[webdev] Web Design Update: September 25, 2009

[Laura Carlson]

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 8, Issue 13, September 25, 2009.

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

++ISSUE 13 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: PHP.
11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
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.

Long Descriptions of Images
By Terrill Thompson.
"...That better method is the aria-describedby attribute, which is part 
of the Accessibility Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) recommendation. 
Here's the technique for adding a long description using 
aria-describedby..."
http://terrillthompson.com/2009/09/long-descriptions-of-images.html

Section 508 For Software Development
By section508.gov.
"In recognizing and promoting workforce and customer diversity, the IRS 
presents this training on Section 508 for Software Development. Through 
it, you will learn important information about Section 508 of the 
Rehabilitation Act, its impact on software development, and the vital 
role you play in developing software that conforms to Section 508. To 
begin, select the Overview module."
http://www.section508.gov/IRSCourse/

Google Chrome Frame - Accessibility Black Hole
By Steve Faulkner.
"Google have released Chrome Frame a plugin-in for Internet Explorer 
'that seamlessly brings Google Chrome's open web technologies and 
speedy JavaScript engine to Internet Explorer.' What it also does is 
seamlessly bring Google Chrome's lack of support for assistive 
technologies to Internet Explorer..."
http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/?p=444

Finite Incatatem - Accessibility is Not Black Magic
By Christian Heilmann.
Christian's EASI presentation slides.
http://tinyurl.com/n7vrmh

Thoughts Around Universal Access on Mobile from Accessibility 2.0
By Henny Swan.
"There was an interesting mix of design, development and mobile covered 
at Accessibility 2.0 yesterday but for me I was most interested to hear 
people's comments on mobile browsing for disabled users. Below are some 
quick thoughts of the day..."
http://www.iheni.com/universal-access-on-mobile-accessibility-20/

Standards.Next Rocking Cognition and Accessibility
By Henny Swan.
"Cognition is probably one of the most under researched areas of 
accessibility and the least understood. As a result design of usable 
and accessible websites is incredibly speculative and hard to get 
right..."
http://www.iheni.com/standardsnext-cognition/

Standards.Next: Cognition and Accessibility
By Bruce Lawson.
"When Henny and I dreamed up the standards.next format, we were 
privileged: we work for Opera, which really supports standards so we 
get allocated time to work on these day-long geekfests without having 
to aggressively pimp the company or worry about turning a profit..."
http://tinyurl.com/ycdfczp

Evaluating Web Site Accessibility with WAVE
By Jared Smith.
Jared's EASI presentation slides.
http://webaim.org/presentations/2009/easi/

Techshare 2009 Presentation
By Andrew Kirkpatrick.
Andrew's "Flash, Flex, and AIR" presentation slides.
http://tinyurl.com/kkaw3a


+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Everything You Need To Know About CSS Selector Specificity
By Neal Grosskopf.
"There's an obscure topic of CSS that I think many people aren't aware 
of. It's called 'specificity'. I suppose it's not as glamorous as 
rounded corners, drop shadows or animations but it's still just as 
important in your day to day work as any other part of CSS. So what is 
CSS specificity? It's a weighted value system for all of your 
selectors..."
http://www.nealgrosskopf.com/tech/thread.php?pid=59

Creating Rounded Borders in Browsers with CSS3 with an IE Twist
By Estelle Weyl.
"In the past we've generally had to add a bunch of useless HTML as 
hooks to add corners when making rounded corners. Now, most modern 
browsers understand their own versions of the CSS border-radius 
property, which creates rounded corners on elements. In this tutorial 
we learn a new method of creating rounded corners in all browsers. 
We'll also target Internet Explorer using a little JavaScript and CSS 
magic."
http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?page=2&cid=AEB6A

