http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Design/Web-Design A listing of the most recently indexed works about Design and Web Design in the field of technical communication. en-us Copyright (c) 2005-08 by the EServer. All rights reserved. tclib-editorial@eserver.org (TC Library Editorial Board) webmaster@eserver.org (Geoffrey Sauer) http://tc.eserver.org/images/newlogo.gif http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Design/Web-Design http://tc.eserver.org/35488.html http://tc.eserver.org/35488.html "Content-rich" is not enough. Most websites are not learner-friendly. As an industry, we haven’t done our best to make our content-rich websites suitable for learning and exploration. Learners require more from us than keywords and killer headlines. They need an environment that is narrative, interactive, and discoverable. Amber Simmons tells how to begin creating rich content sites that invite and repay exploration and discovery. http://tc.eserver.org/35499.html http://tc.eserver.org/35499.html Development of HTML 5, the highly touted upgrade to the language of the Web, is progressing but still faces obstacles, including lack of a standard video codec, said an official of the World Wide Web Consortium at a gathering on Tuesday. http://tc.eserver.org/35500.html http://tc.eserver.org/35500.html HTML 5, a groundbreaking upgrade to the prominent Web presentation specification, could become a game-changer in Web application development, one that might even make obsolete such plug-in-based rich Internet application (RIA) technologies as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun JavaFX. http://tc.eserver.org/35476.html http://tc.eserver.org/35476.html In addition to font stacks, why not replace the heading text with an image, embedded font, or bit of Flash? The methods described below are easier than they sound. And the end result is that the vast majority of users will see the beautiful typography you want them to see. A word of warning, though: don’t use dynamic text replacement for all of the text on your page. All that would do is slow it down and frustrate your visitors. Instead, save it for headings, menu items, pull quotes and other small bits of text. http://tc.eserver.org/35478.html http://tc.eserver.org/35478.html Looks at 50 most useful typographic tools, techniques and resources for creating effective and expressive designs. We will also look at some hands-on typography tools that help designers and developers learn how to style their Web content, test it interactively and see the changes instantly. These tools are great for experimenting with different font types for your website. http://tc.eserver.org/35479.html http://tc.eserver.org/35479.html PHP is one of the most widely used open-source server-side scripting languages that exist today. With over 20 million indexed domains using PHP, including major websites like Facebook, Digg and WordPress, there are good reasons why many Web developers prefer it to other server-side scripting languages, such as Python and Ruby. This post presents 50 useful PHP tools that can significantly improve your programming workflow. Among other things, you’ll find a plethora of libraries and classes that aid in debugging, testing, profiling and code-authoring in PHP. http://tc.eserver.org/35480.html http://tc.eserver.org/35480.html Below, we present 50 extremely useful CSS tools, generators, templates and resources. We did not include “traditional” CSS tools, such as Firebug or the Web Developer extension, but tried to focus on rather unknown tools that are definitely worth a look. Some tools are new and some are old, but hopefully everybody will find a couple of new useful or at least inspiring tools. http://tc.eserver.org/35481.html http://tc.eserver.org/35481.html Sometimes being a web-developer is just damn hard. Particularly coding is often responsible for slowing down our workflow, reducing the quality of our work and sleepless nights with pizza and coffee laying around the laptop. Reason: with a number of incompatibility issues and quite creative rendering engines it sometimes takes too much time to find a workaround for some problem without addressing browsers with quirky hacks. And that’s where ready-to-use solutions developed by other designers come in handy. In this post we present 50 new CSS-techniques, ideas and ready-to-use solutions for effective coding. http://tc.eserver.org/35482.html http://tc.eserver.org/35482.html Since web-development is a quite dynamic field nowadays, new techniques are being developed and updated all the time. A primary example are CSS-related techniques, which emerge almost every day and offer more possibilities for fellows web-developers. We keep an eye on the recent developments and collect new ideas and methods for our readers. A “fresh” round-up of the “fresh” CSS techniques, tutorials and layouts. http://tc.eserver.org/35484.html http://tc.eserver.org/35484.html While many designers have been quick to embrace web standards, it’s surprising how often the basic standards of typography are neglected. Here are ten deadly sins to avoid in your web typography. http://tc.eserver.org/35473.html http://tc.eserver.org/35473.html Here is a collection of some testing tools that we have compiled to aid your testing handily grouped into categories. Look out for our reviews of some of these tools coming soon. http://tc.eserver.org/35474.html http://tc.eserver.org/35474.html Generates screenshots of how websites appear at 800x600 and 1024x768 resolution in six commonly used web browsers. http://tc.eserver.org/35454.html http://tc.eserver.org/35454.html When designing an online store, you have to consider many different types of customers: repeat customers, first-timers, people in a rush, etc. One thing that would help all of them is optimum usability. You can achieve this in a variety of ways, starting with eliminating the most common usability problems from your website. Fixing any one of the following eight common usability problems will get you started on the path to usability and user-experience heaven and, ultimately, more sales. http://tc.eserver.org/35469.html http://tc.eserver.org/35469.html One appealing aspect of blogs over print media is the ability to comment and respond to comments. It’s the appeal of a conversation instead a lecture. http://tc.eserver.org/35440.html http://tc.eserver.org/35440.html Community is discussions, people, passion, alignment, emergent, support, connections, and relationships. http://tc.eserver.org/35442.html http://tc.eserver.org/35442.html Who owns user-generated content (UGC) posted to social media sites? This is but one of the many vexing issues presented by the emerging law of social media, albeit one of great interest to users, corporate subscribers and social networking providers alike. After all, if possession is 9/10 of the law, then the natural, lay reaction to the question of who owns social media UGC is “the Web site, of course.” That’s not exactly correct, however. http://tc.eserver.org/35443.html