Pushing the Boundaries of Traditional Heritage Policy: Maintaining Long-Term Access to Multimedia Content    

This paper will address the direction chosen by the Audiovisual Department of the Bibliotheque nationale de France (BnF) in order to maintain access to a comprehensive collection of multimedia and electronic documents. It will describe several experimental technical solutions for preservation, emphasizing the consequences of a requirement for future users to be able to use these documents for research purposes. These result in the use of emulation solutions as well as new practices of collection development policy with regard to the specific structure of information within a multimedia context.

Miura, Gregory. IFLA Journal (2007). Design>Web Design>Information Design>Multimedia

Using Definition Lists: Question and Answer Formatting

There are two big differences between unordered lists and definition lists. One, there are two different elements that belong in a definition list: dt’s & dd’s. In unordered lists, all you have is li’s. Two, the only default styling applied to definition lists is a bit of a left-margin to the dd elements — no bullets or other strange positioning to fight. Having two different tags to work with is what makes definition lists valuable.

Coyier, Chris. CSSnewbie (2008). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>CSS

Five Ways to Set Your Unordered Lists Apart

Unordered lists are one of the most pervasive elements on the web, probably just behind paragraphs and hyperlinks in terms of their bunny-like abundance. And for good reason: bulleted (i.e., unordered) lists are a great way to convey a bunch of related information in a rather small space, which is often the preferred way to read on (and thus, write for) the internet.

Glazebrook, Rob L. CSSnewbie (2008). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>CSS

When to Use CSS IDs and Classes

There are three different ways in CSS you can dictate which elements you want to style. Each way is useful for a specific set of purposes, but by using all three together, you can really harness the cascading power of style sheets. The three methods of describing objects on a page are by their tag name, their ID, or their class.

Glazebrook, Rob L. CSSnewbie (2008). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>CSS

Intelligent Navigation Bars with JavaScript and CSS

I’ve developed a trick over the years that I’ve used on a number of websites now for making my sites’ navigation bars “intelligent” or “self-aware.” By that, I mean that the navigation bar automatically knows which tab/button/whatever should be considered the currently active link, without having to manually specify a class or ID on either the body tag or on the links themselves.

Glazebrook, Rob L. CSSnewbie (2008). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>DHTML

Information Architecture - Planning Out a Web Site

This article is going to look at the early stages of planning out a web site, and a discipline that is commonly referred to as Information architecture, or IA. This involves thinking about who your target audience will be, what information and services they need from a web site, and how you should structure it to provide that for them.

Lane, Jonathan. Opera (2008). Articles>Web Design>Information Design

Building Up a Site Wireframe

Every web designer should know and understand a Web site’s parameters before lifting a finger to start designing the site. In this article, you will learn the basics required to start designing business Web sites. While this information is useful if you want to build sites for others, it can also serve as a checklist article for sites you want to build for yourself.

Goin, Linda. Opera (2008). Articles>Web Design>Document Design>Information Design

Choosing a JavaScript Framework

once you’ve decided that using a JavaScript framework is appropriate for the task you’re faced with, it can be hard to choose the one that is right for you. And to make things worse, what is right for you may not be right for your co-workers.

Johansson, Roger. 456 Berea Street (2007). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>JavaScript

How to Choose a JavaScript Framework

A JavaScript framework may not make you a better programmer, but it will make you more efficient. That alone should be reason enough to choose a JavaScript framework, or library if you prefer. Unless you decide to build your own, there are plenty of options available to developers. However, choosing the right framework can be tricky, and weeding through a mess of opinionated fanboys (myself included) is intimidating.

Reindel, Brian. d'bug (2008). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>JavaScript

Marking Up Textual Content in HTML

In this article I will take you through the basics of using HTML to describe the meaning of the content within the body of your document.We will look at general structural elements such as headings and paragraphs and embedding quotes and code. After that we will look at inline content, such as short quotes and emphasis, and finish with a quick examination of old-fashioned presentational content.

Francis, Mark Norman. Opera (2008). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>HTML

Pageless Pagination: Cease and Desist

Pageless pagination is a substitute for the paging functionality that appears on the majority of Web sites today. A typical paging mechanism is on a search results page, and it uses numbers to represent additional pages of results. For most users this has long been the acceptable browsing standard for everyday surfing, searching and shopping, and it requires little effort to recognize or learn a paging component. In a quest to improve upon outdated methods, someone decided to overhaul this standard. With pageless pagination, when the user scrolls down the page to bring more results into view, the Web site detects that the event is happening. After the scrollbar reaches a threshold, a script grabs more results and dynamically appends them to the bottom of the results already in view.

Reindel, Brian. d'bug (2008). Articles>Web Design>Information Design

Intelligent Site Structure for Better SEO!

Search engines are one of the most important traffic drivers to sites these days, which is why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is becoming more and more important. SEO is often thought to be just a set of some technical tricks, and as a professional SEO, I confess to spending a lot of time with clients fixing technical issues. A site's structure though, is just as important. Your site's structure determines whether a search engine understands what your site is about, and how easily it will find and index content relevant to your site's purpose and intent. By creating a good structure, you can use the content you've written that has attracted links from others, and use your site's structure to spread some of that "linkjuice" to the other pages on your site.

De Valk, Joost. Opera (2008). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Search Engine Optimization

XFN Encoding, Extraction, and Visualizations

In this article I will take a good look at XFN - the microformat for describing relationships between people. I will look briefly at what it is and the basic markup needed to add the information to your sites, before then going into depth, looking at the benefits you can get from that data by extracting it and using it in different ways. Extracting the data is easier than you think - there is probably a library for your favorite language already! If not, there are also some web services that could do the job that I'll show you below.

