canvas vs SVG
By T.V Raman.
"...'sprinkling' ARIA in dynamic SVG or Canvas controls will solve
nothing --- most of the semantics of such controls that would be
needed to help a blind user work with such controls will need to
be coded by the developer via context-specific script
handlers. (These handlers would in turn manipulate the low-level
ARIA bits in a concerted manner to produce the desired end-user
effect)..."
http://groups.google.com/group/openweb-group/msg/4aeac3adce2e0907?pli=1

Separating Canvas out of HTML 5
By Shelley Powers.
"...One simplification of HTML 5 I would make is to remove the Canvas 
section from the specification..."
http://realtech.burningbird.net/separating-canvas-new-specification

Can HTML5 Make Accessibility Usable?
By Jonny Axelsso.
"Following up the discussion on Accessible drag and drop using 
WAI-ARIA, I think HTML5 may be a huge win for accessibility. HTML4 was 
filled with good intentions, HTML5 should be filled with good 
implementations..."
http://my.opera.com/jax/blog/can-html5-make-accessibility-usable

Why Standards Fail
By Jeffery Zeldman.
"...To the extent that W3C specifications remain modular, practical, 
and accessible to the non-PhD in computer science, they will be adopted 
by browser makers and the marketplace. The farther they depart from the 
principles Bert articulated, the sooner they will peter out into 
nothingness, and the likelier we are to face a crisis in which web 
standards once again detach from the direction in which the web is 
actually moving, and the medium is given over to incompatible, 
proprietary technologies..."
http://www.zeldman.com/2009/07/24/why-standards-fail/

Why (Some) Standards Fail
By Daniel Glazman.
"...Standards are not only documents. They're not only made for the 
greatest benefit of Humanity. They're a battlefield. A battlefield 
where everyone smiles at the other and has a drink with the group after 
work but a battlefield full of war sagas and full of dead ideas and 
codes. Dead companies too. Such a situation does not always end up in 
good compromises. Some compromises are weak, some are even dangerous. 
Some are bloody. So yes, SOME standards fail. Because standards are 
made by human beings, because human beings can make mistakes and 
because human beings - standards authors and users - are the most 
painful species on this planet, rarely happy with what they have in 
hands..."
http://tinyurl.com/m46uvo

The HTML 5 Experiments
By Bruce Lawson.
Bruce's HTML 5 presentation slides.
http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/the-html-5-experiments

An Essay on W3C's Design Principles
By Bert Bos, 06 Mar 2003.
"Contrary to appearances, the W3C specifications are for the most part 
not designed for computers, but for people..."
http://www.w3.org/People/Bos/DesignGuide/introduction.html


+06: TOOLS.

Naview
By Volkside.
Navigation preview tool for rapid IA prototyping
http://www.volkside.com/tools/naview/


+07: TYPOGRAPHY.

Font In Your Face
By Divya Manian.
"...here is the 'A to Z' of what @font-face means now and what it will 
mean for the future of web design..."
http://nimbupani.com/blog/font-in-your-face.html


+08: USABILITY.

Writing for the Web
By Christian Heilmann.
"...The main thing to remember is that text on the web is not published 
in one place but spreads throughout the web as bookmarks, links and 
references. Therefore it is very important to chunk texts up into 
easily digestible and repeatable chunks and make your headlines and 
document titles work without the context of the full text..."
http://developer-evangelism.com/writing.php


[Section one ends.]


++ SECTION TWO:

+09: 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 
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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 
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.]