http://tc.eserver.org/35443.html Who owns user generated content (UGC) posted to social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter,MySpace and the like? How has or will the law evolve to deal with the different, and sometimes unique, modes of personal interaction (with others and with information) made possible by social networking technologies? These are just a few of the legal issues presented by the emergence of social media, one of the fastest growing — and most addictive — forms of Internet-based communication in the relatively brief history of the medium. http://tc.eserver.org/35444.html http://tc.eserver.org/35444.html This chapter will take an HTML page that has absolutely nothing wrong with it, and improve it. Parts of it will become shorter. Parts will become longer. All of it will become more semantic. It’ll be awesome. http://tc.eserver.org/35426.html http://tc.eserver.org/35426.html Google is no longer the only hub for content discovery. The statusphere is introducing new channels that now serve as our attention dashboards and it's the collection of streams of consciousness from those we choose to follow. Collecta, Twitter Search, Facebook News Feeds, FriendFeed, etc., serve as the gateways to insight and enlightenment. http://tc.eserver.org/35428.html http://tc.eserver.org/35428.html Some folks may find it impressive that you know the ins and out of UNIX and how your last open source coding project attracted media attention, but the majority do not. Especially when acronyms start spewing forth with articulated speed. Keep in mind that executives are employed to keep you employed and need to understand your ideas to communicate them to stakeholders and customers. One way to minimize 'tech' talk is to include the following words into each technical statement: We are using [technology/programming language] to enhance [a specific part] of our business. http://tc.eserver.org/35410.html http://tc.eserver.org/35410.html Below are twenty do's and don'ts of effective web design. Study, read, (re)read and print this page. It will help either make or break your website. And don't hesitate to let us know of anything we might have left out, in the comments below. We love getting your opinions on things and discussing the articles with you -- after all, you're quite possibly the coolest people in the world. http://tc.eserver.org/35413.html http://tc.eserver.org/35413.html Our best CSS gallery is a showcase of well designed websites by the best web designers and web developers around the world, css gallery help you to get inspirations for the web site projects as well as to learn and see what can be achieved through pure css layouts and web standard. http://tc.eserver.org/35406.html http://tc.eserver.org/35406.html A while ago, a small department at my current client's organization asked me to run through with them the basics of setting up a website for their department. By their own admission, they had no clue as to how a website gets created or 'put up there' for the world to see. They were thinking of using Word. Here's my slightly edited 'Websites 101' response to them. http://tc.eserver.org/35384.html http://tc.eserver.org/35384.html How can you enable readers to naturally find the content in your archives? How can you make the hundreds of posts you write more visible and prominent, especially if readers are looking for it? This is partly what the field of findability is all about. You can implement several easy aggregation techniques to increase the findability of your content. You can add tags and categories to your posts, and readers can navigate your content this way. http://tc.eserver.org/35386.html http://tc.eserver.org/35386.html Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) 5 is attracting increasing attention as the standard technology for the next-generation web. Naturally, it will have massive impact on personal computers (PC), smartphones and mobile phones, and the effects will spread out to include other home electronics as well. http://tc.eserver.org/35388.html http://tc.eserver.org/35388.html Probably the most worrying thing about the HTML Working Group is the lack of respect for differing opinions that some working group members have. The apparent disinterest in accessibility is another troublesome factor. http://tc.eserver.org/35389.html http://tc.eserver.org/35389.html Testing is vital, particularly at the border of accessibility theory and practice. I wonder, for example, if tabindex and accesskey would have made it to the HTML4 spec if there had been full testing with assistive technology users? What I really want to know from the HTML5 people is who they think is going to do this research that will provide the evidence that their gang requires before useful attributes are restored to the specification. http://tc.eserver.org/35390.html http://tc.eserver.org/35390.html The HTML working group have decided not to include the headers attribute in the HTML 5.0 working draft, as they believe the scope attribute is sufficient for associating header cells with data cells. With simple and most complex tables, this is a reasonable assertion, but doesn't work with overlaid and irregular tables, where the associated headers aren't in the same column or row. http://tc.eserver.org/35392.html http://tc.eserver.org/35392.html As I wrote in Help screen reader users by giving data tables a summary, the summary attribute on the table element can be used to provide information that helps non-sighted users understand data tables. The current draft of HTML 5 requires that validators display a warning if they encounter a summary attribute, since it is now an 'obsolete but conforming feature.' http://tc.eserver.org/35393.html http://tc.eserver.org/35393.html HTML is being developed outside of the W3C by a number of browser implementers, excluding Microsoft. The prevalent feeling amongst those that do so is that if the W3C doesn't adopt their spec, the W3C will look dull. http://tc.eserver.org/35394.html http://tc.eserver.org/35394.html CSS has experienced a colourful and unusual history. From historic slow adoption to the current slow rate of development, ugly hacks have meant filling in the gaps is par for the course. But now that Internet Explorer 7 is looming, we're getting ready to deal with the first really major upgrade to a browser's rendering engine since we've started using CSS-based layouts in earnest. http://tc.eserver.org/35395.html http://tc.eserver.org/35395.html I'm reading worrying things about the discussions about the next version of HTML, known as HTML5. It looks to me as if things are going in the wrong direction. Oh, and in order not to disappoint long-time readers there'll be a little barb against XHTML pretenders at the end of the article. http://tc.eserver.org/35396.html http://tc.eserver.org/35396.html A presentation which shows examples of best-practices in web design for accessibility to users who interact with sites exclusively through the