[webdev] Web Design Update: February 5, 2011

Sat Feb 5 05:32:43 CST 2011

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 9, Issue 32, February 5, 2011.

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

++ISSUE 32 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: EVALUATION & TESTING.
05: EVENTS.
06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
07: NAVIGATION.
08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

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

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Programmatically Determined
By Jason Kiss.
The phrase "programmatically determined" features prominently in six
of the 61 WCAG 2.0 Success Criteria. It's a bit of a mouthful, for
sure, and perhaps a little daunting to those getting into
accessibility and WCAG for the first time, but it's really not that
complicated. In fact, you may already have a handle on it, even if
you're not familiar with the phrase itself. Whatever the case, I think
'programmatically determined' is a very useful concept for explaining,
particularly to web developers, something about WCAG, what web
accessibility means and why the proper use of HTML is so important..."
http://www.accessibleculture.org/blog/2011/01/programmatically-determined/

HTML5 Accessibility Challenges
By Steve Faulkner.
"...The current accessibility support implemented in browsers lags
behind their implementations of the sexy new features themselves.
These are still early days in the implementation of HTML5 features, so
lets keep our fingers crossed that Google,  Apple (Safari on Windows)
and Opera will get their acts together to provide at least a basic
level of support in their browsers for assistive technology users of
the decade old parts of HTML. Equally it is hoped that Mozilla and
Microsoft will strive to have their rate of accessibility support
match their rapid implementation of the new HTML5 features...."
http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/?p=738

6 Surprising Bad Practices That Hurt Dyslexic Users
By Anthony.
"Web accessibility doesn't only extend to color blind users, but
dyslexic users too..."
http://uxmovement.com/content/6-surprising-bad-practices-that-hurt-dyslexic-users

Using Acronyms Without First Expanding Them
By Glenda Watson.
"Every industry, business and organization has them. They are well
understood and simplify communication 'In-house'. Yet, for outsiders,
they cause confusion. They are acronyms: the alphabet soup that
insiders understand but exclude outsiders. "
http://blogaccessibility.com/sin-5-using-acronyms-without-first-expanding-them/

HTML5? Check. Accessible HTML5? Um...
By Aaron Gustafson.
"In a recent blog post, Steve Faulkner of the Paciello Group began to
examine how HTML5, which is supposed to help improve the accessibility
of web sites and applications, is being exposed to assistive
technologies. The current state of things, as documented on
HTML5Accessiblity.com, leaves a considerable amount to be desired..."
http://www.webstandards.org/2011/02/01/html5-check-accessible-html5-um_/

PDF Accessibility
By WebAIM.
WebAIM's PDF accessibility updated has been article for Acrobat X -
http://weba.im/acrobatx

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

CSS Validator to Report Vendor-Specific Extensions as Warnings, Not Errors
By Roger Johansson.
"In late 2009 I wrote an article explaining that Vendor-specific
extensions are invalid CSS. They are also a fact of life if you want
to be able to use new CSS features, which most of us do..."
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201101/css_validator_to_report_vendor-specific_extensions_as_warnings_not_errors/

Enterprise HTML, CSS and JavaScript Explained
By Roger Johansson.
"...I thought I'd bring up a few of the examples from the Enterprise
CSS/HTML/JS sites and explain why I think they are bad examples..."
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201102/enterprise_html_css_and_javascript_explained/

Styling Full Width Tabs with CSS3
By Alen Grakalic.
"In this article I will demonstrate how to create full width
'browser-like' tabs using pure CSS3 and some HTML5 markup..."
http://cssglobe.com/post/9579/styling-full-width-tabs-with-css3

The Practicalities of CSS Media Queries, Lessons Learned
By Sam Collins.
"CSS Media Queries are part of CSS3 and in brief: they allow you to
tailor your websites appearance for different screen sizes. Most
people I speak to know about media queries but have been a little shy
in trying them out. You can read about media queries elsewhere-here,
I'd like to speak about a first-hand experience of using them..."
http://blog.bloop.co/the-practicalities-of-css-media-queries-lesso

On CSS Variables, Mixins and Nesting - Variable Thoughts
By Niels Matthijs.
"Last week the news broke that work on css variables was resumed.
Nothing too official yet, but people felt it was time to give it
another go. Not too much of a surprise, similar frameworks like SASS
and LESS are gaining momentum quite rapidly, but not everyone is happy
with the addition of variables (mixins and nestings) in native css. At
the core of this schism lie crucial fundamentals of css, so let's see
what's holding people back to turn css into a more program-like
language."
http://www.onderhond.com/blog/work/css-variables-mixins-nestings

+03: COLOR.

