[webdev] Web Design Update: August 21, 2009

Fri Aug 21 06:38:47 CDT 2009

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 8, Issue 08, August 21, 2009.

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

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

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

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Labels for Form Controls Overview
By Illinois Center for Information Technology and Web Accessibility.
"Form controls must be labeled and grouped to provide explicit 
references that can be used by assistive technologies to communicate 
the purpose of the form controls. The tabindex attribute can be used to 
include instructions and other information in the tab navigation 
ordering so that screen reader users can easily orient the information 
needed to complete the form..."
http://html.cita.illinois.edu/nav/form/

Time To Be Flexible
By Brian Kelly.
"To achieve universal accessibility for their web resources, surely all 
that organization need do is implement the international Web 
Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines (in particular the WCAG 
guidelines for web content)?..."
http://www.headstar.com/eablive/?p=327

Academic Urges Shift From Accessibility To 'Adaptability'
By Dan Jellinek.
An approach to improving web access for people with disabilities based 
on 'adaptability' rather than 'accessibility' is urged by a leading 
academic in this month's E-Access Bulletin.
http://www.headstar.com/eablive/?p=319

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Taming Advanced CSS Selectors
By Inayaili de Leon.
"CSS is one of the most powerful tools that is available to web 
designers (if not the most powerful). With it we can completely 
transform the look of a website in just a couple of minutes, and 
without even having to touch the markup. But despite the fact that we 
are all well aware of its usefulness, CSS selectors are still not used 
to their full potential and we sometimes have the tendency to litter 
our HTML with excessive and unnecessary classes and ids, divs and 
spans..."
http://tinyurl.com/qfba8t

+03: COLOR.

Understanding Web Safe Colors
By merttol.
"There is a palette (a collection of available colors) of 216 colors 
that is at least somewhat predictable across the various hardware and 
software platforms. Called the web-safe palette (or, the safety 
palette), these colors are recognized universally by all browsers and 
systems (well, except the really ancient systems, anyway). Although the 
colors don't appear exactly the same on all systems because of the 
vagaries of different monitors, they are at least recognized 
unambiguously by all systems..."
http://www.merttol.com/articles/web/understanding-web-safe-colors.html

Making Your Web Colors Visible For All - Five Color Accessibility Tools
By Jennifer Farley.
"f you are designing, or re-designing your web site, it is time well 
spent running your website through the color accessibility tools below 
to ensure that your site can be seen correctly by as many people as 
possible. Most of these tools use WC3 guidelines to perform their 
various operations. If you can actually read and understand them, the 
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 requires, amongst other 
things, that there is sufficient contrast between text and background 
color. For a person with a color disability, the colors used on a web 
site can mean the difference between being able to read text and images 
or not. 1 in 12 people have some sort of color deficiency..."
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/08/20/color-accessibility-tools/

+04: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Testing in the Wild, Seizing Opportunity
By Dana Chisnell.
"When I say 'usability test,' you might think of something that looks 
like a psych experiment, without the electrodes (although I'm sure 
those are coming as teams think that measuring biometrics will help 
them understand users' experiences). Anyway, you probably visualize a 
lab of some kind, with a user in one room and a researcher in another, 
watching either through a glass or a monitor..."
http://www.uie.com/articles/testing_in_wild/

Introducing the SitePoint Personas
By Matthew Magain.
"We recently decided to develop some personas to represent the core 
readership of sitepoint.com, and this is what we came up with."
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/sitepoint-personas/

Build Your Own Data-backed Personas
By Matthew Magain.
"When Matt created the SitePoint Personas, he combined two different 
methodologies, and it worked surprisingly well. Here, he describes the 
process he followed, and explains how you might do the same when 
designing your own web sites."
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/sitepoint-personas-process/

+05: EVENTS.

OZ-IA
October 2-3, 2009.
Sydney, Australia
http://www.oz-ia.org/2009/

Edge of the Web
November 4-6, 2009.
Perth, Australia
http://www.edgeoftheweb.org.au/

+06: JAVASCRIPT.

JavaScript MVC
By Jonathan Snook.
"As JavaScript takes center stage in our web applications, we need to 
produce ever more modular code. MVC (Model-View-Controller) may hold 
the key. MVC is a design pattern that breaks an application into three 
parts: the data (Model), the presentation of that data to the user 
(View), and the actions taken on any user interaction (Controller). 
Discover how MVC can make the JavaScript that powers your web 
applications more reusable and easier to maintain..."
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/javascript-mvc/

+07: MISCELLANEOUS.