keyboard. http://tc.eserver.org/35397.html http://tc.eserver.org/35397.html Next time you consider adding a reset button to a form, think it through very carefully first. Does the user really benefit from being able to reset the form? Is being able to reset the form to its initial state so valuable that it is worth the risk of the user losing the data they have entered? Probably not. http://tc.eserver.org/35366.html http://tc.eserver.org/35366.html Although there are other ways to increase your blog's readability, these are the most important elements to consider: font size, line height, line length, typeface, background, subheadings, paragraphs, white space, graphics, and invisibility. http://tc.eserver.org/35367.html http://tc.eserver.org/35367.html When a screenwriter can summarize a story in one sentence, he has a compass that can guide him throughout the writing process. Cindy Chastain chronicles how we can translate this approach to help us remember the quality and value of the experience we intend to deliver. http://tc.eserver.org/35372.html http://tc.eserver.org/35372.html Concepts, principals, and parts of User Experience Design can often times be difficult to approach—and this tends to create barriers with new bloggers. This begs the question: Do ordinary bloggers have to worry about UX Design? http://tc.eserver.org/35364.html http://tc.eserver.org/35364.html Without HTML, CSS is useless. Without JavaScript, CSS can’t realize its full potential. This means these skills are just as important as the CSS my site’s name suggests you’ll learn. http://tc.eserver.org/35365.html http://tc.eserver.org/35365.html I’m all about efficiency when I’m writing web code. Any time I find myself writing the same functionality more than once or twice, I try to consider whether my repeated code could be wrapped into a function of some sort. Navigation is often one of those areas where I try to improve my efficiency. http://tc.eserver.org/35351.html http://tc.eserver.org/35351.html Wouldn’t it be a little magical if, when you signed up for a new site, it said something like, “We notice you have a profile photo on Flickr and Twitter, would you like to use one of those or upload a new one?” Glenn Jones created a JavaScript library called Ident Engine that can help you do just that. http://tc.eserver.org/35319.html http://tc.eserver.org/35319.html What happens when, one day, you’re asked into the boss’s office and they drop “the web site” and “information architecture” into your lap? Regardless of your experience, where do you begin? Donna says your first question should be, “Why do we bother to have a web site in the first place?” “What’s its purpose?” She says if you don’t get this out of the way first, you’ll run up against it when you’re further along the trail and it won’t be easy to deal with. http://tc.eserver.org/35320.html http://tc.eserver.org/35320.html To present content on the web in the amount that most people want: think “topic,” not “book”; break large documents into topics and subtopics. http://tc.eserver.org/35321.html http://tc.eserver.org/35321.html One page or separate pages? When faced with that decision, ask yourself these questions: How much do people want in one visit? How connected is the information? Am I overloading my site visitors? How long is the web page? What’s the download time? Will people want to print? How much will they want to print? http://tc.eserver.org/35305.html http://tc.eserver.org/35305.html Users hate change, so it's usually best to stay with a familiar design and evolve it gradually. In the long run, however, incrementalism eventually destroys cohesiveness, calling for a new UI architecture. http://tc.eserver.org/35306.html http://tc.eserver.org/35306.html Users like the simplicity of messages that pass into oblivion over time, but were frequently frustrated by unscannable writing, overly frequent postings, and their inability to locate companies on social networks. http://tc.eserver.org/35314.html http://tc.eserver.org/35314.html Rapid eLearning has seen a 7 or 8 year maturation that sometimes amuses me quite a bit. Why? Because many of the young developers have probably never had the experience of working within a large multimedia development team consisting of designers, storyboard teams, Flash developers, and creative artists. They are reduced to storyboarding in PowerPoint or Post-its, developing in Captivate or Articulate, and using iStockPhoto to fill in for their illustrative work. http://tc.eserver.org/35299.html http://tc.eserver.org/35299.html You still have to be willing to moderate comments when you are a blogger or a wiki administrator. And you have to be willing to work hard to build a community that uses the technology in a productive way. http://tc.eserver.org/35293.html http://tc.eserver.org/35293.html Depending on who you ask, HTML 5 is either the next important step toward creating a more semantic web or a disaster that's going to trap the web in yet another set of incomplete tags and markup soup. The problem with both sides of the argument is that very few sites are using HTML 5 in the wild, so the theoretical solutions to its perceived problems remain largely untested. http://tc.eserver.org/35287.html http://tc.eserver.org/35287.html Over the past couple of weeks I’ve had the chance to experiment with WebWorks ePublisher, a set of tools that converts documents from Word, FrameMaker and DITA XML to a number of different output formats. One of those output formats is Confluence wiki. It’s been very interesting, so I thought I’d blog about it and see if anyone else wants to give it a go as well. http://tc.eserver.org/35282.html http://tc.eserver.org/35282.html Now that Twitter’s 140 character limit has become commonplace, web shorthand techniques are once again in full use. So what should you, as a businessperson, know about grammar use on the web? Is it ever appropriate to use this type of language shorthand? It’s actually a complicated matter, which is why I’ve written up this short guide on grammar on the web for business. http://tc.eserver.org/35272.html http://tc.eserver.org/35272.html On a recent project I needed to collect and analyze the content management templates in use across a large enterprise Intranet. We were looking to inventory the diversity of templates in use; whether they existed outside or within the enterprise content management system; what changes might be made to the ‘official’ template set to reduce the overall number of templates, and to prepare for the migration of all content to a new design a few months down the track. I looked around at the literature for information architecture and Web design generally and found quite a few references to content inventories and content analysis, but nothing on analyzing templates. http://tc.eserver.org/35270.html http://tc.eserver.org/35270.html Social technology has risen to meet this challenge over the last few years. And while there are a lot of social tools to choose from, one type stands out for this type of collaboration: the