[webdev] Web Design Update: September 11, 2009

[Laura Carlson]

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 8, Issue 11, September 11, 2009.

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

++ISSUE 11 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: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
07: JAVASCRIPT.
08: MISCELLANEOUS.
09: NAVIGATION.
10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
11: TOOLS.
12: TYPOGRAPHY.
13: USABILITY.


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

[Contents ends.]


++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Conducting User Evaluations with People with Disabilities
By IBM.
"...This guide details the current best practices for incorporating 
users with disabilities into usability testing activities and outlines 
future work in the area..."
http://www-03.ibm.com/able/resources/userevaluations.html

Find Out How Closed Captioning Can Make a Big Difference for Your 
Online Videos
By Karine Joly.
"Two days ago, I've had the chance to attend the rehearsal of the 
webinar Glenda Sims will present on September 16: ADA-Compliant Web 
Videos 101: How to produce and publish online videos accessible to 
people with disabilities..."
http://tinyurl.com/mubtvx

Voice Your Support for HR 3101: Make Online Video Accessible
By Terrill Thompson.
"...In short, HR 3101 stands to finally bring U.S. accessibility laws 
related to communications and video programming into the 21st Century. 
By doing so it will remove the growing array of technological barriers 
that prevent individuals with disabilities from fully participating in 
our video-based information society..."
http://tinyurl.com/mmv5of

Online Video Captioning
By Jen Rohrig.
"Although I am hard of hearing myself, there was a time when I didn't 
consider captions for online videos to be of great importance, since I 
rarely watched videos online. More recently, I've been watching some 
new online shows and would have been disappointed if captions hadn't 
been available. In addition I've become more annoyed that interviews 
with favorite actors are being published online without captions - as 
are clips and previews from TV shows or movies..."
http://accessites.org/site/2009/09/online-video-captioning/

Good Accessibility Web Governance (Part 1 of 4)
By Ken Nakata.
"...’m going to devote four posts to the seemingly simple topic of how 
accessibility knowledge can be governed simply and easily..."
http://www.accessibilitywatch.com/?p=191

Are PDFs More Important Than Web Accessibility?
By Mark Magennis.
"We recently did an audit of a website where probably close to 99% of 
all the information it contained was in downloadable documents, mostly 
PDFs. These documents contained a lot of the stuff you'd usually find 
on a website ? structured text, data tables, application forms, complex 
diagrams, graphs and other images. None of those we looked at were 
accessible. We wondered what we should advise the client to do about 
it."
http://www.cfit.ie/news-and-commentary-archive/98-pdf-support

The Physically Challenged What? Martians?
By Glenda Watson Hyatt.
"Words can confuse or clarify, simplify or elaborate, demean or 
empower. Take care in how they are used; otherwise, readers may think 
you are talking about Martians with physical challenges..."
http://tinyurl.com/m22nly

What is in a Word? The Evolution of Disability Language
By Glenda Watson Hyatt.
"Cripple. Handicapped. Disabled. Physically challenged. Person with a 
disability. It doesn't really matter what term is used, does it? After 
all, is not a rose by any other name still a rose? Anthropologist 
Bronislaw Malinowski suggested that 'language and culture are 
indivisible, our language is our culture and how we use it reflects on 
our culture'..."
http://tinyurl.com/3wbbgj

Accessibility Review at Practical eCommerce
By Joe Dolson.
"Launching today, I'm beginning a new series at Practical eCommerce. 
This is a series of practical accessibility reviews - web sites can 
submit themselves to be reviewed, and I'll take some time to review the 
site and write up my comments in an article format."
http://tinyurl.com/lka5hu


+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

A Super Simple Horizontal Navigation Bar
By Rob Glazebrook.
"I occurs to me that, while I've written tutorials on tabbed navigation 
bars, dropdown navigation bars, and even horizontal dropdown navigation 
bars, I've never stopped to explain how to build a basic, no-frills 
horizontal navigation bar. And in more cases than not, a simple 
navigation bar is exactly what the doctor ordered..."
http://www.cssnewbie.com/super-simple-horizontal-navigation-bar/

