[webdev] Web Design Update: July 31, 2010

Sat Jul 31 04:25:20 CDT 2010

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 9, Issue 05, July 31, 2010.

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: EVALUATION & TESTING.
04: EVENTS.
05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
06: JAVASCRIPT.
07: MISCELLANEOUS.
08: PHP.
09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
10: TOOLS.
11: USABILITY.
12: XML.

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

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Ten Common Accessibility Problems
By Gary Barber.
"This document outlines ten common accessibility issues I have
encountered which could result in a site's failure to fully comply
with WCAG 2.0. The document includes links to some of the WCAG 2
advisory Sufficient Techniques provided by the W3C for addressing each
issue..."
http://www.dingoaccess.com/accessibility/ten-common-accessibility-problems/

Should Photos in Photo-Sharing Sites Have Alternate Text?
By Vlad Alexander.
"...Photo-sharing sites should leave alternate text blank. Instead,
they should encourage users to caption and describe images, with the
captions and descriptions being available to all visitors..."
http://rebuildingtheweb.com/en/no-alt-text-for-photo-sharing-sites/

Real World Approaches to Accessibility
By Brian Kelly.
"The theme of the Seventh International Cross-Disciplinary Conference
on Web Accessibility (W4A 2010), held in North Carolina in April, was
'Developing regions: common goals, common problems?'..."
http://www.headstar.com/eablive/?p=449

Critique - New Section 508 Web Site
By Dennis Lembree.
"Below are suggestions for improving the web accessibility of the new
United States government Section 508 web site..."
http://webaxe.blogspot.com/2010/07/critique-new-section-508-web-site.html

Microsoft Office 2010 and Accessibility
By John Eric Brandt.
"...For the new version of MS Office (MSO), Microsoft has made
accessibility a priority since one of the new features is the
Accessibility Checker (MSO-AC) built into three of the core
applications..."
http://jebswebs.net/blog/2010/07/microsoft-office-2010-and-accessibility/

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Top 10 CSS3 Commands
By Paul McCarthy.
CSS3 is here and gives more power to web developers than ever before.
Read through our top 10 CSS3 commands and unleash its power.
http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/web-dev/css3.shtml

Understanding border-image
By Nora Brown.
"The new CSS3 property border-image is a little tricky, but it can
allow you to create flexible boxes with custom borders (or drop
shadows, if that's your thing) with a single div and a single image.
In this article I explain how the border-image shorthand property
works in today's browsers..."
http://css-tricks.com/understanding-border-image/

A CSS3 Tip
By Dave Shea.
"All browsers that support the CSS text-shadow and box-shadow
properties also support the new CSS3 RGBa syntax. Which means you can
safely combine them today. That's handy, because it means no worrying
about matching a precise hex colour shadow to a specific hex colour
background. Instead just let the browser blend. An example:"
http://mezzoblue.com/archives/2010/07/27/a_css3_tip/

+03: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Overcoming the Obstacles of Usability Testing
By Jacob Creech.
"When people hear about 'usability testing,' many things come to
mind-eye-tracking cameras, big HCI labs, a long testing process, a lot
of expenses, and maybe a little confusion as well. Even at this stage
in the proverbial game, usability testing isn't so well understood,
and misconceptions abound."
http://www.uxbooth.com/blog/a-test-too-far/

Interviewing Users
By Jakob Nielsen.
"Despite many weaknesses, interviews are a valuable method for
exploratory user research."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/interviews.html

Three Important Benefits of Personas
By Jared Spool.
As part of our research to understand what techniques truly help teams
produce better designs, we're still constantly surprised by the number
of teams successfully using personas. With personas, teams report that
they are producing more usable designs that better match the needs of
their audience, increasing the satisfaction of their users.
http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2010/07/26/uietips-persona-benefits/

Time to Delight
By Joshua Porter.
"...As our work becomes more about emotion and less about usability,
time to delight might become a metric that has real meaning. The
faster we can delight someone the first time, the faster we can
re-delight them a second time."
http://52weeksofux.com/post/866407309/time-to-delight

+04: EVENTS.