Gender in IT, OSS, & PHP, and How it Affects Us All
By Elizabeth Naramore.
"I started looking into the state of women in the IT industry, open 
source and PHP for purely selfish reasons. I wanted to satisfy my own 
curiosity so I decided to do some research. What I found was not only 
interesting, it shed some light into where we stand, how we got here, 
why we should even care in the first place, and what we can potentially 
do about it..."
http://tinyurl.com/omux3e

All Programming is Web Programming
By Jeff Atwood.
"Pretty soon, all programming will be web programming."
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001296.html

+08: PHP.

Functional PHP 5.3 Part I - What are Anonymous Functions and Closures?
By Kris Jordan.
"One of the most exciting features of PHP 5.3 is the first-class 
support for anonymous functions. You may have heard them referred to as 
closures or lambdas as well. There's a lot of meaning behind these 
terms so let's straighten it all out.."
http://tinyurl.com/ls5qlu

+09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

A Call for Education: How Do We Educate the Web Standards Kids?
By Chris Mills.
"There have been some exciting developments in web standards education 
of late. I've pretty much got the core of the Web Standards Curriculum 
published, and there are translations on the way. I have also 
contributed to the WaSP InterAct project, which currently has 11 
courses available and promises more in the next year or so. And these 
initiatives are being brought together along with others under the 
umbrella of the Open Web Education Alliance, which promises to provide 
a worldwide standard for teaching web design and development that 
provides educators with all the tools and resources they need to start 
teaching web standards and best practices in their courses..."
http://tinyurl.com/nlon7y

Draw Attention With Mark
By Mike Robinson.
"Other than allowing Marks everywhere to rejoice that they have an 
element that shares their name, HTML 5 introduces mark as a way to 
highlight text to indicate its relevance to the user. Read on as we 
tally up the uses of this new element..."
http://html5doctor.com/draw-attention-with-mark/

W3 HTML5 Storage - What Works, What Does Not
By Andrea Giammarchi.
"My last sessionStorage is basically ready to implement storage events 
but apparently I cannot implement them right now. Why not? Doing some 
test I just discovered a lot of inconsistency for each browser which 
supports Web Storage in core, so here I am with a little report and 
some suggestion."
http://tinyurl.com/m88my6

Jumping to Time Offsets in HTML5 Video
By Silvia Pfeiffer.
"For many years now I have been progressing a deeper view of video on 
the Web than just as a binary blob. We need direct access to time 
offsets and sections of videos..."
http://blog.gingertech.net/2009/08/19/jumping-to-time-offsets-in-videos/

Dive Into HTML 5
Mark Pilgrim.
"Dive Into HTML 5 seeks to elaborate on a hand-picked Selection of 
features from the HTML 5 specification and other fine Standards. I 
shall publish Drafts periodically, as time permits..."
http://diveintohtml5.org/
Let's Call It a Draw(ing Surface) is the Chapter on Canvas.
http://diveintohtml5.org/canvas.html

+10: TOOLS.

ConvertIcon!
"...can import ICO, PNG, GIF, and JPEG formats and export to 
high-quality PNG or ICO files."
http://converticon.com/

+11: TYPOGRAPHY.

CSS Font-Sizing: a Definitive Guide
By Craig Buckler.
"Font sizing in CSS sounds as though it should be easy. Until you try 
it. Many developers use the force; they tinker with the font-size 
property until it looks right only to find it's different in another 
browser. A little understanding can go a long way..."
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/08/20/css-font-sizing-tutorial/

+12: USABILITY.

Customization of UIs and Products
By Jakob Nielsen.
"Websites that let users customize the UI have the same measured 
usability as regular sites. Sites for customizing products, however, 
score substantially worse due to complex workflow."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/customization.html

10 User Interface Design Fundamentals
By Kyle Sollenberger.
"It's no great mystery that truly great user interfaces are the ones 
that are engineered to stay out of the way. 'Staying out of the way' 
means not distracting your users. Rather, good UIs let your users 
complete goals. The result? A reduction in training and support costs, 
and happier, satisfied and highly engaged users. When getting started 
on a new interface, make sure to remember these fundamentals..."
http://tinyurl.com/mncq97

[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.

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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.]