How to Create a Valid Non-Javascript Lightbox
By Jenna Smith.
"I recently came across a solution on CSSPlay for a JavaScript free 
lightbox that uses invalid markup. So, being a sucker for a challenge, 
I set myself the task of creating one with valid markup and I 
eventually succeeded..."
http://www.growldesign.co.uk/projects/lb/

Style a List with One Pixel
By Chris Coyier.
"A one-pixel background image can be a pretty versatile thing. With 
repeat-x it can be a horizontal line, repeat-y makes a vertical line, 
and repeat makes it a fill color. Just as a little fun proof of 
concept, we can use that to create a depth-chart looking unordered 
list..."
http://css-tricks.com/style-a-list-with-one-pixel/

Advanced CSS Styling Workshop Example
By Andy Clarke.
"I'm busy working on the slide deck and example site files for our 
Advanced CSS Styling workshops in Birmingham, Newcastle (and Tokyo). 
I'm really excited about this new workshop format and wanted to share 
one of the example site pages..."
http://tinyurl.com/mvvgob

The Real Advantage of CSS
By Jens Meiert.
"...The main advantage of CSS is that it allows to separate concerns; 
it can thus make documents more maintainable with respect to their 
appearance. End of story..."
http://meiert.com/en/blog/20090908/advantage-of-css/

CSS - Design Out Of The Box
By Nick La.
"Are you tired of your typical columned and boxed layout? It is time to 
learn how to break out of the box and do something creative. In this 
post, I've collected some of the best examples that are designed out of 
the box. I've also provided some quick CSS tips with demo files on how 
to break out of the box by creatively using background images and the 
CSS position property..."
http://www.webdesignerwall.com/tutorials/css-design-out-of-the-box/


+03: COLOR.

Colblindor
By Daniel Fluck.
Colblindor is all about color blindness. You can learn a lot of 
colorblind facts while browsing through the articles. Or just try one 
of my tools or take a color vision deficiency test.
http://www.colblindor.com/

Everybody is Color Blind
By Daniel Fluck.
"Are you colorblind? No, you don't think so? - I am sure you also have 
some form of color vision deficiency or colorblind sensations. You 
don't believe me? I'll prove it in the following article. I would like 
to show you four types of color blindness which are true for almost all 
of us. Starting with a very simple form we will definitely get into 
more details when it comes to small-field tritanopia, which strongly 
supports my statement that everybody is colorblind..."
http://www.colblindor.com/2009/08/04/everybody-is-color-blind/


+04: EVALUATION & TESTING.

What's My Persona? Developing a Deep and Dimensioned Character
By Traci Lepore.
"Designers gather data to understand the personas that represent the 
users for whom they are designing a user interface. This is quite 
similar to the way actors must develop an understanding of their 
characters."
http://tinyurl.com/lhbmkc


+05: EVENTS.

OpenWebCamp
September 26, 2009.
Stanford University, California, U.S.A.
http://www.openwebcampsv.org/

Illinois Web Accessibility Conference and Expo
September 29, 2009.
Urbana, Illinois
http://webaccessibilityconference.illinois.edu/

Web 2.0
December 3-4, 2009.
London, United Kingdom
http://www.web2events.com/


+06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

Wireframes and Concept
By Designer Break.
"When planning a website the first important steps involve just a pen 
and a paper. It's crucial to understand what we are creating and its 
nature. To list the purpose, the expected content and draw its 
structure will be our first concern."
http://tinyurl.com/mqaoab


+07: JAVASCRIPT.

Making JavaScript Fast, Part 1
By David Chisnall.
"David Chisnall discusses how dynamic language techniques work in 
JavaScript."
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1391212

Javascript Object Hierarchy Video Tutorial
By Stefan Mischook.
In this video I introduce you to two things: 1. Basic object oriented 
concepts. 2. The Javascript object hierarchy. The goal of this video is 
to give you a birds eye view of Javascript, to hopefully make it easier 
to understand how to use this language in later videos."
http://tinyurl.com/nvddg7


+08: MISCELLANEOUS.

