[webdev] Web Design Update: October 9, 2010

Sat Oct 9 01:27:51 CDT 2010

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 9, Issue 15, October 9, 2010.

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

++ISSUE 15 CONTENTS.

SECTION ONE: New references.
What's new at the Web Design Reference site?
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/
New links in these categories:

01: ACCESSIBILITY.
02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.
03: COLOR.
04: DREAMWEAVER.
05: EVALUATION & TESTING.
06: EVENTS.
07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
08: JAVASCRIPT.
09: MISCELLANEOUS.
10: PHP.
11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
12: TOOLS.
13: TYPOGRAPHY.
14: USABILITY.

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

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

President Obama Signs Accessibility Act
By Andrew Kirkpatrick.
"Today I am thrilled to attend an event at the White House where
President Obama signs into law the 21st Century Communications and
Video Accessibility Act of 2010. This act includes a number of
provisions intended to increase access to video programming on
television and the internet..."
http://blogs.adobe.com/accessibility/2010/10/president-obama-signs-accessibility-act.html

Accessibility Video Tutorials
By Think Vitamin.
Think Vitamin's accessibility videos are now no cost to view.
http://membership.thinkvitamin.com/library/accessibility

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Vendor Prefix Lists
By Eric A. Meyer.
"At the prompting of an inquiry from a respected software vendor, I
asked The Twitters for pointers to 'canonical' lists of
vendor-prefixed properties, values, and selectors. Here's what the
crowd sourced at me..."
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2010/10/08/vendor-prefix-lists/

Make a 'View Source' Button
By Chris Coyier.
"Remy Sharp's cool site for HTML5 demos has a 'View Source' button on
each of the individual demo pages. Click it, and you see the entire
source code for the page you are looking at. It's not a popup or a new
tab, it just shows the source right there on the page. I thought that
was cool so I set out to recreate it my own way."
http://css-tricks.com/make-a-view-source-button/

+03: COLOR.

How is Colour Contrast Determined?
By Glenda Watson Hyatt.
"Today on Blog Accessibility, I revealed my favourite tool in my
accessibility toolbox."
http://blogaccessibility.com/?p=54

+04: DREAMWEAVER.

Why Teaching Dreamweaver is Like Being President
By Virginia DeBolt.
"I mentioned a while back that I accepted a job teaching Dreamweaver
at UNM Continuing Ed. I just completed my first session – a 12 hour
class in beginning Dreamweaver. I've decided that teaching Dreamweaver
is a lot like being the President of the United States."
http://www.webteacher.ws/2010/10/05/why-teaching-dreamweaver-is-like-being-president/

+05: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Heretical Ideas - Abandon Focus Groups
By Gary Barber.
"Too often we see focus groups being used as the core evaluation and
research tool within a web design project. Why..."
http://manwithnoblog.com/2010/10/07/heretical-ideas-abandon-focus-groups

+06: EVENTS.

Student Web Conference
January 7, 2011.
Colesville, Maryland, U.S.A.
http://dabrook.org/conferences/2011

SXSW Interactive
March 11-15, 2011.
Austin, Texas, U.S.A.
http://sxsw.com/interactive

An Event Apart - Seattle
March 28-30, 2011.
Seattle, Washington, U.S.A.
http://aneventapart.com/2011/seattle/

An Event Apart - Boston
May 2-4, 2011.
Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
http://aneventapart.com/2011/boston/

An Event Apart - Atlanta
June 13-15, 2011.
Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A.
http://aneventapart.com/2011/atlanta/

+07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

Alphabetical Sorting Must (Mostly) Die
By Jakob Nielsen.
"Ordinal sequences, logical structuring, time lines, or prioritization
by importance or frequency are usually better than A-Z listings for
presenting options to users."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/alpha-sorting.html

Index Pages: Unsuspected Project-Profitability Killers
By Nicola Rovetta.
"During an information architecture project, creating index pages for
items within categories can result in a lot of unexpected work."
http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2010/10/index-pages-unsuspected-project-profitability-killers.php

Understanding How Prototyping Practices Affect Design Results
By Stanford HCI Group.
"This research examines aspects of the creative process such iteration
and comparison, two key strategies for discovering contextual design
variables and their interrelationships. We found that, even under
tight time constraints when the common intuition is to stop iterating
and start refining, iterative prototyping helps designers learn. Our
experiments also indicate that creating and receiving feedback on
multiple prototypes in parallel— as opposed to serially — leads to
more divergent ideation, more explicit comparison, less investment in
a single concept, and better overall design performance. Most
recently, we found that groups who produce and share multiple
prototypes report a greater increase in rapport, exchange more verbal
information, share more features, and overall, reach a better
consensus."
http://hci.stanford.edu/research/prototyping/

Match the Tool to the Problem
By Daniel Ritzenthaler.
"This piece is about bringing clarity to this discussion. It will help
you decide which tool to use without worrying what other designers are
arguing about."
http://52weeksofux.com/post/1215277844/match-the-tool-to-the-problem

+08: JAVASCRIPT.

What is jQuery?
By Matthew David.
"When you work in jQuery you tend to forget some of the obvious
questions such as: what is jQuery? The focus of this article is to
explain what jQuery is and, when your boss asks, why it's important to
your work..."
http://insideria.com/2010/10/what-is-jquery.html

JAWS Support for ARIA
By Steve Faulkner.
"Freedom scientific have provided documentaion on how the JAWS screen
reader support WAI-ARIA. It is available as a microsoft word document.
Below is the same information in HTML format..."
http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/?p=692

+09: MISCELLANEOUS.

