[webdev] Web Design Update: November 8, 2012

Thu Nov 8 06:50:50 CST 2012

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 10, Issue 20, November 8, 2012.

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

++ISSUE 20 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: JAVASCRIPT.
07: MISCELLANEOUS.
08: NAVIGATION.
09: SITES.
10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
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.

Bland Inclusive Design is Bland
By David Sloan.
"Recently, Jared Spool of UIE published a short post asking whether
designing for everybody leads to bland results. He argued that in
order to avoid acceptable, but anodyne and uninspiring design
solutions, design teams need to focus on a given group at the expense
of others. The analogy he used was a restaurant that focuses on a
particular cuisine and concentrates on achieving excellence in that
area rather than trying to cover all tastes. Does that mean he's
suggesting there's a problem with inclusive design?..."
http://58sound.com/2012/11/02/bland-inclusive-design-is-bland/

Campus Leaders Speak Out on Value of Keeping Tech Accessible
By Alisha Azevedo.
"Make sure campus technology is accessible to everyone who needs it
before you adopt it. That's one of the takeaways from a video set to
premiere today at the annual Educause higher-education technology
conference..."
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/campus-leaders-speak-out-on-value-of-keeping-tech-accessible/40852

Getting Down and Dirty with Accessibility and Usability
By Karen Mardahl.
"These are the notes from my workshop on 2 October 2012 at the
Technical Communication UK (TCUK) 2012 conference..."
http://www.mardahl.dk/2012/11/02/getting-down-and-dirty-with-accessibility-usability-tcuk12-workshop/

Sliding Doors - Transformative Moment Inspires Accessibility Journey
By Wendy Chisholm.
The following post is authored by Wendy Chisholm - Senior
Accessibility Strategist at Microsoft. She is co-author of 'Universal
Design for Web Applications' (O'Reilly) and a former editor of W3C's
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 and 2.0. With 17 years
of experience making web applications accessible, she helps teams
across Microsoft understand and implement accessible web design."
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/accessibility/archive/2012/11/07/sliding-doors-transformative-moment-inspires-accessibility-journey.aspx

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Dropdown Default Styling
By Chris Coyier.
"There has always been big differences across how different browsers
handle form styling. There probably always will be - because UI design
choices aren't described in the specs. Browser makers perhaps view
this as one of the ways they can differentiate the user experience a
bit. Select (dropdown) menus are one that is particularly weird..."
http://css-tricks.com/dropdown-default-styling/

The CSS Physical Unit Problem
By Peter-Paul Koch.
"Now that we have the iPad Mini, web designers waste no time in
wanting to distinguish between it and the iPad 2. Tough luck..."
http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2012/11/the_css_physica.html

display: none;
By Laura Kalbag.
"Or The things you think are common knowledge but really they aren't..."
http://laurakalbag.com/display-none/

+03: COLOR.

Color Blindness Simulation in Short Films
By Daniel Fluck.
"Carlos Hernandez Matas created in 2011 three short films
demonstrating the three main forms of color blindness: Deuteranopia,
Protanopia and Tritanopia."
http://www.colblindor.com/2012/11/01/color-blindness-simulation-in-short-films/

+04: EVALUATION & TESTING.

How to Ask About User Satisfaction in a Survey
By Caroline Jarrett.
"The state of satisfaction may include a variety of emotions and …
their intensity may vary according to how much you care….' Recently,
Janet Six devoted the October edition of her Ask UXmatters column to
customer feedback surveys. That column has inspired me to have a go at
one particular aspect of customer feedback in more detail: asking
about user satisfaction. That and the excerpt from an email message,
shown in Figure 1, which I received after an encounter with a customer
support facility, complete with its odd repetition of the question."
http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2012/11/how-to-ask-about-user-satisfaction-in-a-survey.php

+05: EVENTS.

IA Summit
April 3-7, 2013.
Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A.
http://2013.iasummit.org/

Breaking Development
April 8-10, 2013.
Orlando, Florida, U.S.A.
http://bdconf.com/2013/orlando

6th Annual International Symposium for Emerging Technologies for Online Learning
April 9-11, 2013.
Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S.A.
http://sloanconsortium.org/conference/2013/et4online/welcome

UX London
April 10-12, 2013.
London, England, United Kingdom
http://2013.uxlondon.com/

+07: JAVASCRIPT.

Using JavaScript to Check If Images are Enabled
By Roger Johansson.
"Sometimes it's useful to know if images are enabled in the user's
browser, so that you can adjust your CSS and/or JavaScript to make
sure that important content is not hidden and that the page is still
usable even if images aren't loaded..."
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201211/using_javascript_to_check_if_images_are_enabled/

+08: MISCELLANEOUS.