Speech, Touchscreen - Been There, Done That. What's the user interface 
of tomorrow?
By Mary Czerwinski.
"A lot of research across a large number of companies is going into 
developing natural user interfaces (NUI). The idea is that by freeing 
people from keyboard-based interaction, we won't just make it easier to 
work with computers, but we'll enable brand new experiences that aren't 
possible today..."
http://tinyurl.com/nns764

7 Simple Steps to Meeting Deadlines
By Alyssa Gregory.
"...Here is a 7-step process I follow in order to ensure I can meet 
deadlines on time, with a great result..."
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/09/08/steps-to-meeting-deadlines/


+09: NAVIGATION.

Best Practices for Designing Faceted Search Filters
By Greg Nudelman.
"...In this column, I've presented five best practices for designing 
filters for faceted search results. Of these, I think the 
first?choosing either drill-down or parallel selection?is the most 
important. If you choose your filter value-selection paradigm 
correctly, you are already half way there..."
http://tinyurl.com/nrxzb8


+10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

If the Web Were the Petroleum Industry
By Shelley Powers.
"...if the web were any other industry-petroleum, pharmaceutical, 
airline, auto, electrical utility, and so on- allowing the companies 
who produce products in the industry, free and unfettered reign to 
define the standards for their industries, would draw howls of 
protests, and a demand for accountability."
http://burningbird.net/node/65

This is Your Site. This is Your Site on HTML5.
By Shelley Powers.
"Recently, a group of well known web designers issued a "Super Friends" 
declaration of support or HTML5, with an attached set of concerns. Most 
of the concerns had to do with the new "semantic markup" elements 
included in HTML5, such as section, article, and so on. I've not 
previously discussed these new semantic page markup elements, because I 
had other fish to fry. However, I decided to take a closer look at the 
elements, particularly at how I would use them for my Drupal sites..."
http://tinyurl.com/m9jsst

HTML 5 and the Summary Attribute
By Roger Johansson.
"...It's good that HTML 5 gives us more ways of providing table 
information, but I really think that the summary attribute should be 
allowed (without validator warnings) for the cases where the only other 
real-world option will be to not provide any information at all to 
non-sighted users..."
http://tinyurl.com/lnwa7a

HTML5 Redefines Footer
By Jeffrey Zeldman.
"It seems like only yesterday that the HTML5 Super Friends asked the 
HTML5 working groups to rethink footer's content model to avoid web 
developer misuse and frustration. Okay, it wasn't yesterday, it was 
Monday. Close enough. Today comes word that footer is indeed being 
redefined as we requested. This is a wonderful usability improvement to 
HTML5, and we salute the working group(s) for listening and acting..."
http://www.zeldman.com/2009/09/04/html5-redefines-footer/

Testing HTML5
By Jeremy Keith.
"...I was handling the HTML5 side of things and had quite a bit of fun 
with it. I put together an HTML5 pocket book using  Natalie's superb 
CSS..."
http://adactio.com/journal/1605/

This Spec Has a Posse: 'Superfriends' Suggest Changes for HTML5
By Scott Gilbertson.
"We're excited about the coming improvements in HTML5, and with just 
about every new browser release there's more support for HTML5 out 
there in the wilds of the web. But just because HTML5 is heavily 
anticipated, it doesn't mean the spec is perfect. In fact, more than a 
few details regarding HTML5 have left us scratching our heads.."
http://tinyurl.com/nqag88

How to Draw with HTML 5 Canvas
By Jamie Newman.
"...Although Canvas adds features to a page, I don't think it has been 
particularly well thought out. In many ways it feels like a step into 
the past and represents a very old-fashioned way of drawing that is 
inferior to the modern XML-based SVG standard. It is pixel-based, as 
opposed to the nice vectors of SVG and to draw with it entails writing 
lots of unmanageable JavaScript. The lack of accessibility is also a 
big problem. However, what Canvas has going for it, that SVG doesn't, 
is that it can integrate with our existing web pages very easily. We 
can also work with canvas in much the same way we work with images in 
web pages..."
http://tinyurl.com/ldkdqq