Easy Multi-Column Designs Using CSS 2.1 Display Properties
By projectseven.
"CSS 2.1 introduced a set of display properties that allow compliant 
browsers to display DIVs, as well as other elements, as if they were 
tables, table rows, and table columns. With the rise of MSIE 8, all 
major browser brands now support these properties. Since IE 8 is 
gaining market share over earlier versions, and with Windows 7 
launching in October 2009 (with IE 8 as its default browser), it's a 
good time to embrace this methodology. Of course, IE 6 and IE 7 need to 
be addressed-but this can be done with a simple workaround using MSIE 
Conditional Comments..."
http://www.projectseven.com/tutorials/css/3-column-flex-display/

10 Top-Notch CSS Editors
By Omar Abid.
"...In this article, you'll find some of the more popular CSS editors 
available..."
http://sixrevisions.com/css/10-top-notch-css-editors/

How to Handle IE6 - Aggressive Graceful Degradation
By Jonathan Christopher.
"No matter how much it may bother us, IE6 is still quite a hot topic 
around our little community. Two camps have recruited their groups and 
each seems quite comfortable with the accepted stance on their side of 
the fence. To one segment, IE6 is literally a bane of existence, and 
taking active aggressive measures against IE is daily practice. The 
other side, however, sucks it up and deals..."
http://mondaybynoon.com/2009/09/21/aggressive-graceful-degradation/


+03: COLOR.

We Are Colorblind.
By Tom van Beveren.
"Wearecolorblind.com is a library with patterns and examples for anyone 
who designs, develops or is in another way involved with creating 
websites or content for the web."
http://wearecolorblind.com/


+04: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Testing Your Own Designs - Bad Idea?
By Paul J. Sherman.
"This column was spurred by a simple question I posted to Twitter in 
mid-August: Can designers effectively usability test their own 
designs?..."
http://tinyurl.com/nty424

Collecting Usability Data, Without Crossing the Line Into Spying
By jonoscript.
"Test Pilot is a delicate balancing act..."
http://tinyurl.com/mn2zo6


+05: EVENTS.

The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing
September 30-October 3, 2209.
Tucson, Arizona, U.S.A.
http://gracehopper.org/2009/

IDEAS 2009
October 5-6, 2209.
Washington D.C., U.S.A.
http://www.ideas2009.com/

Accessibility Camp D.C.
October 10, 2209.
Washington D.C., U.S.A.
http://www.accessibilitycampdc.org/

Introduction to W3C's Mobile Web Best Practices
October 12 - December 11, 2209.
Online.
http://www.w3.org/2009/09/MobiWeb106/

Advanced CSS Styling - Newcastle
October 30, 2009.
Newcastle Upon Tyne, United Kingdom.
http://tinyurl.com/lqxmt5

W3C Accessibility of Media Elements in HTML 5 Gathering
November 1, 2009.
Stanford University, California, U.S.A.
http://www.w3.org/2009/09/acc-media-html-gathering.html
More Accessible Media Workshop details from Silvia Pfeiffer:
http://tinyurl.com/l8quxa

TPAC 2009, W3C Technical Plenary / Advisory Committee Meetings Week
November 2-6 November, 2009.
Santa Clara, California, U.S.A.
http://www.w3.org/2009/11/TPAC/

Public Developer Gathering (Part of W3C Technical Plenary Week)
November 5, 2009.
Santa Clara, California, U.S.A.
http://www.w3.org/2009/11/TPAC/DevMeeting


+06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

Why Your Next Website Should be Designed with Wireframes
By Zach Dunn.
"...In this article, we'll take a look at a pre-design process known as 
wireframing. It's used by designers to help define a website's essence 
before working on the time consuming details..."
http://tinyurl.com/nx6lo5

Why Low-Fidelity Prototyping Kicks Butt for Customer-Driven Design
By Andrew Chen.
"In my discussions with designers, one of the interesting recurring 
conversations is the tools and process they use to prototype and mock 
up experiences. In particular, there's a lot of divergence on how high 
or low-fidelity to go with a prototype."
http://tinyurl.com/n7l2xq

Integrating Prototyping Into Your Design Process
By Fred Beecher.
"...When aimed well, a prototype can answer design questions and 
communicate design ideas. In this article, I talk about the dimensions 
of prototype fidelity and how you can use them to choose the most 
effective prototyping method for the questions you need answered..."
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/integrating

The Point of Personas
By William Hudson.
"I was at the Accessibility 2.0 conference in London yesterday and 
heard a couple of comments about personas that indicated they are still 
not very well understood. Since I have been teaching developers about 
them for around 10 years, I thought it might be helpful to provide some 
clarification..."
http://www.syntagm.co.uk/design/blog/?p=89


+07: JAVASCRIPT.