wiki. The unique communication model inherent in the wiki makes it ideal for becoming a central business tool for your entire team. The following is an overview of using wiki software for small business. http://tc.eserver.org/35235.html http://tc.eserver.org/35235.html Although social networking sites have become the commonplace over the past eight years since the introduction of Friendster in 2002, designers have not yet explored two important notions: 1) What kind of social experience do social networking sites foster?; and 2) Do social networking sites encourage community? http://tc.eserver.org/35260.html http://tc.eserver.org/35260.html Conflict within local communities is an under-researched theme in Community Informatics (CI). This article therefore aims to contribute to the development of CI as a field of study by analysing forms of internal conflict within Moseley Egroup – a CI initiative developed in Moseley, Birmingham (UK). Ultimately it is argued that conflict is an inherent part of local community and is important to CI for a number of reasons. Conflict impacts on the appropriation and social shaping of internet technology by local communities, and has broader implications on the extent to which CI regenerates localities and empowers citizens. In this sense conflict is identified as a productive force, shaping and reshaping both local community and internet projects mobilized in its name. Conflict also draws attention to the contested and mutable relationship that exists in CI between the online spaces that are created and the localities they are set up to serve. It is concluded that conflict and forms of social struggle within communities should form a central part of the developing CI research agenda. http://tc.eserver.org/35261.html http://tc.eserver.org/35261.html Co-creative relations among professional media producers and consumers indicate a profound shift in which our frameworks and categories of analysis (such as the traditional labour theory of value) that worked well in the context of an industrial media economy are perhaps less helpful than before. Can this phenomenon just be explained as the exploitative extraction of surplus value from the work of users, or is something else, potentially more profound and challenging, playing out here? Does consumer co-creation contribute to the precarious conditions of professional creative workers? This article draws from ethnographic research undertaken from 2000 to 2005 with Auran games (a game development company based in Brisbane, Australia) to engage with debates about the status of user co-creation as labour. The article argues that as a hybrid and emergent social network market these relationships introduce a form of creative destruction to labour relations in the context of the creative industries. http://tc.eserver.org/35262.html http://tc.eserver.org/35262.html This article will demonstrate how the notion of ‘phatic communion’ has become an increasingly significant part of digital media culture alongside the rise of online networking practices. Through a consideration of the new media objects of blogs, social networking profiles and microblogs, along with their associated practices, I will argue, that the social contexts of ‘individualization’ and ‘network sociality’, alongside the technological developments associated with pervasive communication and ‘connected presence’ has led to an online media culture increasingly dominated by phatic communications. That is, communications which have purely social (networking) and not informational or dialogic intents. I conclude with a discussion of the potential nihilistic consequences of such a culture. http://tc.eserver.org/35226.html http://tc.eserver.org/35226.html CSS is simple. You assign style primitives to elements and some of those primitives cascade down to the elements contained within. I get it. It’s simple to understand. But CSS is not simple to use or maintain. It’s time for stylesheets to evolve so that we can take web design to the next level. http://tc.eserver.org/35213.html http://tc.eserver.org/35213.html Everyone would agree that usability is an important aspect of Web design. Whether you’re working on a portfolio website, online store or Web app, making your pages easy and enjoyable for your visitors to use is key. Many studies have been done over the years on various aspects of Web and interface design, and the findings are valuable in helping us improve our work. Here are 10 useful usability findings and guidelines that may help you improve the user experience on your websites. http://tc.eserver.org/35214.html http://tc.eserver.org/35214.html To find typographic design patterns that are common in modern Web design and to resolve some common typographic issues, we conducted extensive research on 50 popular websites on which typography matters more than usual (or at least should matter more than usual). We’ve chosen popular newspapers, magazines and blogs as well as various typography-related websites. We’ve carefully analyzed their typography and style sheets and searched for similarities and differences. http://tc.eserver.org/35215.html http://tc.eserver.org/35215.html CSS Font stacks are one of those things that elude a lot of designers. Many stick to the basic stacks Dreamweaver auto-recommends or go even more basic by just specifying a single web-safe font. But doing either of those things means you’re missing out on some great typography options. Font stacks can make it possible to show at least some of your visitors your site’s typography exactly the way you intend without showing everyone else a default font. Read on for more information on using and creating effective font stacks with CSS. http://tc.eserver.org/35217.html http://tc.eserver.org/35217.html You want to use Gill Sans? Go right ahead. Nothing should stop you. Font stacks are prioritized lists of fonts, defined in the CSS font-family attribute, that the browser will cycle through until it finds a font that is installed on the user’s system. This means that you can use Gill Sans, and if your users don’t have it, you can give them an adequate substitute that will not diminish their experience. http://tc.eserver.org/35210.html http://tc.eserver.org/35210.html As help systems continue to evolve, whatever name they are called, we will increasingly have to face responsibility for their content, and bring their expertise to what we write. The new systems provide us with all the required tools that tell us the problems with their content. It is up to us to leverage that information to provide better content, and act as ambassadors for products that we write. If writers can go a step ahead, and use their help information to sell products, and reduce the burden on customer support, we would have truly arrived. http://tc.eserver.org/35184.html http://tc.eserver.org/35184.html HTML 5 defines the fifth major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web, HTML. "HTML 5 differences from HTML 4" describes the differences between HTML 