Uncle Sam Wants You (to Optimize Your Content for Mobile)
By Karen McGrane.
"Thirty-one percent of Americans who access the internet from a mobile
device say that's the way they always or mostly go online. For this
group, if your content doesn't exist on mobile, it doesn't exist at
all. The U.S. government has responded with a broad initiative to make
federal website content mobile-friendly. Karen McGrane explains why
this matters-and what you can learn from it."
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/uncle-sam-wants-you-to-optimize-your-content-for-mobile/

Your Content, Now Mobile
By Karen McGrane.
"Making your content mobile-ready isn't easy, but if you take the time
now to examine your content and structure it for maximum flexibility
and reuse, you'll have stripped away all the bad, irrelevant bits, and
be better prepared the next time a new gadget rolls around. This
excerpt from Karen McGrane's new book, Content Strategy for Mobile,
will help you get started."
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/your-content-now-mobile/

Mobile Input Methods
By Steven Hoober.
"One key area that surprises a lot of designers and developers that I
have worked with is input methods. Yes, they know that users don't
have a mouse, but there's still an unstated assumption that all
desktop Web input widgets will work. Perhaps more troubling is that
their personal preferences and rumors sometimes supplant data
regarding the kinds of actual experiences that exist out in the
world..."
http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2012/11/mobile-input-methods.php

Do You Wanna Touch
By Jeff Atwood.
"Traditional laptops may have reached an evolutionary dead-end (or,
more charitably, a plateau), but it is an amazing time for things that
… aren't quite traditional laptops..."
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/11/do-you-wanna-touch.html

+09: NAVIGATION.

Responsive Navigation: Optimizing for Touch Across Devices
By Luke Wroblewski.
"As more diverse devices embrace touch as a primary input method, it
may be time to revisit navigation standards on the Web. How can a
navigation menu be designed to work across a wide range of touch
screen sizes?"
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1649

Navigation Patterns: Exploration Of Single-Page Websites
By Steven Bradley.
"...The websites in this article let you scroll, but they also provide
alternative ways of finding cues and means for getting around. In
several cases the designs encourage exploration, which is both more
engaging and also teaches you how to navigate at the same time..."
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/11/05/navigation-patterns-in-single-page-websites/

+10: SITES.

A11ybuzz
By Karl Groves et al.
"Users of the site submit links of interest for inclusion on the site.
During the submission process, the links are validated to ensure
uniqueness and triaged."
http://www.a11ybuzz.com/

+11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

HTML5 Mythbusting
By Chris Heilmann.
"The ongoing discussion about the 'readiness' of HTML5 is based on a
lot of false assumptions. These lead to myths about HTML5 that get
uttered once and then continuously repeated - a lot of times without
checking their validity at all..."
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/11/html5-mythbusting/

+14: USABILITY.

5 Perspectives On The Future Of The Human Interface
By Alex Williams.
"The next generation of apps will require developers to think more of
the human as the user interface. It will become more about the need to
know how an app works while a person stands up or with their arms in
the air more so than if they're sitting down and pressing keys with
their fingers..."
http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/04/5-perspectives-on-the-future-of-the-human-interface/

New Rule - Every Desktop Design Has To Go Finger-Friendly
By Josh Clark.
"Touch has landed on the desktop. A whole new category of touch
devices is flooding the consumer market in coordination with the
release of Windows 8: touchscreen laptops and tablet/keyboard combos.
These new hybrid combinations of touch and keyboard create a new
ergonomic environment... and fresh demands on designers..."
http://globalmoxie.com/blog/desktop-touch-design.shtml

Mobile Design Details - Just in Time Actions
By Luke Wroblewski.
"On mobile devices, there simply isn't room for a lot of user
interface elements -even when they're useful. But while there may not
be enough space to include everything up front, we can reveal relevant
features only when they are needed. In other words, we can surface
them just in time..."
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1648

Mobile Design Details - Hide/Show Passwords
By Luke Wroblewski.
"Passwords on the Web have long been riddled with usability issues.
>From overly complex security requirements to difficult to use input
fields, passwords frequently result in frustrated customers and lost
business. The situation is even worse on mobile where small screens
and imprecise fingers are the norm. But what can we do?..."
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1653

Hardware Specs vs. User Experience
By Jakob Nielsen.
"Product quality has to be judged in the context of human tasks, and
reviews should emphasize real use-not raw numbers."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/specifications-vs-ux.html

+15: XML.

Have You Considered Polyglot Markup?
By Albert Wiersch.
"Nowadays, many web developers have moved toward HTML5 over XHTML. But
did you know web documents can be both HTML and XML-based at the same
time? This is what's known as polyglot markup: HTML documents that can
correctly be served as either text/html or as an XML MIME-type-like
application/xml or application/xhtml+xml. Like a polyglot person, who
speaks more than one language, a polyglot document 'speaks' both HTML
and XML..."
http://www.sitepoint.com/have-you-considered-polyglot-markup/

Polyglot Markup Formal Objection Rationale
By Lachlan Hunt.
"At the HTML F2F, I was asked to provide rationale for my previously
filed formal objection to the Polyglot Markup specification..."
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2012Nov/0021.html

[Section one ends.]

++ SECTION TWO:

+16: 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.]