Notes on HTML 5 Issues
By Noah Mendelsohn.
"These are very rough, work-in-progress notes on issues that the TAG 
might want to raise with respect to the HTML 5 working draft. Most of 
these are notes that I gathered while reading a few sections, but some 
of the issues were mentioned by other TAG members. I am not necessarily 
convinced that all of these are legitimate issues, and even when they 
are, details may be wrong..."
http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2009/09/TagHTMLIssues.html

Response to 'Notes on HTML 5'
By Mark Pilgrim.
"The W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) is in the process of 
reviewing HTML 5. Noah Mendelsohn recently posted his initial, 
personal, not-speaking-on-behalf-of-TAG notes on HTML 5. Here are my 
initial, personal, not-speaking-on-behalf-of-WHATWG responses..."
http://blog.whatwg.org/response-to-notes-on-html-5

HTML5 And You
By Eric A Meyer.
"Turns out it is, and by a comfortable margin. Michael(tm) Smith's 
HTML5: The Markup Language is a version of the HTML5 draft with all of 
those eye-wateringly pedantic implementor sections stripped out, and 
when I generated a PDF it came in at 147 pages. That's what you really 
need in order to get up to speed on what's in HTML5. It's for you."
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2009/09/07/html5-and-you/

First Polyglot Validator Check Deployed
By Sam Ruby.
"... to Validator.nu.  Look for the Profile option..."
http://tinyurl.com/nmvtty

Keyboard Control of HTML5 Video Elements
By David Bolter.
"HTML 5 introduces the video and audio media elements. Playback is 
manipulated by the user with browser supplied controls (indicated via 
the controls attribute), or with author supplied controls. In the case 
of browser supplied controls the current Firefox implementation is 
described here, and an idea for potentially improved keyboard support 
is suggested..."
http://tinyurl.com/l3u7nj

HTML5 Drag-and-Drop API Is no Panacea for Developers
By Scott Gilbertson.
"...Developers have been pining for drag-and-drop support in webapps 
pretty much since the first servers came online. But now, with HTML5 
nearly here, true drag and drop support is about to become a reality..."
http://tinyurl.com/ncy4o7


+11: TOOLS.

ImageOptim
By porneL.
"ImageOptim is a front-end (GUI) for set of tools for optimization of 
PNG/JPEG images and GIF animations. Optimization makes files smaller 
(in terms of disk space) by finding optimal compression parameters and 
by removing unnecessary information, like file comments, EXIF tags and 
color profiles..." Mac OS X
http://pornel.net/imageoptim/en

Text-Based Browser
By Sucuri.
A text browser simulator.
http://sucuri.net/index.php?page=tools&title=text-browser


+12: TYPOGRAPHY.

Download Hundreds @font-face Fonts
By Font Squirrel.
"This page showcases all the fonts that Font Squirrel offers for use 
with @font-face CSS embedding. Though we try very hard to verify 
compliance with license agreements, please read them yourself before 
using. Font Squirrel makes no guarantee that our interpretation of each 
license is correct (since most have no @font-face clause). Please tell 
us if we are stepping on your toes."
http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface

Enhancements to Georgia and Verdana Typeface Families Announced
By Ascender.
"...a project in conjunction with Microsoft to extend the Georgia and 
Verdana typeface families. This project began more than a year ago, and 
the first of the new typefaces are expected during the first quarter of 
2010..."
http://www.ascendercorp.com/pr/2009-09-08/


+13: USABILITY.

Ten Tips for Creating Usable and Accessible PDFs
By Deborah Edwards-Onoro.
"...With the hopes that what I've learned will help others who publish 
PDF files, I've highlighted ten tips I use for creating accessible and 
usable PDF files..."
http://tinyurl.com/5fkmdc

Social Media Outsourcing Can Be Risky
By Jakob Nielsen.
"Hosting a company's content and services on 3rd-party social media 
sites such as YouTube involves both tactical risks (lower usability) 
and strategic risks (less user loyalty)."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/social-mega-ia.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.]