4 and HTML 5 and provides some of the rationale for the changes. http://tc.eserver.org/35188.html http://tc.eserver.org/35188.html This Fast Track tutorial demonstrates and employs web standards and accessibility methods for tabular data table creation. It is presented free of charge to the community as a help authoring, technical writing and web design guide. http://tc.eserver.org/35190.html http://tc.eserver.org/35190.html This Fast Track tutorial demonstrates two methods to call Context-Sensitive Help in a Web Form. We'll discover how Unobtrusive DOM/JavaScript achieves the desired result in calling Context-Sensitive help, and demonstrate how to keep the Structure, Presentation, and Behavior layers of a web page completely separate from one another ensuring good practice with current web standards and accessibility rules. http://tc.eserver.org/35191.html http://tc.eserver.org/35191.html There are times when we need to build a navigation tree stucture to accomodate a small document collection. There is no need to have this nav list expand or contract, so employing a Behavior layer (unobtrusive DOM/JavaScript) is not appropriate. http://tc.eserver.org/35196.html http://tc.eserver.org/35196.html With HTML5 markup in place I started wondering about how CSS would affect things. The first thing I discovered was that Firefox doesn't have much in the way of default styling for the new elements - so setting background colours doesn't have much effect until I added some default styles. http://tc.eserver.org/35197.html http://tc.eserver.org/35197.html Unlike its predecessors, CSS3 is not a single, monolithic spec, but a collection of modules all of which are at different levels of completeness. For instance the selectors module became a candidate recommendation in November 2001 and is already widely supported. In this post I'm going to be experimenting with the Backgrounds and Borders module and the Transitions module, mostly because the recent Firefox 3.5 release includes improved (but still experimental) support for some of the more interesting bits of it. http://tc.eserver.org/35198.html http://tc.eserver.org/35198.html There are some new CSS3 features supported in the latest Chrome release and Firefox alpha which make this worth a second post. This time I'm going to focus on background sizing, CSS gradients and RGBA colours. http://tc.eserver.org/35199.html http://tc.eserver.org/35199.html I recently sat down with Chris Coyier from css-tricks.com for a hard hitting investigative in your face user interface interview, unfortunately I don’t know how to write (I just press a bunch of keys on the keyboard and hope for the best) much less write stuff like that so I just winged it. http://tc.eserver.org/35201.html http://tc.eserver.org/35201.html The HTML 5 video element has the potential to liberate streaming Internet video from plugin prison, but a debate over which codec to define in the standard is threatening to derail the effort. Ars takes a close look at the HTML 5 codec controversy and examines the relative strengths and weaknesses of H.264 and Ogg Theora. http://tc.eserver.org/35202.html http://tc.eserver.org/35202.html DailyMotion and Google are both experimenting with the HTML 5 video element and have strongly endorsed standards-based solutions for deploying video on the Web. Ars takes a close look at the state of open video and explores both the benefits and challenges of liberating rich media from the proprietary plugin prison. http://tc.eserver.org/35177.html http://tc.eserver.org/35177.html There’s often an unsettling discrepancy between the stakeholder approved wireframes and visual comps and the actual product in production. What you see in those environments is sometimes a far cry from those polished wireframes and those shiny, pixel-perfect visualizations that were filled with placeholder content (such as lorem ipsum text, dummy copy, and image blocks). What you’re seeing in production environments now holds the real content. The imagery doesn’t support the interactions, is meaningless, useless, or worse, contradictory to the design intent. The copy, headers, and labels are unclear, too long, too short, or simply irrelevant. What happened? http://tc.eserver.org/35181.html http://tc.eserver.org/35181.html Dive Into HTML5 seeks to elaborate on a hand-picked Selection of features from the HTML5 specification and other fine Standards. I shall publish Drafts periodically, as time permits. http://tc.eserver.org/35182.html http://tc.eserver.org/35182.html You may well ask: “How can I start using HTML5 if older browsers don’t support it?” But the question itself is misleading. HTML5 is not one big thing; it is a collection of individual features. So you can’t detect “HTML5 support,” because that doesn’t make any sense. But you can detect support for individual features, like canvas, video, or geolocation. http://tc.eserver.org/35183.html http://tc.eserver.org/35183.html HTML 5 defines the CANVAS element as “a resolution-dependent bitmap canvas which can be used for rendering graphs, game graphics, or other visual images on the fly.” A canvas is a rectangle in your page where you can use JavaScript to draw anything you want. http://tc.eserver.org/35161.html http://tc.eserver.org/35161.html Despite the fact that site search often receives the most traffic, it’s also the place where the user experience designer bears the least influence. Few tools exist to appraise the quality of the search experience, much less strategize ways to improve it. When it comes to site search, user experience designers are often sidelined like the single person at an old flame’s wedding: Everything seems to be moving along without you, and if you slipped out halfway through, chances are no one would notice. But relevancy testing and precision testing offer hope. These are two tools you can use to analyze and improve the search user experience. http://tc.eserver.org/35162.html http://tc.eserver.org/35162.html Now when people show up at a website, many of them ignore our lovingly crafted navigational elements and jump to the site search box. The increased use of site search as a core navigation method makes it very important to understand the data that site search generates. http://tc.eserver.org/35163.html http://tc.eserver.org/35163.html While goal-driven analysis is wonderfully useful, we’ll explore a different, “bottom-up” approach that relies on pattern analysis and failure analysis to help you understand your users’ intent in qualitative ways that complement the top-down approach. http://tc.eserver.org/35164.html http://tc.eserver.org/35164.html Ready or not, here it comes. Despite the confusion surrounding its evolution, real-world HTML 5 is right around the corner. Longtime ALA contributor J. David Eisenberg returns to get us all up to speed on the markup we’re about to be writing. http://tc.eserver.org/35167.html http://tc.eserver.org/35167.html If you’re working with the latest technology, there may not be any user reference material at all; the