[webdev] Web Design Update: April 29, 2011

Fri Apr 29 06:35:22 CDT 2011

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 9, Issue 44, April 29, 2011.

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

++ISSUE 44 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: PHP.
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.

In Defense of Checklist Accessibility
By Karl Groves.
"Frequently on mailinglists, blog posts, and Twitter, I read about
accessibility advocates decrying the sins of what they call
'Checklist' accessibility. What the arguments attempt to assert is,
essentially, that 'Checklist' accessibility is not good enough, either
because the checklists themselves are flawed or that the checklist
takes the disabled user out of the equation and relegates their
challenges to the level of a series of check items..."
http://www.karlgroves.com/2011/04/12/in-defense-of-checklist-accessibility/

Accessible PDF
By Bim Egan.
"Lots of folk have spent time and effort bringing their web site
content up to current accessibility standards, but due to an
oversight, some may be inaccurately claiming that their site is fully
conformant to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0)..."
http://www.rnib.org.uk/professionals/webaccessibility/wacblog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=be9c76d3-7ad0-4e03-a1a0-e6f6953b8178&ID=46

Time to Make the Title Attribute Device Independent
By Roger Johansson.
"In a response to the Working Group Decision on ISSUE-31 / ISSUE-80
validation survey to make images that have no alt attribute conforming
(what we normally call 'valid') in HTML5 if they have a title
attribute, Steve Faulkner posted a message about device independent
title attribute support in browsers..."
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201104/time_to_make_the_title_attribute_device_independent/

HTML5 Accessibility Chops: The alt Decision
By Steve Faulkner.
"A recent decision by the W3C HTML working group has caused much
discussion and some consternation within the accessibility community
and wider web development community..."
http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2011/04/html5-accessibility-chops-the-alt-decision/

Longdesc and Other Long Image Description Solutions, Part 1: The Issues
By Dennis Lembree.
"You may have heard some discussion about 'longdesc' recently which
spiked when much debate broke out on whether to keep it in the HTML5
specification. Unless you're a 'veteran'web professional, you may not
even heard of 'longdesc' So what is it, you ask, and should you be
using it? Let's examine..."
http://designfestival.com/longdesc-and-other-long-image-description-solutions-part-1-the-issues/

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Hypermile Your CSS
By Virginia DeBolt.
"Have you heard these rules for best practices in web design?  1. Keep
your HTML as lean as possible - stick with plain old semantic HTML
(POSH) 2. Put all your presentation rules in the CSS. Well, it's
possible to do #2 while failing at #1. That's because of a condition
known as classitis. Classitis is a condition in which your HTML is
cluttered up with multiple classes when just one would do the trick.
Classitis happens when the class attribute gets attached to the wrong
element in your HTML."
http://www.webteacher.ws/2011/04/22/hypermile-your-css/

Speed Up Your Website With CSS 3
By Scott Gilbertson.
"The drive behind the adoption of new web technologies often revolves
around experimentation - developers use HTML5 or CSS 3 because it's
something new and exciting. That experimental drive is great for
pushing boundaries and discovering cool new possibilities. But there's
another, more practical reason, to start using the newest features of
the web, particularly in the case of CSS 3, which can make not only
speed up your development time, but make your site faster as well..."
http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/04/speed-up-your-website-with-css-3/

Automating CSS 3 Gradients
By Nicole Sullivan.
"CSS 3 is full of ways to reduce our dependence on background images,
one of which is pure CSS gradients. They have several features, which
I'm sure designers are salivating over, like multiple color stops, and
angled, radial, and linear gradients. Many people had built cool
designer-focused tools to make interacting with a somewhat confusing
gradient syntax a little easier. The issue for me has been that I'm
not a designer. I generally work off of photoshop comps or (when doing
big re-architecture projects) the site itself, as if the old version
were a design. This means that, for the most part, I was trying
desperately to match CSS gradients to an image with zero information
about how that image would have been created. Because of my focus on
fixing old and broken CSS, the original designer may not even still
work at the company..."
http://www.stubbornella.org/content/2011/04/25/css-3-gradients/

Setting CSS3 Border-Radius with Slash Syntax
By Louis Lazaris.
"What could I possibly say about the CSS3 border-radius property that
hasn't been said before? Well, I can't claim that anything I'll be
saying in this article will be completely new to anyone who regularly
reads articles covering front-end technologies..."
http://blogs.sitepoint.com/setting-css3-border-radius-with-slash-syntax/

+03: COLOR.