Suda, Brian. Opera (2008). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Collaboration

Building a More Semantic Web With Microformats

This paper will introduce the Semantic Web, the next stage in the development of the web. We will explain why semantics are important, how they can help computers catalogue data, and how this will benefit us as individuals. We will also look at microformats, an ongoing project the aims to help us create a more semantic web. We assume you have a good knowledge of XHTML.

Mercurytide (2006). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>XHTML

User Interface Implementations of Faceted Browsing

Just as it is important to choose the proper knife when slicing-n-dicing vegetables, it is critical to prescribe a suitable user interface to support faceted filtering. Faceted filtering allows you to narrow down a large list of objects to a manageable size by applying flexible combinations of attribute filters in any order. Rather than forcing you down fixed paths within a website’s information architecture, faceted filtering allows you to multi-dimensionally slice-n-dice the information in a manner that best accommodates your specific needs. A user interface that optimally supports faceted filtering must expose its robust functionality in a way that expresses affordances, controls complexity, and follows existing standards that have been pre-established across the web.

Padilla, Mike. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Information Design

The Wisdom of Crowds Meets the Wisdom of Authors: How XML Enables the Semantic Web

Key to the Semantic Web is semantic markup, which lets users annotate their web pages with metadata -- HTML attributes that don't get displayed in the document. Semantic metadata describes what the pages are about, letting authors define things with authority and precision.

Wlodarczyk, Paul. Content Wrangler, The (2008). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>XML

Brint.com: Why More is Not Better

Information architect Lou Rosenfeld never thought he'd criticize a website for being over-architected. Then he saw Brint.com and its 16 navigational systems.

Rosenfeld, Louis. CIO Magazine (2000). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>User Centered Design

It's Time To Get Serious About Metadata

When it comes to the Web, there is nothing more misunderstood than metadata. Technical people search vainly for a way to automate its creation. Many editors and writers want nothing to do with it. And yet without quality metadata a website cannot properly achieve its objectives. It’s time to get serious about metadata.

McGovern, Gerry. New Thinking (2004). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata

Web Search: How the Web Has Changed Information Retrieval

Topical metadata have been used to indicate the subject of Web pages. They have been simultaneously hailed as building blocks of the semantic Web and derogated as spam. At this time major Web browsers avoid harvesting topical metadata. This paper suggests that the significance of the topical metadata controversy depends on the technological appropriateness of adding them to Web pages. This paper surveys Web technology with an eye on assessing the appropriateness of Web pages as hosts for topical metadata. The survey reveals Web pages to be both transient and volatile: poor hosts of topical metadata. The closed Web is considered to be a more supportive environment for the use of topical metadata. The closed Web is built on communities of trust where the structure and meaning of Web pages can be anticipated. The vast majority of Web pages, however, exist in the open Web, an environment that challenges the application of legacy information retrieval concepts and methods.

Brooks, Terrence A. Information Research (2003). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Search

The "All Together" Rule for Intranets

The primary purpose of intranets is to support staff in doing their jobs, to help them complete common business tasks. In practice, however, this can be very frustrating on many intranets. Policies are located in one section, procedures in another section, and forms in a third. Information then needs to be hunted out in order to complete even simple activities. The effectiveness of intranets can be greatly enhanced by bringing together all of the information and tools relating to a task or a subject, and presenting them in a single location.

Robertson, James. Step Two (2005). Articles>Web Design>Intranets>Information Design

Information Architecture and Personalization

This white paper demonstrates the use of information architecture components as a foundation for thinking about personalization. After defining the information architecture components, it describes a model that combines the components into a complete personalization system. This model could be used to guide your personalization system development methodology, evaluate a set of personalization systems, or merely to give you the terminology to help you communicate about personalization.

Instone, Keith. Argus Center (2000). Articles>Information Design>Web Design>Personalization

Navigating Through Stars: An Information Architecture Critique of Stars.com

The inconsistency and unpredictability of behavior in outer space must be incredibly disorienting. Without proper planning, information spaces can be bewildering as well. Good information architectures orient users, rather than confuse them. Done well, information architectures take users to the information they need in a way that meets their expectations. Done poorly, information architectures leave users frustrated and unable to find what they're looking for.

Toub, Steve and Lou Rosenfeld. WDVL (1998). Articles>Web Design>Information Design

Site Navigation: A Few Helpful Definitions

Every site has structure, and visitors will form their first and most lasting impressions of that structure by looking at the links, buttons, tabs, and other controls that form the “navigation.” As designers, we’re very concerned with creating a navigation scheme and interface that makes it easy for the user to understand what they can do and where they can go. But collaborating with your team on the design of a navigation system can be difficult unless you all share the same vocabulary when talking about the different parts that make up the navigation UI.

Young, Indi. Adaptive Path (2002). Articles>Web Design>Information Design

A-Z Indexes to Enhance Site Searching

On a Web site or intranet each of the alphabetically arranged entries or subentries is hyperlinked to the page or to an anchor within a page to where the topic is discussed. Since an alphabetical index can be quite long, it is often divided into pages for each letter of the alphabet. Typically, each letter is linked at the top of the page allow a jump to the start of that letter’s section of the index.

Digital Web Magazine (2005). Articles>Web Design>Indexing>Information Design

Breadcrumb Navigation: Further Investigation of Usage

There are three different types of breadcrumbs represented in websites – path, attribute, and location. Path breadcrumb trails are dynamic in that any given page will show a different breadcrumb trail based on how the user reached the page. Attribute breadcrumb trails display meta information showing many different trails representing several possible paths to reach the page.

Rogers, Bonnie Lida and Barbara S. Chaparro. Usability News (2003). Articles>Web Design>Information Design