Responsive Enhancement
By Jeremy Keith.
"...My point is that responsive web design isn't something that can be
tacked on to the end of an existing workflow. It requires a different
mindset, one that considers the medium from the outset. If you're
currently thinking in proportions rather than pixels, the transition
to responsive web design will be relatively painless. But if you're
stuck in the world of converting PSDs into web pages, you're going to
have a tough time..."
http://adactio.com/journal/1700/

Improving Your Process: Work from the Inside Out
By Jonathan Christopher.
"For a long time I've had the opinion that it's more important to both
design and  develop websites from the inside out. That is to say, I
prefer to begin with the most generic possible interior page and work
my way to the home page. I've had this stance for a number of years
and while I'm comfortable with it, I haven't met too many designers or
developers that feel the same way. I thought I'd state my case in
hopes of sparking a bit of conversation as well as an overall view of
our landscape of colleagues."
http://mondaybynoon.com/2010/10/04/improving-your-process-work-from-the-inside-out/

Findings from the Web Design Survey, 2009
By A List Apart.
"The findings are in from the survey for people who make websites.
Once again, we have crunched the data this way and that, figured out
what the numbers were telling us, and assembled the sliced and diced
data-bytes into nifty charts and graphs for your edification and
pleasure..."
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/findings-from-the-web-design-survey-2009/

+10: PHP.

High-Performance String Concatenation in PHP
By Craig Buckler.
"We recently examined the complexities of fast string concatenation in
JavaScript so I thought it would be useful to repeat the exercise for
PHP. This could be a more important to your application: large string
operations are often handled on the server when generating HTML
pages..."
http://blogs.sitepoint.com/2010/10/05/high-performance-string-concatenation-in-php/

+11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

W3C: Hold Off on Deploying HTML5 in Websites
By Paul Krill.
"HTML5, which updates the HTML specification to accommodate modern Web
applications, has gained a lot of adherents in vendors like Microsoft,
Google, and Apple. But the specification is plain not ready yet for
deployment to websites, an official with the World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C), which oversees HTML5, stressed this week. 'The problem we're
facing right now is there is already a lot of excitement for HTML5,
but it's a little too early to deploy it because we're running into
interoperability issues,' including differences between video on
devices, said the official, Philippe Le Hegaret, W3C interaction
domain leader. He is responsible for specifications like HTML and SVG
(Scalable Vector Graphics)."
www.infoworld.com/d/.../w3c-hold-html5-in-websites-041

HTML5 Accessibility
By Steve Faulkner.
"This site is a resource to provide information about which HTML5 user
interface features are usable by people who rely upon assistive
technology (AT) to use the web..."
http://www.html5accessibility.com/

HTML5 Simplequiz #2:
By Bruce Lawson.
"...It's easy to cite works in HTML and default browser stylesheets
obey the typographic convention of showing the citation in italics..."
html5doctor.com/html5-simplequiz-2-citing-people/

Correction to the HTML5 Review Procedure
By Shelley Powers.
"...all comments should be submitted to the Bugzilla
database...Relying on Bugzilla to manage Last Call comments sucks.
It's also demonstrative of a group that has not effectively dealt with
conflict. Instead of dealing with the major issues—such as the
continuing split of the document across W3C and WhatWG, or the
disquieting trends reflected in accessibility bugs—the HTML WG has,
instead, tried to get technology to take care of the problem. And you
know something? Relying on technology in this way never works."
http://realtech.burningbird.net/web/html5/correction-html5-review-procedure

State of Media Accessibility in HTML5
By Silvia Pfeiffer.
"...To be clear: at this exact moment, there is no actual
specification text in the W3C version of HTML5 for media
accessibility. There is, however, some text in the WHATWG version,
providing a framework for text-based alternative content. Other
alternative content still requires new specification text. Finally,
there is no implementation in any browser yet for media accessibility,
but we are getting closer..."
http://blog.gingertech.net/2010/10/02/state-of-media-accessibility-in-html5/

+12: TOOLS.

ProCSSor - Advanced CSS Prettifier
By procssor.com.
ProCSSor is a web-based service helps format CSS. It has unique
formatting styles and several customizable options.
http://procssor.com/

+13: TYPOGRAPHY.

Does it Still Make Sense to Use em Rather Than px?
By David B. Calhoun.
"Alex Kessinger tweeted  asking if there was a reason to still use EMs
instead of PX measurements in mobile. This is an interesting question,
but 140 characters isn't quite enough to explain my thoughts. So
here's an old-fashioned blog post..."
http://davidbcalhoun.com/2010/does-it-still-make-sense-to-use-em-rather-than-px

+14: USABILITY.

Seeing Before Reading: Messages Encoded in the Design of Information
By Tom Johnson.
"...Overall, the design of information provides cues about the meaning
of the information. These cues, like punctuation, are often
unconsciously interpreted by readers, but they do significantly
influence the message."
http://idratherbewriting.com/2010/10/05/seeing-before-reading-messages-encoded-in-the-design-of-information-visual-imagination-2/

[Section one ends.]

++ SECTION TWO:

+15: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site?

Accessibility Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/accessibility.html

Association Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/associations.html

Book Listings.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/books.html

Cascading Style Sheets Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/css.html

Color Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/color.html

Dreamweaver Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/dreamweaver.html

Evaluation & Testing Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/testing.html

Event Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/events.html

Flash Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/flash.html

Information Architecture Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/architecture.html

JavaScript Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/javascript.html

Miscellaneous Web Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/misc.html

Navigation Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/navigation.html

PHP Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/php.html

Sites & Blogs Listing.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/sites.html

Standards, Guidelines & Pattern Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/standards.html

Tool Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/tools.html

Typography Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/type.html

Usability Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/usability.html

XML Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/xml.html

[Section two ends.]

++END NOTES.

+ SUBSCRIPTION INFO.

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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.]