Accessibility for Web Writers, part 5
By Dey Alexander.
"Not all web users can see or identify colours. About 8% of men and
0.5% of women are colourblind. Older people and those with partial
sight may not see colours well either. And blind users who use screen
readers to read web content may also miss out on colour information.
As a web writer, you need to avoid creating content that relies on
colour for meaning. For instance, you should avoid writing things like
'Required fields are in red' or 'error messages are shown in red'."
http://www.4syllables.com.au/2011/04/accessibility-web-writers-part-5/

+04: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Are Both Positive and Negative Items Necessary in Questionnaires?
By Jeff Sauro.
"There is a long tradition of including items in questionnaires that
are phrased both positively and negatively to minimize extreme
response and acquiescent biases. An analysis of an all positively
worded version of the SUS found little evidence for these biases but
did find real negative effects of miscoding by researchers and
misinterpreting by users..."
http://www.measuringusability.com/positive-negative.php

+05: EVENTS.

Web Design Conference
June 27-28, 2011.
San Francisco, California, U.S.A.
http://webdesign2011.voicesthatmatter.com/

+06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

Usability Testing With Card Sorting
By Kayla Knight.
"...Card sorting is a usability methodology that has been used by
information architects for years to organize web designs and web
content more effectively. It involves placing content, groups,
keywords and the like on physical note cards and allowing study
participants to move the cards into groups to see how the cards can be
organized into categories..."
http://sixrevisions.com/usabilityaccessibility/card-sorting/

+07: PHP.

Simple Object Iterators in PHP
By Craig Buckler.
"...Iterators is a subject which strikes fear into the heart of many
developers. They sound complex and are often explained with
indecipherable abstract references. They're best explained with a
simple example so we'll create a basic class which defines a list of
web technologies..."
http://blogs.sitepoint.com/php-simple-object-iterators/

+08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

When Standards Go Awry
By Marc Drummond.
"...But after that, I'd hear about decision after decision on HTML5,
and if there was one consistent theme, it seemed to be that
accessibility concerns were tossed out the window..."
http://marcdrummond.com/xhtml/2011/04/26/when-standards-go-awry

Why are Tool and AT Vendors Not Participating in HTML5 Development?
By Vlad Alexander.
"Jared Smith from WebAIM asks on Twitter 'Want to help fix HTML5
accessibility? Convince AT vendors to be actively and adamantly
involved in the process.' Why are authoring tool and assistive
technology vendors not actively participating in HTML5 development?
Will simply asking tool/AT vendors convince them to get engaged in the
process?"
http://rebuildingtheweb.com/en/why-vendors-not-participating-in-html5-dev/

The HTML5 Switch
By Ben Buchanan.
"Depending on who you talk to, you should have been using HTML5
months, nay years ago; or it's something you might be using in 2022.
As usual the truth is somewhere between the glib extremes..."
http://weblog.200ok.com.au/2011/04/html5-switch.html

+09: USABILITY.

Redesign Out, Continuous Improvement In
By Gerry McGovern.
"Big redesigns are a very dangerous strategy. Continuous improvement
of your customers' top tasks is much better..."
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2011/nt-2011-04-25-Redesign-out.htm

On CSS Galleries
By Dmitry Fadeyev.
"...CSS galleries focus on one specific thing: aesthetics. Because CSS
galleries celebrate the best of web design, they misleadingly shift
the focus of web design from the underlying product design and problem
solving, to style and decoration. The galleries cannot function
otherwise because visitors cannot evaluate the usability of a site at
a glance-something they can do with looks. Good design becomes
associated with good style, rather than what it really is: good
product design..."
http://www.usabilitypost.com/2011/04/23/on-css-galleries/

Content First
By Jeremy Keith.
"I'm perplexed by the reasoning that concludes that if a website is
suffering from clear usability issues, the solution is to create a
splinter site for some users while leaving everyone else to suffer on.
Note that I'm not suggesting that everyone get the same experience -
far from it. Thanks to progressive enhancement (and let's face it,
responsive design done right is a perfect example of progressive
enhancement) we can serve up the content that people want and display
it to the best ability of any particular device. That's the key
difference: start with the content, not the device."
http://adactio.com/journal/4523/

[Section one ends.]

++ SECTION TWO:

+10: 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.]