only documentation available is the specification. In such a case, learning to read the spec is a necessity, not a luxury. http://tc.eserver.org/35168.html http://tc.eserver.org/35168.html Inline validation gives people several types of real-time feedback: It can confirm an appropriate answer, suggest valid answers, and provide regular updates to help people stay within necessary limits. These bits of feedback can be presented before, during and / or after users provide answers. http://tc.eserver.org/35169.html http://tc.eserver.org/35169.html While MVC is a familiar term to those in back-end application development—using frameworks such as Struts, Ruby on Rails, and CakePHP—MVC’s origin in user interface development lends itself to structuring client-side applications. Let’s examine what MVC is, see how we can use it to rework an example project, and consider some existing MVC frameworks. http://tc.eserver.org/35170.html http://tc.eserver.org/35170.html If content strategy isn’t in the current budget, though, how do you convince your client to add money for it? Your client might already realize content strategy can help create measurable ROI. If they don’t, help them understand. After all, relevant and informative content is what their audience wants; content strategy assesses the content they have and creates a plan for what they need and how they’ll get it. http://tc.eserver.org/35171.html http://tc.eserver.org/35171.html In just two years, Erskine Design grew from two people working at home into a full-fledged agency of eight, working with some major clients. Our website needed to better reflect our achievements, abilities, team strengths, and to get better information from client inquiries to help grow the business. I’ll explore our thought processes and share the decisions we made as our own client. http://tc.eserver.org/35172.html http://tc.eserver.org/35172.html Fond as I was of my site’s current incarnation, I’m a one-person show and my website is my main act. I couldn’t risk letting it stagnate. http://tc.eserver.org/35173.html http://tc.eserver.org/35173.html Affordance allows us to look at something and intuitively understand how to interact with it. For example, when we see a small button next to a door, we know we should push it with a finger. Convention tells us it will make a sound, notifying the homeowner that someone is at the door. This concept transfers to the virtual environment: when we see a 3D-shaped button on a web page, we understand that we are supposed to “push” it with a mouse-click. http://tc.eserver.org/35174.html http://tc.eserver.org/35174.html It’s time we came to grips with the fact that not every “document” can be a “web page.” Some forms of writing just cannot be expressed in HTML—or they need to be bent and distorted to do so. But for once, XML might actually help. http://tc.eserver.org/35175.html http://tc.eserver.org/35175.html RDFa (“Resource Description Framework in attributes”) is having its five minutes of fame: Google is beginning to process RDFa and Microformats as it indexes websites, using the parsed data to enhance the display of search results with “rich snippets.” http://tc.eserver.org/35152.html http://tc.eserver.org/35152.html Let’s take a look at 10 ways to improve the accessibility of your XHTML website by making it standards-compliant. We’ll go the extra mile and include criteria that fall beyond the standards set by the W3C but which you should follow to make your website more accessible. Each section lists the criteria you need to meet, explains why you need to meet them and gives examples of what you should and shouldn’t do. http://tc.eserver.org/35153.html http://tc.eserver.org/35153.html To get an accurate picture of why HTML 5 matters and how its adoption will change the future of the web and software in general, you have to take a look at the squabbling drama of contention that HTML 5 is emerging from as industry rivals work to achieve a new level of consensus on how the web should work. http://tc.eserver.org/35155.html http://tc.eserver.org/35155.html CSS 3 no doubt is amazing. I have been using slight bits of it in some of my other web projects, and i am more than pleased with it. Its simplicity runs so well with its advanced features such as rounded corner rendering and font file reading. Rounded up here are my 12 favorite tutorials to help you learn many of CSS 3’s new and exciting features very quickly. http://tc.eserver.org/35156.html http://tc.eserver.org/35156.html Many people are mistaken by what a freelancer actually is and how they use their time. There are many myths that clients think about freelancers, freelance work, or becoming a freelancer. I have made a short list of freelance myths, and what the reality of the myth actually is. http://tc.eserver.org/35157.html http://tc.eserver.org/35157.html Christmas and the holiday season are often the time of the year where people spend the most amount of money. So if your outgoings overtake your freelance in-comings, then you may need to take a look at re-branding your business for the holiday season. Here is WebdesignDev’s short guide on how freelancers can make a bit of extra money on the side during the holiday season when times are tough on the wallet. http://tc.eserver.org/35158.html http://tc.eserver.org/35158.html When it comes to an about page, think outside the box. Try to think of something new and creative that’s different form the rest of your site. Of course display images of you / your staff, and descriptions of each, but try to lay it out in a very fun way, whistle keeping it clean and readable. http://tc.eserver.org/35159.html http://tc.eserver.org/35159.html There's no point in having an awesome website and an awesome product if your product comparison table is crap. It will throw people right off, and believe me I have seen some bad tables. Anyway here is a collection of the best product comparison tables handpicked by WebdesignDev. We think we have picked the top 25 comparison tables based on creative design and how clear it is to read and compare. http://tc.eserver.org/35160.html http://tc.eserver.org/35160.html Are you interested in HTML 5 and what's coming down the pipeline but haven't had time to read any articles yet? We've put together an educational Introduction to HTML 5 video that goes over many of the major aspects of this new standard. In the video we also crack open the HTML 5 YouTube Video prototype to show you some of the new HTML 5 tags, such as nav, article, etc. http://tc.eserver.org/35118.html http://tc.eserver.org/35118.html Among the set of goodies in the HTML 5 specification is Canvas which is a way to programmatically draw using JavaScript. We’ll explore the ins and outs of Canvas in this article, demonstrating what is possible with examples and links. http://tc.eserver.org/35112.html http://tc.eserver.org/35112.html By seeing all of the available data in one chart, associations, patterns and conclusions can be drawn simply by comparing the relationships as they are presented. This is something that I learned from Edward Tufte. http://tc.eserver.org/35096.html http://tc.eserver.org/35096.html Recently, Office Depot redesigned their search user interface, adding attribute-based filtering and creating a more dynamic, interactive user experience. Unfortunately, Office Depot’s interaction design misses some key points, making their new search user interface less usable and, therefore, less effective. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the Office Depot site presents us with an excellent case study for demonstrating some of the important best practices for designing filters for faceted search results. http://tc.eserver.org/35099.html http://tc.eserver.org/35099.html As we explore what social technologies can offer and the boundaries they can cross—boundaries that had confined the traditional Web—UX professionals must now take up a new design challenge. We must address the changing needs for social media and facilitate users’ taking better advantage of everything social media has to offer. http://tc.eserver.org/35102.html http://tc.eserver.org/35102.html In this article, I’ll discuss the cognitive elements at the intersection of advertising and human behavior. By taking an approach to advertising that looks at the impact psychological factors have on customer behavior, I’ve learned that customers respond directly to online advertisements, as we can see from their emotions, behavior, and interactions on the Web. http://tc.eserver.org/35103.html http://tc.eserver.org/35103.html We made a timeline message more punchy, credible, and viral through 5 rounds of redesign. http://tc.eserver.org/35104.html http://tc.eserver.org/35104.html Hosting a company's content and services on 3rd-party social networking sites involves both tactical risks (lower usability) and strategic risks (less user loyalty). http://tc.eserver.org/35106.html http://tc.eserver.org/35106.html Websites that let users customize the UI have the same measured usability as regular sites. Sites for customizing products, however, score substantially worse due to complex workflow. http://tc.eserver.org/35107.html http://tc.eserver.org/35107.html The first major Web trend we're looking at is Structured Data. In prior presentations, this has sometimes been referred to under the umbrella term of 'Semantic Web'. However the way 2009 has panned out so far, it's become clear that this trend is much more than the Semantic Web. In this post, we'll analyze the developments in Structured Data this year and provide you with 3 product examples: OpenCalais, Google, and Wolfram Alpha. http://tc.eserver.org/35095.html http://tc.eserver.org/35095.html Writing toward personas can help produce a successful form of content creation. Of course the next step after writing is to test the content with your customers to see if it indeed answers their questions. But there’s an important next step, especially if you’re a larger organization. You must work cross-silos to make sure different departments are not having contradictory conversations with the same customers. You also have to ensure that all the information on your site is current. If one department updates data, they all must still agree! http://tc.eserver.org/35085.html http://tc.eserver.org/35085.html In today's highly competitive environment, it's important to think about how a product or service is conceived and designed across multiple touchpoints. In this article we introduce the concept of service design and explain why it's important. http://tc.eserver.org/35084.html http://tc.eserver.org/35084.html New media should be accessible to everyone, not just marketing, public relations and web professionals. Here, I aim to help all people navigate the new media landscape. http://tc.eserver.org/35070.html http://tc.eserver.org/35070.html Today i want to introduce you to jSON (JavaScript Object Notation), in short, it is a simple format designed to exchange data between different programming languages. I will show you how to create JavaScript object, convert it to JSON string, and send to PHP script, which will decode jSON string to readable format (for PHP). But that’s not all, PHP script will create it’s own data object encode it to jSON string and send it back. All communication between JavaScript and PHP will be done thru AJAX. http://tc.eserver.org/35071.html http://tc.eserver.org/35071.html The YUI Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. YUI is available under a BSD license and is free for all uses. http://tc.eserver.org/35072.html http://tc.eserver.org/35072.html Ajax is only a name given to a set of tools that were previously existing. The main part is XMLHttpRequest, a server-side object usable in JavaScript, that was implemented into Internet Explorer since the 4.0 version. http://tc.eserver.org/35073.html http://tc.eserver.org/35073.html Unfortunately, Firefox doesn't allow cross-domain XMLHttpRequests for security reasons. While good security is a plus, this restriction can make development and testing a real chore. For those of us willing to risk the security vulnerability, here is how to bypass the cross-domain restriction once and for all. http://tc.eserver.org/35074.html http://tc.eserver.org/35074.html Since my last AJAX project I've increasingly been wondering about the "ideal" output format for the AJAX response. Once you've succesfully fired an AJAX request, what sort of response should the server give? An XML document? An HTML snippet? A JSON string which is converted to a JavaScript object? Or something else? In this entry I'd like to discuss the three formats, with examples, and ask you which format you've used in your practical AJAX applications. http://tc.eserver.org/35052.html http://tc.eserver.org/35052.html Marketing departments – especially in IT – like to speak in the modern lingo about a product’s innovative “Look and Feel”. While “Look“ refers to the design of the solution, “Feel” means usability, the quality of use. Developers of Content Management Systems and other enterprise IT solutions have to walk a fine line to meet the exacting demands of users in both areas. But in recent years a clear trend has become apparent: There is a drive towards the modern, “cool” product design where at a minimum usability takes a back seat, often to its detriment. http://tc.eserver.org/35050.html http://tc.eserver.org/35050.html Today the HTML conversation is reborn. Standards development around HTML seems to actually have a chance of influencing user experience in the browser, and Microsoft itself is participating in the HTML 5 conversation despite still holding roughly two-thirds of the browser market. While Microsoft's market share is only slowly eroding, developer mindshare seems to have shifted decisively to the band of WHATWG upstarts, Microsoft's competitors. http://tc.eserver.org/35020.html http://tc.eserver.org/35020.html In this article we will introduce the concept of WS-Management and Common Information Model (CIM). By exploring the SOAP message with