Colorblind Leading the Blind
By Andy Baio.
"Today, Netflix posted some interesting research, tracking the
performance of their streaming service on the top ISPs in the U.S.
Sadly, the charts were completely useless to me - a pile of
mostly-indistinguishable lines. Along with one out of every 14
American males (about 7%), I'm red-green colorblind..."
http://waxy.org/2011/01/colorblind_leading_the_blind/

Color Wheels are Wrong? How Color Vision Actually Works
By Jason Cohen.
"Color theory is a little obsession of mine. You're here for startup
advice, but this week I'm taking an indulgence.."
http://blog.asmartbear.com/color-wheels.html

+04: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Measuring Usability with the System Usability Scale (SUS)
By Jeff Sauro.
"It's the 25th anniversary of the creation of the System Usability
Scale (SUS). The SUS is the most widely used questionnaire to measure
perceptions of usability..."
http://www.measuringusability.com/sus.php

Test-Taking Enhances Learning
By Jakob Nielsen.
"People remember much more after reading if they retrieve information
about the text from memory. Quizzes are one way websites can help
users remember more."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/learning-recall.html

+05: EVENTS.

2011 Web and New Media Conference
March 17-18, 2011
Washington, DC, U.S.A.
http://www.usa.gov/webcontent/wmu/conference/2011/index.shtml

+06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

Building an Information Architecture Checklist
By Laura Downey and Sumit Banerjee.
"Government environments often have prescribed complex processes for
obtaining and implementing technology solutions. In order to encourage
and enable information architecture (IA) in government systems, it is
essential to embed IA within the current processes and to view IA as
part of the overall architectural framework. The definition of IA used
here is broad and inclusive spanning applications, the Web and the
enterprise. A common focus exists aimed at organizing information for
findability, manageability and usefulness, but the definition also
includes infrastructure to support organization of information. This
case study describes the development of an IA checklist in a large
United States government agency. The checklist is part of an
architectural review process that is applied 1) during assessment of
proposed information systems projects and 2) design of solution
recommendations before system implementation."
http://journalofia.org/volume2/issue2/03-downey/

to_be_classified
By Elise Conradi.
"This paper examines the use of the postulational approach to facet
analysis to manually induce a faceted classification ontology from a
folksonomy."
http://journalofia.org/volume2/issue2/02-conradi/

Building an Information Architecture Checklist
By Laura Downey and Sumit Banerjee.
"Government environments often have prescribed complex processes for
obtaining and implementing technology solutions. In order to encourage
and enable information architecture (IA) in government systems, it is
essential to embed IA within the current processes and to view IA as
part of the overall architectural framework. The definition of IA used
here is broad and inclusive spanning applications, the Web and the
enterprise. A common focus exists aimed at organizing information for
findability, manageability and usefulness, but the definition also
includes infrastructure to support organization of information. This
case study describes the development of an IA checklist in a large
United States government agency. The checklist is part of an
architectural review process that is applied 1) during assessment of
proposed information systems projects and 2) design of solution
recommendations before system implementation."
http://journalofia.org/volume2/issue2/03-downey/

The Benefits of Wireframing a Design
By Brad Shorr.
"...In this article, I will go over five key benefits of website
wireframing. What I'll discuss are direct observations based on what
we've experienced at the agency I work at..."
http://sixrevisions.com/user-interface/wireframing-benefits/

+07: NAVIGATION.

Should Web Writers and UX Designers use 'Click Here'?
By Melanie.
"Shocked. Appalled. Scandalized. That's how I felt when I ran across a
Copyblogger article asserting that using 'click here' to indicate
links in copy is actually (gulp) okay..."
http://prosekiln.com/should-web-writers-use-click-here/

+08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

The HTML5 Standardisation Journey Won't Be Easy
By Brian Kelly.
"...perhaps more worrying is what this will mean for the formal
standardisation process which W3C has been involved in.  Since it
seems that new HTML(5) features can be implemented by browser and tool
vendors this seems to herald a return to the days of the browser wars,
during which Netscape and Microsoft introduced 'innovative' features
such as the BLINK and MARQEE tags...This unease has much to do with
the apparent autonomy of browser vendors: I have mentioned comments
from employees of Google and Opera who seem to be endorsing this move
(how would we feel if it was Microsoft which was challenging the W3C's
 standardisation process?). But perhaps we should accept that
significant Web developments are no longer being driven by a standards
organisation or from grass-roots developments but from the major
global players in the market-place? Doesn't sound good, does it - a
twenty-first century return to browser vendors introducing updated
versions of BLINK and MARQUEE elements as they'll know what users
want..."
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2011/02/03/the-html5-standardisation-journey-wont-be-easy/

Boilerplate
By Dave Shea.
"...I'm sharing this as a minimum viable starting point since I'm
still getting comfortable with the new semantics myself..."
http://mezzoblue.com/archives/2011/01/31/boilerplate/

HTML5 and Web Video: Questions for the Industry from the Community
By Dean Hachamovitch.
"A Web without video would be a dull Web and consumers, developers and
businesses want video on the Web to just work. As an industry we know
this and have, until recently, been on a path to make this a reality
with HTML5 by integrating video into Web pages more natively using
H.264. There is more detail and discussion below but I want to be
unambiguous on some key points..."
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/02/02/html5-and-web-video-questions-for-the-industry-from-the-community.aspx

HTML5 Logo: W3C Takes a Step in the Right Direction
By Chris Mills.
"After receiving a wave of negative feedback concerning the HTML5
logo, the W3C have made steps towards righting things..."
http://www.webstandards.org/2011/01/28/html5-logo-w3c-takes-a-step-in-the-right-direction/

[Section one ends.]

++ SECTION TWO:

+09: 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.]