[webdev] Web Design Update: February 25, 2010

Thu Feb 25 15:57:45 CST 2010

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 8, Issue 35, February 25, 2010.

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

++ISSUE 35 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: EVALUATION & TESTING.
04: EVENTS.
05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
06: JAVASCRIPT.
07: NAVIGATION.
08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
09: USABILITY.

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

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Accessibility is a Human Right
By Ian Pouncey.
"I'd like to add my own thoughts to those expressed by Vlad Alexander's 
excellent article Is Web accessibility a human right?..."
http://ianpouncey.com/weblog/2010/02/accessibility-is-a-human-right

YouAbility's YouTube Channel
By Equal Access to Software and Information (EASI).
YouAbility's YouTube channel contains several video tutorials on 
accessibility: video captioning, accessibility in Word, and many more.
http://www.youtube.com/user/youability

Vancouver Olympics Web Sites Are Inaccessible to Disabled People
By Joe Clark.
"physical disabilities, and hard to use and understand for blind or deaf 
people...."
http://joeclark.org/access/webaccess/vancouver2010/

Research Proposal: Accessibility Support for Non-HTML Web Technologies
By Mark Magennis.
"This proposal is for research into the state of 'accessibility support' 
for key web technologies that present significant barriers for web users 
with disabilities. Examples include PDF and Flash..."
http://tinyurl.com/yddvxfc

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Multiple Class / ID and Class Selectors
By Chris Coyier.
"Can you spot the difference between these two selectors?..."
http://css-tricks.com/multiple-class-id-selectors/

Rotate That Image with CSS
By Adrian Senior.
"A little unknown and not often used style of CSS is the ability to 
rotate images through a central axis. Rotation is a very easy thing to 
achieve and it is not limited to just images, you can apply the same 
styling to text. The rotate value does require some proprietary code but 
the affect can be achieved across all the main stream browsers with the 
exception of Opera; as we shall see..."
http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=6DA05

CSS Display- inline-block: Why it Rocks, and Why it Sucks
By Robert Nyman.
Usually when you want a horizontal list, you need to use float in the 
CSS code to make it work, with all its drawbacks. However, there is an 
alternative with display: inline-block..."
http://tinyurl.com/ycxwyq5

CSS Efficiency Tip  Use A Single Stylesheet File For Multiple Media
By Roger Johansson.
"The way most people link CSS intended for different media types, such 
as screen, print, or handheld, is to use multiple files. The files are 
then linked either through link elements with a media attribute or 
through @import statements with one or more media types specified. There 
is nothing wrong with splitting your CSS into multiple files and linking 
them this way (I currently do that here on this site), but there are two 
drawbacks: it leads to more HTTP requests from the browser to the server 
and the need to maintain multiple CSS files..."
http://tinyurl.com/yg95xj3

+03: EVALUATION & TESTING.

What You Really Get From a Heuristic Evaluation
By Dana Chisnell.
"...Heuristic evaluation may help a team know whether their UI complies 
with someone else's guidelines. But observing people using a design in a 
usability test gives a team primary data for making design decisions for 
their users using their design-especially in a world evolved far beyond 
command line entry and simple GUIs to options like touchscreens, social 
media, and ubiquitous connectivity. Separately and in combination, these 
and other design decisions present subtle, complex problems of 
usability. For me, observing people using a design will always trump an 
inspection or audit for getting solid evidence to determine a design 
direction. There is nothing like that "ah ha!" moment when a user does 
something unexpected to shed light on how well a design works."
http://tinyurl.com/ye3uftp

The Ten-Second Usability Test
By Joanna Bawa.
"Is your site usable? Testing the usability of a site is one of the 
first things to be done during the search engine optimization process. 
Keeping tabs on usability is one of the ways to assess how much work 
your site is going to need to pull it up in the rankings. Every search 
engine optimization company will have their own usability checklists, 
and you can talk to us at SEO Consult about SEO analyzes. It's a good 
idea for every site owner to have their own, to be used as part of their 
ongoing SEO maintenance. A basic usability test can be done in 10 
seconds..."
http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article6290.asp

Rapid Desirability Testing - A Case Study
By Michael Hawley.
"There can often be disagreements among the members of a project team on 
which design direction we should choose..."

The Essence of a Successful Persona Project
By Jared Spool.
"Personas are a flexible and powerful tool for user researchers. They're 
also one of the most misunderstood. When done well, they ensure the team 
focuses on the needs and delights of their users. Like other effective 
user research techniques, personas deliver confidence and insights to 
the team. Personas help the team make important design decisions with a 
thorough understanding of who the users are, what they need, and when 
they need it."
http://www.uie.com/articles/essence_personas/

+04: EVENTS.

