[webdev] Web Design Update: November 27, 2010

Laura Carlson lcarlson at d.umn.edu
Sat Nov 27 01:08:13 CST 2010 

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 9, Issue 22, November 27, 2010.

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

++ISSUE 22 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: DREAMWEAVER.
04: EVALUATION & TESTING.
05: EVENTS.
06: FLASH.
07: JAVASCRIPT.
08: MISCELLANEOUS.
09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
10: TYPOGRAPHY.
11: USABILITY.


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

[Contents ends.]


++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Testing HTML for 508 Compliance Course
By The Department of Veterans Affairs.
"1194.22 requirements for web pages, web-based documents, and
web-based applications"
http://www.ehealth.va.gov/508/sw/course.asp

The Importance of Section 508 Accessibility Compliance
By articlewriter22.
"...There are many businesses still left to comply with Section 508
accessibility. Although businesses not contracted by federal agency
aren't vulnerable to compliance lawsuits, the principle of the matter
is that individuals with disabilities aren't benefiting from it.
Section 508 compliance is crucial to the welfare of people with
disabilities. As if living in a world that isn't built for them isn't
hard enough, abiding by Section 508 can make accessing every day
resources a little bit easier."
http://searchwarp.com/swa652598-The-Importance-Of-Section-508-Accessibility-Compliance.htm

Is Accessibility Being Overlooked in Favour of Sociability?
By Beth Johnson.
"...Regardless of the channel used, organisations still have both a
moral and legal responsibility to provide information in accessible
formats but social media sites have received criticism in the past for
their failure to work with assistive technologies..."
http://www.mediageek.co.uk/blog/?p=318

Fallbacks for Embedded Content
By Michael Cooper.
"This is an attempt to analyze how fallback mechanisms are applied to
various types of embedded content in HTML. The analysis is an
important step towards determining where the support provided by the
HTML specification needs to be extended or modified to ensure all
accessibility use cases are covered. The analysis is prepared
primarily by Michael Cooper, with input from members of the Bug Triage
sub-team of the HTML Accessibility Task Force..."
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-a11y/2010Nov/att-0246/embeddedcontent.html

Using HTML Headings
By Leonie Watson.
"..So when is a heading not a heading? When it's just normal text in disguise."
http://www.nomensa.com/blog/2010/using-html-headings/


+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Sticky Notes With CSS3
By Rob Sobers.
"I've been working on a pretty cool wall-mounted status board as one
of my projects at Fog Creek. It's a webapp that runs on a vertically
mounted LCD screen in our office. It displays a bunch of interesting
information like tech support calls, staff vacations, tweets about
FogBugz, and more..."
http://www.accidentalhacker.com/sticky-notes-with-css3/

HTML5 and CSS3 for the Real World
By Louis Lazaris.
"...In this article, we're going to walk you through many of the new
HTML5 and CSS3 features that are included in IE9 Beta, so you can see
how creating websites and apps for IE9 Beta will make things more
scalable, more efficient, and more maintainable than ever before..."
http://blogs.sitepoint.com/2010/11/26/html5-and-css3-for-the-real-world/


+03: DREAMWEAVER.

Understanding CSS Basics
By Brian Wood.
"The following videos provide an overview of and introduction to
cascading style sheets (CSS) and explain how you can use CSS in
Dreamweaver to facilitate and standardize formatting of your web
pages..."
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/understanding_css_basics.html


+04: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Multivariate Testing in Action: Five Simple Steps to Increase Conversion Rates
By Paras Chopra.
"In this post we will talk about how to tweak a website for generating
more sales, downloads, membership (or any other business goal) in a
scientific manner, using A/B split and multivariate testing..."
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/11/24/multivariate-testing-in-action-five-simple-steps-to-increase-conversion-rates/


+05: EVENTS.

Usability Week Dubai
January 16-20, 2011.
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
http://www.nngroup.com/events/dubai/agenda.html

Usability Week New York
February 7-11, 2011.
New York, New York, U.S.A.
http://www.nngroup.com/events/new_york/agenda.html

Usability Week Hong Kong
February 28 - March 4, 2011.
Hong Kong, China
http://www.nngroup.com/events/hong_kong/agenda.html

Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education (SITE) 2011
March 7-11, 2011.
Nashville, Tennessee, U.S.A.
http://site.aace.org/conf/

EDUCAUSE Midwest Regional Conference 2011
March 14-16, 2011.
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.
http://net.educause.edu/mwrc11


+06: FLASH.

Bye Bye Flash
By Roger Johansson.
For a long time I've been doing what many others do and use tricks
like ClickToFlash (for Safari) and FlashBlock (for Firefox) to prevent
Flash content from bringing my Macs' CPUs to their knees and ruining
my 'web experience'.
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201011/bye_bye_flash/

Creating Accessible Flash Course
By The Department of Veterans Affairs.
"How to apply the principles of accessibility to creating Section
508-compliant Flash presentations"
http://www.ehealth.va.gov/508/flash/index.asp


+07: JAVASCRIPT.

How to Write Faster JavaScript Condition Expressions
By Craig Buckler.
"There's an interesting optimization feature in JavaScript which
doesn't necessarily apply in other languages. Consider the following
code sample..."
http://blogs.sitepoint.com/2010/11/23/faster-javascript-condition-expressions/


+08: MISCELLANEOUS.