multiple examples, we will learn how to transfer CIM operations through WS-Management SOAP messages. http://tc.eserver.org/35021.html http://tc.eserver.org/35021.html Google Web Toolkit (GWT) applications, apart from connecting to servlets in time-honored Java fashion, can also use PHP Web services to send and receive data in XML. You'll explore methods to generate XML documents and process them, both in the Java language and in PHP. http://tc.eserver.org/34984.html http://tc.eserver.org/34984.html While Firefox 3.0 improved typographic rendering by introducing support for kerning, ligatures, and multiple weights along with support for rendering complex scripts, authors are still limited to using commonly available fonts in their designs. Firefox 3.5 removes this restriction by introducing support for the CSS @font-face rule, a way of linking to TrueType and OpenType fonts just as code and images are linked to today. Using @font-face for font linking is relatively straightforward. Within a stylesheet, each @font-face rule defines a family name to be used, the font resource to be loaded, and the style characteristics of a given face such as whether it’s bold or italic. Firefox 3.5 only downloads the fonts as needed, so a stylesheet can list a whole set of fonts of which only a select few will actually be used. http://tc.eserver.org/34985.html http://tc.eserver.org/34985.html So, you are a web designer going about your daily life, struggling with IE 6, huffing about CSS 3/HTML 5, berating your designers for not using web-safe fonts, and there comes a brick hurling towards you named @font-face. You are dumbstruck. You have no idea what hit you. Everyone is asking about it, and you pretend to know about it. Then you quickly google for it and are hit with even more bricks. I was one such web designer and I spent 4 days in agony, learning about @font-face. I wrote this down, so that no other web designer has to face this torture anymore. So here is the “A to Z” of what @font-face means now and what it will mean for the future of web design. http://tc.eserver.org/34992.html http://tc.eserver.org/34992.html This article questions how professional communication genres already well established in print form have been changing as they are transplanted into digital media like the Web. Whereas some technology-oriented genre research has sought how a new medium provides genres with new technological features, this article argues that a more insightful approach would seek how a new medium, together with its users, provides genres with new rhetorical situations. To operationally define rhetorical situations, I adapt Lloyd Bitzer's three situational dimensions of exigence, audience, and constraints. Then, to illustrate how the new rhetorical situations of the Web can influence a genre, I explore the genre of the résumé. Drawing on a survey of 100 Web résumé authors and an analysis of their sites, I show that as each of the three dimensions of the résumé's traditional rhetorical situation has opened itself to greater diversity on the Web, the Web version of the résumé genre has correspondingly reoriented itself. Hence, genres change in response not just to the new medium's technology per se but to the new rhetorical situations that the medium hosts. http://tc.eserver.org/34994.html http://tc.eserver.org/34994.html This article explores the social meaning of locale in mobile communication research and introduces an approach of user localization to study technology integration. It investigates how locale forms an essential role in mobile communication in the way that practice, agency, and identities are articulated into a user localization process of incorporating technology into user's everyday life. It argues that the use of mobile communication technology is both a complex and dynamic interaction with its surrounding social, cultural, technological, and economic conditions, and an articulation work of self and locale. http://tc.eserver.org/34999.html http://tc.eserver.org/34999.html Web Localization means the process of making all kinds of information on a Web site culturally, linguistically, graphically, and technologically customized to the needs of the users of the target country. Web site localization is an important means by which an industry or organization wins an international market for its products or services since the Internet has billions of users and has the world wide access. However, language problems are still an obstacle to successful Web localization or online writings for cross-cultural audiences, which result in failing to achieve the communication purpose of the organization or company that has the problems on its Web site. This article mainly focuses on the language problems in online writing or localizing a Web linguistically for cross-cultural audiences from semantic, syntactical, textual, and rhetorical perspectives and makes some suggestions for solving the problems. http://tc.eserver.org/35005.html http://tc.eserver.org/35005.html With the flurry of HTML5 tweets this past month, I felt it was somewhat easier to park some of them in a blog post. Retweeting was adding to the confusion for a non-HTML5 person like me. http://tc.eserver.org/35006.html http://tc.eserver.org/35006.html Now that the development of XHTML 2 is discontinued, should we stick to XHTML 1.0 or move forward to HTML 5 or better prefer the old HTML 4? Let’s set things straight once and for all. In this post we are trying to clear up the confusion, explain what is what and describe what markup language you can use for your web-sites. http://tc.eserver.org/34973.html http://tc.eserver.org/34973.html Developing web-based applications can be done using a variety of tools and languages. However, the Java™ programming language and Java servlets are the ideal choice because of a number of attractive features, namely, portability, efficiency, safety, extensibility, and flexibility. Few viable alternatives exist that can be considered equally powerful. Over the past few years, I have developed an easy-to-use, easy-to-understand framework based on Java servlets to facilitate the development of web-based applications. The framework (called Hamlets) is the result of a radical simplification effort. In this article I show you step by step how to write your first web-based application in Java using Hamlets. http://tc.eserver.org/34936.html http://tc.eserver.org/34936.html According to a study by the Annenberg School at USC, American Internet users include: 75% of adults aged 56-65 and 41% of adults over 66. If we want to design for the bulk of our users, we had best consider the more mature user groups. http://tc.eserver.org/34939.html http://tc.eserver.org/34939.html Wiggly, distracting, or poorly placed ads irritate users. Worse, they teach site visitors to ignore whole sections of layout. Yet some online ads work. They capture visitors visually, and present an engaging hook. They get visitors to click. Even, at times, from the home page. So what's the difference?