[webdev] Web Design Update: March 20, 2013

Laura Carlson lcarlson at d.umn.edu
Wed Mar 20 15:34:36 CDT 2013 

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 10, Issue 39, March 20, 2013.

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

++ISSUE 39 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: DRUPAL.
04: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
05: MISCELLANEOUS.
06: NAVIGATION.
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.

Handling Erratic Behaviour With AT
By Gez Lemon.
"Most of us have come across scenarios where web accessibility testing
with assistive technologies produces unexpected results, when we know
the underlying structure of the web page is correct. Assistive
technologies are complex, so it's not surprising they sometimes go
wrong, but we need to know how to recover when they're being
unresponsive or providing incorrect information. My colleague, Hans
Hillen, sent an email internally at TPG about handling erratic
behaviour with JAWS, and has kindly allowed me to post it here, as
this is useful information..."
http://juicystudio.com/article/handling-erratic-behaviour-at.php

Requirements for an Accessible PDF
By Denis Boudreau.
"When asked what the most important PDF accessibility requirements
are, most people will tell you that in order to be considered
accessible, PDF documents need to..."
http://www.deque.com/requirements-accessible-pdf

The CSUN 2013 Web Track Mega Post
By Paul Schantz.
"...As you may have gathered if you followed my live blog posts a
couple weeks ago, my interest in attending the CSUN 2013 conference
was almost exclusively web-related.  Now that it's been a couple weeks
and I've had some time to reflect, I figured it would be a good idea
if I consolidated everything into one mega-list..."
http://paulschantz.com/2013/03/15/the-csun-2013-web-track-mega-post/

Better, But...
By John Foliot.
"Roughly 3 years ago (late April, 2010) I wrote a Rant entitled A
Letter to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary
where I got all hissy about the fact that the transcripts of the
invited experts were posted in inaccessible PDF files: big giant
pictures (the most evil of PDFs)! I got all righteous and took it upon
myself to convert those PDFs to HTML and mirrored them from my site,
freely knowing that I might just get into a bit of trouble over that
decision. I never heard a word, and after a while life moved on..."
http://john.foliot.ca/better-but/


02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Defining Breakpoints
By Nicolas Torres.
"To set up a responsive strategy on one's Web design implies an
important prior reflection. Responsive Web design is much more than
percentage units: it consists in a real rearrangement of the
containers, and sometimes of content, according to the device in order
to privilege the readability and legibility of the information. With a
concrete and standard example, Nicolas Torres teaches you how to set
clever responsive breakpoints."
http://openweb.eu.org/articles/defining-breakpoints

Pseudo or Not-So-Pseudo Click Mobile Events
By Estelle Weyl.
"When you 'click' with your finger there is no 'right click' event.
Because of this, mobile devices react when you hold and click instead.
Because there is no keyboard, mouse or right click, mobile browsers
have some built in behaviors."
http://www.standardista.com/pseudo-or-not-so-pseudo-click-mobile-events/

Unstoppable Promises
By Eric A. Meyer.
"Over the past year and a half, the CSS Working Group has been working
on a CSS Conditional Rules Module Level 3 module.  Now, don't get
overexcited: this is not a proposal to add generalized, formal
if/then/else or switch statements to CSS-though in a very limited way,
it does just that.  This is the home of the @media rule, which lets
you create if/then conditions with regard to the media environment.
It's also the home of the @supports rule, which lets you…well, that's
actually more complicated than you might think."
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2013/03/19/unsupportable-promises/


03: DRUPAL.

Accessibility Tag in Drupal 7 Issue Queue
By Drupal.org.
http://drupal.org/project/issues/search/drupal?version[]=8.x&issue_tags=accessibility

Accessibility Tag in Drupal 8 Issue Queue
By Drupal.org.
http://drupal.org/project/issues/search/drupal?version[]=8.x&issue_tags=accessibility

Drupal API Extension for Dreamweaver
By  Chris Charlton.
"XTND.US releases early preview download of their Drupal API extension
for Dreamweaver. Reduce typing and get past plain text editing of
Drupal files in Dreamweaver. If you are into Drupal and use, or want
to use, Dreamweaver then you really need this extension. Let us save
you tons of time by reducing keystrokes with our Drupal API code hints
integration for Dreamweaver (API versions 5 & 6). The extension
provides code hints and code coloring for every Drupal API method in
Drupal 5 & 6."
http://groups.drupal.org/node/10783