Jaws 11 ARIA Drag and Drop Support
By Leonie Watson.
"...Although Jaws has included desktop drag and drop capability for 
some while, the same functionality on a web page has always been more 
difficult. Jaws 11 now indicates which elements on the page can be 
dragged, and where they can be dropped..."
http://tink.co.uk/2009/08/jaws-11-aria-drag-drop-support/

Java is not JavaScript
By Roger Johansson.
"Completely obvious to most (but not all) web developers, but 
understandably confusing for many non-coders out there: Java is not 
JavaScript..."
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200909/java_is_not_javascript/

JavaScript For People Who Don't Code
By Christopher Schmitt.
"Recently I spoke at the edeWeb 2009 Conference in Chicago thanks to 
Karlyn Morissette's new track that focused on getting things done. My 
presentation (slides) covers using Web Standards and jQuery to make 
life easier for Web designers..."
http://tinyurl.com/nk9ot2

Introduction to the Javascript DOM
By Stefan Mischook.
"The DOM is short for: Document Object Model. This is basically a 
virtual map of the currently loaded web page. You can use this map 
along with the help of Javascript, to travel about your web page and do 
things like.."
http://www.killersites.com/blog/2009/introduction-to-the-javascript-dom/

Progressive Enhancement and Graceful Degradation: an Overview
By Craig Buckler.
"In this article, I will discuss progressive enhancement and graceful 
degradation - two concepts that are well known but perhaps a little 
misunderstood..."
http://tinyurl.com/m4lezg


+08: MISCELLANEOUS.

The State of the Web Design Profession
By Noah Stokes.
"...Now, just because we're not a licensed profession, doesn't mean we 
can't act like one..."
http://tinyurl.com/nyjr9x


+09: NAVIGATION.

Testing Search for Relevancy and Precision
By John Ferrara.
"Despite the fact that site search often receives the most traffic, 
it's also the place where the user experience designer bears the least 
influence. Few tools exist to appraise the quality of the search 
experience, much less strategize ways to improve it. But relevancy 
testing and precision testing offer hope. These are two tools you can 
use to analyze and improve the search user experience."
http://tinyurl.com/nn2aen

Internal Site Search Analysis - Simple, Effective, Life Altering
By Avinash Kaushik.
"Your search and clickstream data is missing a key ingredient: customer 
intent. You have all the clicks, the pages people viewed, and where 
they bailed, but not why they came to the site. Your internal 
site-search data contains that missing ingredient: intent. Learn five 
ways to analyze your internal site-search data-data that's easy to get, 
to understand, and to act on."
http://tinyurl.com/mkxo9k

Beyond Goals - Site Search Analytics from the Bottom Up
By Lou Rosenfeld.
Top-down analytics are great for creating measurable goals you can use 
to benchmark and evaluate the performance of your content and designs. 
But bottom-up analysis teaches you something new and unexpected about 
your customers-something goal-driven analysis can't show you. Discover 
the kinds of information users want, and identify your site's most 
urgent mistakes."
http://tinyurl.com/kwao54


+10: PHP.