Web Directions @media
June 8-11, 2010.
London, United Kingdom
http://atmedia.webdirections.org/

eduWEB Conference
July 26-28, 2010.
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.
http://www.eduwebconference.com/

+05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

Review of Information Architecture Evaluation Tools: Chalkmark and Treejack
By Jim Ross.
"Recently, Optimal Workshop, the creators of the online, card-sorting 
tool Optimal Sort, released two new information architecture evaluation 
tools: Chalkmark and Treejack. Though these tools are not perfect, they 
do provide the ability to quickly and easily test early designs and 
information hierarchies with large numbers of participants..."
http://tinyurl.com/yhuqu94

+06: JAVASCRIPT.

The Seven Deadly Sins Of JavaScript Implementation
By Christian Heilmann.
"Using JavaScript has become increasingly easy over the last few years. 
Whereas back in the day we needed to know the quirks of every browser, 
now many libraries such as jQuery, YUI, Dojo and MooTools allow someone 
who doesn't even know JavaScript to spruce up boring HTML documents with 
impressive and shiny effects. By piggy-backing on the CSS selector 
engine, we have moved away from the complexity and inconsistencies of 
the DOM and made things much easier..."
http://tinyurl.com/ygftkt7

Crockford on JavaScript - Act III: Function the Ultimate (73 min.)
By Eric Miraglia.
"The third installment of the Crockford on JavaScript series provides a 
deep-dive on functions in JavaScript..."
http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2010/02/24/video-crockonjs-3/

+07: NAVIGATION.

Sitemaps - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
By Rob Mills.
"Sitemaps are a safety net. They can be a last resort for users before 
they abandon ship and leave your site having not found what they needed 
and vowing never to come back."
http://tinyurl.com/y9ed2jb

+08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

HTML5 - Techniques for Providing Useful Text Alternatives
Editor Steve Faulkner.
"This document contains best practice guidance for authors of HTML 
documents on providing text alternatives for images."
http://dev.w3.org/html5/alt-techniques/

Make the Table Summary Attribute Valid and Conforming in HTML5
Editor Laura Carlson.
"The current editor's draft lacks a valid and conforming way to provide 
a non-visual, explicitly associated, programmatic, table summary 
mechanism for users who cannot see the visual rendering of a table. 
HTML5 currently makes the summary attribute obsolete. It recommends 
against using the summary attribute. This change proposal: 1. Makes the 
summary attribute valid and conforming. 2. Requires user agents to make 
the summary attribute visible on demand with some type of a preference 
or switch in the user agent/browser. 3. Replaces current spec text with 
suggested text..."
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/ChangeProposals/SummaryAttribute20100222

HTML5 Challenges
By Jeff Noble.
"If you haven't heard about HTML5, then I'm both happy that you have 
awoken from your coma, and sad that you haven't been following the magic 
miracle that will finally fix all the browser compatibility problems and 
give us amazing animation and video without 'a buggy/lazy' plugin. While 
the development of HTML5 is encouraging, and recent developments like 
YouTube rolling out HTML5 video for the two browsers out now that 
support it, as well as Apple refusing to put Flash on the iPad and 
iPhone, it still might be a bit soon to crown HTML5 the king of the web 
any time soon. I found the following links below that highlight some of 
the current challenges, I know, shame on me for bringing it up..."
http://uitrends.com/2010/02/20/html5-challenges/

HTML5 Media and Accessibility Presentation
By Silvia Pfeiffer.
"Today, I was invited to give a talk at my old workplace CSIRO about the 
HTML5 media elements and accessibility..."
http://tinyurl.com/yezb33r

+09: USABILITY.

Progress in Usability: Fast or Slow?
By Jakob Nielsen.
"Over the past decade, usability improved by 6% per year. This is a 
faster rate than most other fields, but much slower than technology 
advances might have predicted..."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/usability-progress-rate.html

We Go Below the 'Fold'
By Susan Weinschenk.
"For the last year or so there has been a heated debate about 'the 
fold'. The fold is the idea that there is a place on a web page that is 
the bottom edge of what people will see when they look at the page in a 
browser, and that in order to see anything below that line, the visitor 
has to scroll down the page..."
http://tinyurl.com/yl9d9z6

[Section one ends.]

++ SECTION TWO:

+10: 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.

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+ 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.]