Tim Berners-Lee: Facebook Could Fragment Web
By Josh Halliday.
"Founder of world wide web says some of the most successful social
networking sites 'have begun to chip away at its principles'..."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/nov/22/tim-berners-lee-facebook

Tantek Celik: HTML5: Right Here, Right Now
By Eric Miraglia.
Video of Tantek Celik discussing HTML5.
http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2010/11/24/video-yuiconf2010-tantek/

Video of My Hardboiled Web Design Talk
By Andy Clarke.
"If you didn't get a chance to catch my Hardboiled Web Design talk at
a conference this year, your luck just came in. Those fine chaps at
CodeWorx have posted a high quality video of the entire talk. I'll
post a text transcript and slides from the talk later this week..."
http://forabeautifulweb.com/blog/about/video_of_my_hardboiled_web_design_talk_from_dibi_2010/


+09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

HTML5 Sanity Check
By Dennis E. Lembree.
"Most of us are excited about HTML5 and all the benefits it will
bring. Overly excited maybe is a more accurate term, which includes
myself. We as a community need a "sanity check" about the readiness of
HTML5 and its accessibility because..."
http://webaxe.blogspot.com/2010/11/html5-sanity-check.html

Bold and Italic in HTML5
By Louis Lazaris.
"...Here I describe some things to take note of when adding HTML
elements that are usually associated 'bold' or 'italic' text..."
http://www.impressivewebs.com/bold-italic-html/

HTML5 Aside- Defining Relations
By Niels Matthijs.
"Together with the new header and footer and article and section
elements there is one more important addition to the html5 spec which
is bound to improve the structure of our future html documents. The
aside element caused some controversy when it was first introduced but
now the spec seems to be nearing its final stage. Time to find out how
the aside element can help us bring more structure to our content..."
http://www.onderhond.com/blog/work/html5-aside-element

HTML5 Audio Unplugged
By Richard Shepherd.
"...Until recently, playing audio required a plugin of some sort. But
thanks to the evil geniuses who put together the HTML5 spec we now
have a fully fledged Audio element and JavaScript API to play with.
With great power comes great responsibility. Apparently. And so before
we go on and take a look at how to include (and control!) audio with
HTML5 a word of caution..."
http://thinkvitamin.com/code/html5-audio-unplugged

Tidy5 aka the Future of HTML Tidy
By Lars Gunther.
"...Simply put, there is no 'opt out' of HTML5. An HTML 4 or XHTML 1.x
doctype is nothing more than a contract between developers.
Technically all it does is to set the browser in standards compliance
mode. Thus, I do not see any future in a tool that does not rely on
the HTML5 parsing algorithm. Tidy can not grow from its current code
base, but needs to have the same html5lib at its core that is in the
HTML5 validator, which basically is the same as the one being used in
Firefox 4..."
http://itpastorn.blogspot.com/2010/11/tidy5-aka-future-of-html-tidy.html

Your Questions #14
By Richard Clark.
"The clinic is getting busy with more HTML5 ailments. This week, we'll
cover questions about <aside>, blogging platforms, stylesheet links,
id attribute validation, and take a mammoth semantic journey..."
http://html5doctor.com/your-questions-14/


+10: TYPOGRAPHY.

Beware of -webkit-text-size-adjust:none
By Roger Johansson.
The other day I came a cross a website with text too small for me to
read it comfortably. I hit Command-Plus a couple of times to make
Safari bump up the text size a bit… and nothing happened. What?
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201011/beware_of_-webkit-text-size-adjustnone/


+11: USABILITY.

Designing for Noise
By Brian Suda.
"...Any attempt at communication is always subject to noise. As
designers, it is our job to build a system that can communicate in
even the noisiest of environments. If we are aware of the problems
from the outset-such as color, poor quality printing, analog noise,
etc.-we can better design around them, increasing the chance that your
signal with make it to the destination intact."
http://www.uxbooth.com/blog/designing-for-noise/

Micro Copy: Content Strategy and Writing the User Interface
By Amy Thibodeau.
"When we think about writing, planning or implementing copy for the
web, most of us probably picture longer form text: blogs, about pages
and information on products and services. As content strategists we
audit websites and try to come up with holistic content solutions for
our clients. But apart from Help content, we rarely talk about the
expanding world of web applications and the implications of user
interface copy for our practice..."
http://contentini.com/micro-copy-content-strategy-and-writing-the-user-interface/

Write Plenty of Clear, Complete Sub-Headlines
By Rachel McAlpine.
"...Clear, complete sub-headlines have at least four keywords and
summarize the next chunk of content. Vague headings or questions don't
work well..."
http://contented.com/contented/2010/writing-tip-write-plenty-of-clear-complete-sub-headlines/

Applying Lessons from UML to UX
By Peter Hornsby.
"Unified Modeling Language (UML) is probably the most widely used
modeling language among software engineers."
http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2010/11/applying-lessons-from-uml-to-ux.php

Templates
By Usability.gov.
The following templates, forms, and examples are organized by steps in
the usability process. They can be customized for your organization's
usability needs. All of these are in the public domain and can be
freely downloaded.
http://usability.gov/templates/


[Section one ends.]


++ SECTION TWO:

+12: 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.


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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.]

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