[webdev] Web Design Update: March 28, 2013

Thu Mar 28 06:32:55 CDT 2013

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 10, Issue 40, March 28, 2013.

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

++ISSUE 40 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: HTML5.
05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
06: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
07: TOOLS.
08: USABILITY.

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

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Accessibility and Content Management Tools
By Lisa Seeman.
"...make sure your content management tools are accessible. Each hour
spent on accessibility evaluation of tools and processes when you
establish your IT process can save you literally months of
accessibility remediation later..."
http://www.deque.com/its-tools-dammit-accessibility-content-management-tools

Deaf, Blind Sue Over Web Shopping
By Joe Palazzolo.
"Advocates for Disabled Say Netflix, Target Are Legally Obligated to
Make Sites Easier to Navigate"
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324373204578374483679498140.html?mod=e2tw

PDF Techniques for WCAG 2.0
By W3C WAI.
"This Web page lists PDF Techniques from Techniques for WCAG 2.0:
Techniques and Failures for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0.
Technology-specific techniques do not supplant the general techniques:
content developers should consider both general techniques and
technology-specific techniques as they work toward conformance..."
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/pdf.html

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

CSS3 Video Tutorial - Box Sizing
By Russ Weakley.
"...This week, Australian CSS expert Russ Weakley gives you the
lowdown on using the new CSS3 box-sizing property. You'll find the
transcript further down the page..."
http://www.sitepoint.com/css3-video-tutorial-box-sizing/

CSS3 Video Tutorial - NOT Selector
By Russ Weakley.
"Today we're talking about a new CSS3 selector called the not
selector. The interesting thing about the not selector is that it's
the opposite of almost every other selector you've used..."
https://learnable.com/jumpcasts/css-not-selector-20

Letting Users Disable Responsive Layout
By Roger Johansson.
"It's great that media queries allow us to adapt the layout of our
sites to the users' viewport size, a.k.a. Responsive Web Design.
However, some argue that doing so comes with a (slight) risk of
confusing some people that don't expect viewport width to make the
layout change as drastically as media queries allow..."
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201303/letting_users_disable_responsive_layout/

A Simple (and Very Rough) Responsive Table Solution
By Russ Weakley.
"There are a lot of very clever responsive table solutions available
now. There are solutions that flip the table on it's side, convert it
to a pie chart, gradually reduce the columns, allow users to determine
columns, and even allow partial scrolling across the table. All of
them are very clever. However, there are concerns about many of
them..."
http://www.maxdesign.com.au/2013/03/22/simple-responsive-table/

Printing the Web
By Hans Christian.
"...There are still some people that like to print web sites on paper.
Once you are aware of that you might want to include a dedicated print
stylesheet into web sites you build. Here is some advice on what you
can do to get the best out of your page..."
http://drublic.de/blog/printing-the-web/

Tracking When Users Print Pages
By Adrian A. Roselli.
"A few months ago I had the pleasure of writing a piece for .net
Magazine about print styles (Make your website printable with CSS). It
was posted to .net's web site last month and received an overwhelming
one comment. That comment, however, summed up something I hear all the
time..."
http://blog.adrianroselli.com/2013/03/tracking-when-users-print-pages.html

Go Vertical
By Anthony Colangelo.
"...why has responsive design focused almost exclusively on viewport
width? Just like we had to stop ignoring skinny viewports, we need to
stop ignoring short (and tall!) ones..."
http://cognition.happycog.com/article/go-vertical

+03: DRUPAL.

Drupal Themes Explained
By Stephen Burge.
"In this chapter, learn how to change your Drupal theme and change
your site's design and layout. You'll also learn how to distinguish
between the administrative theme and the site theme, install a theme
from Drupal.org, turn on and setup a theme, and configure a theme that
utilizes modules to provide features..."
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1984067

Creating a New Drupal Node Type
By Abbas Suterwala.
"...In this article you'll see how to write a custom Drupal module
which will install new node types using the Drupal hooks and API..."
http://phpmaster.com/creating-a-new-drupal-node-type/

+04: HTML5.

HTML5 Video and Background Images
By Ian Devlin.
"Stack Overflow can be a great place to get the mind going and this
evening was no exception. A question was posted asking how to get a
HTML5 video's poster..."
http://www.iandevlin.com/blog/2013/03/html5/html5-video-and-background-images

+05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

Using Card Sorting to Test Information Architecture
By Jeff Sauro.
"...here are some questions and answers to help make the method more
approachable..."
http://www.measuringusability.com/blog/card-sorting-ia.php

+06: JAVASCRIPT.

Access All ARIAs
By Leonie Watson.
"Leonie Watson takes a closer look at Accessible Rich Internet
Applications and assistive technologies"
http://www.netmagazine.com/features/access-all-arias

ARIA (sydjs lightning talk)
By Ben Buchanan.
"Last week I did a five-minute lightning talk about ARIA, at Sydjs.
The main point was to illustrate a secondary benefit to using ARIA,
beyond the primary purpose of accessibility: taking advantage of the
standardised definition of state..."
http://weblog.200ok.com.au/2013/03/aria-sydjs-lightning-talk.html

Standardizing JSON
By Larry Masinter.
"JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a text representation for data
interchange. It is derived from the JavaScript scripting language for
representing data structures and arrays. Although derived from
JavaScript, it is language-independent, with parsers available for
many programming languages..."
http://masinter.blogspot.com/2013/03/standardizing-json_25.html

+07: TOOLS.

Readability Bookmarklet
By Greg Kraus.
"This tool will show you how readable selected text is on a page. The
readability guidelines are based on WCAG 2 Level AAA Conformance.
Note, there is no readability requirement for WCAG 2, Level AA
Conformance. The results are based on six tests..."
http://accessibility.oit.ncsu.edu/tools/readability/

+08: USABILITY.

No to NoUI
By Timo Arnall.
"...Of course the interfaces we design may become normalised in use,
effectively invisible over time, but that will only happen if we
design them to be legible, readable, understandable and to foreground
culture over technology. To build trust and confidence in an interface
in the first place, enough that it can comfortably recede into the
background."
http://www.elasticspace.com/2013/03/no-to-no-ui

A Great UI is Invisible
By Patrick Cox.
"A user interface that is invisible and that provides seamless
interaction possibilities will help the user focus on their goals and
direct them to what they need."
http://tympanus.net/codrops/2013/03/21/a-great-ui-is-invisible/

Why User Experience Cannot be Cesigned
By Helge Fredheim.
"A lot of designers seem to be talking about user experience these
days. We're supposed to delight our users, even provide them with
magic, so that they love our websites, apps and start-ups. User
experience is a very blurry concept. Consequently, many people use the
term incorrectly. Furthermore, many designers seem to have a firm (and
often unrealistic) belief in how they can craft the user experience of
their product. However, UX depends not only on how something is
designed, but also other aspects. In this article, I will try to
clarify why UX cannot be designed."
http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2011/03/15/why-user-experience-cannot-be-designed/

Site Speed and Usability
By Toby Biddle.
"The cost of every lagging second, and what you can do about it..."
http://boxesandarrows.com/site-speed-and-usability/

[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

Drupal Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/drupal.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

HTML5 Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/html.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.]