Drupal Glossary
http://drupal.org/glossary


+04: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

Web Organization is Not Like Book Organization
By Mark Baker.
"One of the most difficult aspects of moving content to the Web is
that webs are not organized like other things - books in particular.
And the difference is not small. It is not that web organization is
somewhat different from book organization. It is so different that you
can't even look at web organization the way you look at book
organization."
http://everypageispageone.com/2013/03/19/web-organization-is-not-like-book-organization/

How to Organize Page-Level Content
By Tom Johnson.
"One of the topics I haven't covered is how to organize content within
the same page. If your topics become long and look more like Wikipedia
pages, you will have a lot of content to organize - potentially twenty
different sections on the page, including both tasks and concepts.
What's the best way to organize all your page-level content?"
http://idratherbewriting.com/2013/03/16/how-to-organize-page-level-content/


+05: MISCELLANEOUS.

Interview With Steve Faulkner: HTML5 Editor and New Doctor
By Bruce Lawson.
"Steve Faulkner - invariably prefixed by the honorific 'The Mighty' by
those who know him - is Australian living in London with his wife and
two kids. He works for The Paciello Group, a well-known web
accessibility consultancy, and is a co-editor of the HTML5 spec at W3C
Today, we're pleased to announce that he's joining the HTML5 Doctor
team, with special focus on accessibility and didgeridoo..."
http://html5doctor.com/interview-steve-faulkner-html5-editor-new-doctor/


+06: NAVIGATION.

Quality Search Requires Quality People
By Gerry McGovern.
"On its own, search technology will not help us find the right things
quickly. We need human expertise and human management."
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/new-thinking/quality-search-requires-quality-people

Converting Search into Navigation
By Jakob Nielsen.
Most users are unable to solve even halfway complicated problems with
search. Better to redirect their efforts into more supportive user
interfaces when possible."
http://www.nngroup.com/articles/search-navigation/


+07: PHP.

Object-Oriented PHP
By Ricky Onsman.
"Are you sick of unravelling unmaintainable spaghetti code? We have a
new Learnable course that will help you learn to write more readable,
more sharable and more maintainable PHP code: Learn Object-oriented
PHP..."
http://www.sitepoint.com/object-oriented-php-2/


+08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

Can Object Oriented Principles Be Applied To Web Design?
By Steven Bradley.
"When Nicole Sullivan coined the phrase object oriented css a lot of
programmers reacted against it and understandably so. CSS is not an
object oriented language. It's not even a programming language. At the
same time I can understand why Nicole chose the name..."
http://www.vanseodesign.com/web-design/object-oriented-principles/

The Web on Mobile and Beyond
By Dominique Hazael-Massieux.
"People used to stare at me and laugh, back in 2005 when W3C launched
its Mobile Web Initiative to advocate the importance of the web to the
mobile world. Now I am the one smiling much of the time, as I did most
recently during the 2013 edition of the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in
Barcelona, one of the largest events to focus on mobile devices and
networks..."
http://alistapart.com/column/the-web-on-mobile-and-beyond


+09: USABILITY.

Common Misconceptions About Touch
By Steven Hoober.
"44 pixels is not a physical size....We cannot even translate 44
pixels, or points, to a single actual size."
http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2013/03/common-misconceptions-about-touch.php

What a CMS Won't Do for You
By Marli Mesibov.
"...There is no one-size-fits-all CMS. For every team that needs pages
with three custom images across the top there is another team that
needs 2px borders surrounding every third block of text. The
frustrations that content creators face have more to do with nuance
than with any particular flaw in the options available today. The
solution is forward thinking. Content isn't meant to be perfected for
one page, where it will live forever untouched; it's meant to appear
on Jonathan's desktop, Lisa's mobile phone, Sarah's RSS feed, and
Tom's email. That level of detail and flexibility means content
creators need to work harder and smarter..."
http://www.uxbooth.com/articles/what-a-cms-wont-do-for-you/


[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.


+ SUBSCRIPTION INFO.

WEB DESIGN UPDATE is available by subscription. For information on how
to subscribe and unsubscribe please visit:
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/webdev_listserv.html
The Web Design Reference Site also has a RSS 2.0 feed for site updates.


+ TEXT EMAIL NEWSLETTER (TEN).

As a navigation aid for screen readers we do our best to conform to
the accessible Text Email Newsletter (TEN) guidelines.  Please let me
know if there is anything else we can do to make navigation easier.
For TEN guideline information please visit:
http://www.headstar.com/ten


+ 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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