Usability Week 2010 Conference
August 9-14, 2010 in Toronto, Canada.
October 3-8, 2010 in San Francisco, California, U.S.A.
October 18-22, 2010 in Copenhagen, Denmark.
October 25-29, 2010 in Edinburgh, Scotland.
http://www.nngroup.com/events

+05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

Wireframing is Not a Religion
By Joshua Brewer.
"...There is no right way to wireframe. You must understand the
context and the requirements for the project and move ahead
accordingly. Know that regardless of the fidelity of the wireframe, it
is still simply a tool in the design process that you can utilize to
quickly get feedback, prove out your design decisions and help you
make a better product.  "
http://52weeksofux.com/post/866406780/wireframing-is-not-a-religion

+06: JAVASCRIPT.

WAI ARIA How Useful?
By WebAIM Thread.
"How useful is WAI Aria to the average screen reader user who may not
be technically inclined? Does this also help the mobility impaired
user who is not visually impaired?"
http://webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread?thread=4288

+07: MISCELLANEOUS.

The 7 Sins of Managing Web Projects
By Rob Mills.
"Managing web projects is both tough and satisfying in equal measures.
Every project is a new learning curve and even though I'm educated
from every project I work on, new problems are presented to me on a
daily basis. Some problems and challenges on the other hand, rear
their head time after time, and I have classified these in line with
the 7 deadly sins, renaming them of course as the 7 sins of managing
web projects."
http://thinkvitamin.com/business/the-7-sins-of-managing-web-projects/

Woman in Technology
By Nicole Sullivan.
Women may be less likely to be a code-cowboy, but they can be amazing
developers. We are not trying to give anything to anyone that doesn't
deserve it, but instead, to counteract the subtle prejudices that
leave women feeling invisible, excluded, and unrecognized for their
accomplishments. Now, with that in mind, let's look at the twit-storm
I found after leaving a seven hour mediation session on Saturday. I'll
put my comments inline since I was unavailable to tweet that day.
http://www.stubbornella.org/content/2010/07/26/woman-in-technology/

+08: PHP.

Exception Handling in PHP5
By Lorna Jane Mitchell.
"This article follows on from my earlier posts, introducing OOP in
PHP, taking a closer look at OOP concepts in PHP, and also covering
the various magic methods on offer in PHP 5. We'll now move on to look
at exceptions, which is how PHP 5 handles errors in an object-oriented
way."
http://thinkvitamin.com/dev/exception-handling-in-php5/

+09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

Opera Rep Provides HTML5 Overview
By Adrian Roselli.
"Patrick H. Lauke is the Web Evangelist at Opera Software and ran the
Accessibility Task Force for the Web Standards Project (WaSP). Last
week (July 13) he gave a talk to the Institutional Web Management
Workshop on HTML5..."
http://blog.adrianroselli.com/2010/07/opera-rep-provides-html5-overview.html

+10: TOOLS.

Unicorn - W3C's Unified Validator
By W3C.
"Unicorn combines a number of popular tools in a single, easy
interface, including the Markup validator, CSS validator, mobileOk
checker, and Feed validator, which remain available as individual
services as well."
http://validator.w3.org/unicorn/

CSS Frame Generator
By lab.xms.pl.
"Put your XHTML code below, we will grab it and send over to one of
our scientists. He will do his voodoo and in return you will get a
corresponding CSS frame."
http://lab.xms.pl/css-generator/

+11: USABILITY.

Life Below 600PX
By Paddy Donnelly.
"...The digital fold concept evolved into 'squash as much content as
you can above a certain number of pixels'. This is wrong, wrong,
wrong. Gone was the intent of putting your most eye catching content
at the entrance point to entice your visitors to come in and explore
the rest of the site. Now you were being pressured By
""'web design rule enforcers' to sell everything on the front doorstep. .."
http://iampaddy.com/lifebelow600/

+12: XML.

XHTML5 in a Nutshell
By Sergey Mavrody.
"...The W3C first public working draft of "Polyglot Markup"
recommendation describes polyglot HTML document as a document that
conforms to both the HTML and XHTML syntax by using a common subset of
both the HTML and XHTML and in a nutshell the HTML5 polyglot document
is..."
http://blog.whatwg.org/xhtml5-in-a-nutshell

[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.

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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.]