Session Security
By Marc Plotz.
"Sessions are a very complicated part of PHP, and it is no surprise 
that the smarter website attacks are carried out on sessions. Most of 
these attacks involve one user impersonating another, or, more to the 
point, "hijacking" the other user's session data. As most experienced 
developers know, exploiting session data is an easy way into most 
low-to-medium security level websites--after all, that is how most 
website login systems work..."
http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/marc_plotz009172009.php3


+11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

Why Apple is Betting on HTML 5 - A Web History
By Daniel Eran Dilger.
"Despite making the vast majority of its money from hardware sales, 
Apple is investing heavily in shaping the future of software. One 
example of this pertains to HTML 5 and related web standards..."
http://tinyurl.com/nhwxf8

HTML5 (Podcast)
By Paul Boag and Marcus Lillington.
"...We interview Jeremy Keith about the truth of HTML5 and Ryan Carson 
shares some more advice about building your own web application..."
http://boagworld.com/podcast/184

September HTML5 Spec Changes
By Remy Sharp.
"September being one month before the HTML5 spec goes to last call in 
October, there's been a few significant changes to the HTML5 spec that 
we wanted to briefly share with our patients..."
http://html5doctor.com/september-html5-spec-changes/

Tracking Status of Video Accessibility Work
By Silvia Pfeiffer.
"Just a brief note to let everyone know about a new wikipage I created 
for my Mozilla work about video accessibility, where I want to track 
the status and outcomes of my work..."
http://tinyurl.com/mrxg2c

The HTML5 Drag and Drop Disaster
By Peter-Paul Koch.
"...The module should be removed from the HTML5 specification straight 
away, and conforming browsers should disable it at their earliest 
opportunity pending a complete rewrite from the ground up..."
http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2009/09/the_html5_drag.html

HTML5 Canvas - Part 1: Introduction
By  Rob Williams.
"In this first article, we'll explore what Canvas is, why it's 
important to us, and get a first quick look at how it can be used."
http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=3363F


+12: TYPOGRAPHY.

Roundup of Font Embedding and Replacement Techniques
By Zoe Gillenwater.
"There are more options than ever for getting unique, good-lookin' 
fonts into your pages. Apart from @font-face, here are your options for 
font embedding services and font replacement techniques..."
http://tinyurl.com/nfuzeb

About Fonts in SVG
By Divya Manian.
"One area in my webfonts investigation that I wanted to know more 
about, was the state of SVG fonts..."
http://nimbupani.com/blog/about-fonts-in-svg.html


+13: USABILITY.

Designing Tables 101
By Mike Hughes.
"...In this column, I'll review some of the basic principles of good 
table design from an information developer's perspective, then discuss 
their visual design and interactivity. These principles and my examples 
provide the bare essentials of table design. When designing tables, a 
key information design objective is keeping them simple, so if you 
start needing more than this column provides, you might be making 
things unnecessarily complicated for your users..."
http://uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2009/09/designing-tables-101.php

UX in the Boardroom: A Solid Case for Investing in UX
By Kate Walser.
"Some think the best way to demonstrate the value of usability in a 
corporate setting is to emphasize the resulting cost savings. While 
that may be sage advice in some organizations and industries, following 
it in the information technology and government arenas would cost you 
respect and a meeting..."
http://tinyurl.com/m29pgl

Fresh vs. Familiar - How Aggressively to Redesign
By Jakob Nielsen.
"...So, unless your existing design is an overgrown mess of bolted-on 
features that needs a new architecture, it's best to stay with the 
familiar design that users prefer and avoid the temptation to go with a 
novel design that only you'll appreciate."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/familiar-design.html

Things to Ask Before You Redo Your Website
By Seth Godin.
"...Does the organization understand that 'everything' is not an 
option?..."
http://tinyurl.com/ldnzs8

Web Page Performance Thesis
By Andrew B. King.
This research into web page performance quantifies what web page 
attributes effect response times the most. The most important factors 
in speeding up web page response times are minimizing the number of 
embedded objects and the amount of dynamic data. The number of embedded 
objects was 2.6 times more costly than total page size for response 
time. Caching was found to improve response times by over 19%. The 
number of lines of code and the size of cookies were found to affect 
response times the least.
http://tinyurl.com/nzpayw

Keep Paragraphs in Web Content Short
By Rachel McAlpine.
"...Try to keep most paragraphs under 65 words. Write no paragraph 
longer than about 200 words. Vary the length of paragraphs..."
http://www.contented.com/contented/?p=712


[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.]