Accessibility

Since the discourse over creating accessible Web pages began, the standards organizations that helped inform the new Federal rules have stressed the separation of design and content. If the Internet is to reach its full potential, content will need to be authored so that it can be rendered by a broad array of devices: browsers, assistive technologies, PDAs, and devices that have yet to be imagined. Only by separating content from design will this be possible. By following the rules in Section 508, you will be doing more than providing access for those with disabilities; you will be creating content that is available to all users, no matter what devices are used to read it.

Apple Inc. (2006). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Section 508

Apple Guide Complete: Designing and Developing Onscreen Assistance

If you've been waiting to give your users more than just onscreen reference information, now you can with Apple Guide, Apple Computer's innovative help delivery system. With Apple Guide, you can produce guide files that actually lead users, step by step, through complex tasks and concepts. If you want to provide task-oriented, context-specific instructions, Apple Guide gives you the ease and flexibility to do so. You'll learn about the complete cycle of designing, scripting, and coding guide files in the four parts of this book.

Apple Inc. (1996). Design>Documentation>Help

Apple Human Interface Guidelines  

These guidelines are designed to assist you in developing products that provide Mac OS X users with a consistent visual and behavioral experience across applications and the operating system.

Apple Inc. (2003). Design>User Interface>Operating Systems

Apple Publications Style Guide  

The Apple Publications Style Guide provides editorial guidelines for text in Apple instructional publications, technical documentation, reference information, training programs, and the software user interface.

Apple Inc. (2006). Resources>Style Guides

Apple Publications Style Guide (2003)  

An updated version of the style guide used by writers and editors in Apple publications groups.

Apple Inc. (2003). Reference>Style Guides>Technical Writing>Technical Writing

Apple Publications Style Guide (2003)  

The May 2003 edition of the standard reference for Apple publications.

Apple Inc. (2003). Reference>Style Guides>Technical Writing

Cross Browser Animation

Dynamic HTML (DHTML) provides a new range of ways to animate a page. DHTML can animate both text and images and animations can move throughout the browser window, instead of being anchored in one spot. Unfortunately, DHTML can be tricky because of differences between browsers. This article will cover the basics of cross-browser animation. You’ll learn how to animate text and images. Plus you’ll see how to move HTML elements around the screen. After you’ve finished reading this article, you should be able to add cross-browser compatible DHTML animations to your web pages.

Apple Inc. (2006). Design>Web Design>DHTML>CSS

Delivering Content with RSS for Web Developers

The delivery of web content is being revolutionized by a new technique known as syndication. The most common format for syndication is RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, an XML (eXtensible Markup Language) format for coordinating the delivery of time-based content streams, or 'feeds.' This means that RSS can be used to deliver content that changes over time. RSS provides for the inclusion of additional data, similar to email attachments, using the ENCLOSURE tag.

Apple Inc. (2006). Design>Web Design>XML>RSS

Dynamic Content with DOM-2 (Part I)

The relatively recent emergence of peer-to-peer distributed computing and the renewed interest in real-time data exchange have stoked the embers of a hot topic: displaying dynamic content over the Web. Unfortunately, the statelessness of HTTP and the limitations of the rendering components of different browsers present significant challenges to web developers wishing to get fresh information to the client without sending additional requests to a server.

Apple Inc. (2006). Design>Web Design>Standards

Dynamic Content with DOM-2 (Part II)

This article dives into the JavaScript node interface and examines the different ways of altering the visible properties of an element or text node. You’ll first learn how to alter element attributes with DOM element methods, then you’ll see how to change an element’s style properties through the DOM Level 2 (DOM2) Style specification interface.

Apple Inc. (2006). Design>Web Design>Standards

Dynamic Forms with DHTML

This approach uses Dynamic HTML (DHTML), which has several benefits over using IFRAMES to make life a bit easier for the users of your site. First, DHTML allows for more flexible formatting than IFRAMEs permit. You can apply background images, borders, fonts, and all the other features you’ve learned to expect from HTML and Cascading Style Sheets to DHTML objects. In contrast, IFRAMES have almost no configurable features. Second, if someone fills out one form, switches to another, then switches back, there’s a good chance that the browser will lose the information that was initially entered. This problem doesn’t exist in the DHTML solution. Third, with DHTML you can do tricky things like clipping and moving the form around the page. You could do these things by combining IFRAMES and DHTML, but you might as well just use DHTML in the first place.

Apple Inc. (2006). Design>Web Design>Forms>DHTML

Dynamic HTML and XML: The XMLHttpRequest Object

As deployment of XML data and web services becomes more widespread, you may occasionally find it convenient to connect an HTML presentation directly to XML data for interim updates without reloading the page. Thanks to the little-known XMLHttpRequest object, an increasing range of web clients can retrieve and submit XML data directly, all in the background. To convert retrieved XML data into renderable HTML content, rely on the client-side Document Object Model (DOM) to read the XML document node tree and compose HTML elements that the user sees.

Apple Inc. (2006). Design>Web Design>DHTML>Ajax

Fonts

The ability to customize fonts— in Mac OS, in word processing documents, in Web pages— is really nothing new. However, when it comes to changing fonts on Web pages, the mechanism is decidedly less intuitive and certainly less than easy. Having to litter a Web page with FONT FACE tags makes for larger files, and larger headaches as you weed through these tags to find that one misspelled word. CSS makes the process of selecting a font easy, and even better, it provides a fallback mechanism for those times when users don'’t have the fonts you wanted to appear.

Apple Inc. (2006). Design>Web Design>Typography>CSS

Form Validation

Any sort of interactive site is going to have form inputs — a place where your users input who they are, what they want to buy, where they live, and so forth. This data is passed to whatever handles your back end — a Perl CGI script, a PHP engine, a database like Oracle, or some other technology you’ve invested in. Whatever system is back there, you can bet that it doesn’t appreciate having its time wasted with bogus information, and chances are the user doesn’t appreciate it either. If the data the user submits to the CGI contains an error, there will be a noticeable lag — typically several seconds — before the information travels over the Internet to the server, is examined on the server, and then returns to the user along with an irritating error message. If you run a little preliminary validation of the user’s form input before the form is submitted, there will be no wait time. Client-side validation is instantaneous because it doesn’t have to transmit any data. JavaScript catches any erroneous data the user enters before it goes anywhere.

Apple Inc. (2006). Design>Web Design>Forms>DHTML

HelpHook

This is a very simple example of integrating a J2SE application with the Apple Help Viewer application. This sample code has been updated to include a project that produces a universal binary. No code changes were required for it to run correctly on Intel-based Macintosh computers.

Apple Inc. (2007). Articles>Documentation>Help>Macintosh

Hide/Show Layer

This script uses dynamic HTML (DHTML) to pop open a box with info in it when you click on a link. In my demo I’ve used this to pop up contextual help about filling in a form. It could also be used, for example, to give pop-up definitions for terms in an article. In both cases, it makes sense to give the information in context, modelessly. Likewise, this solution avoids the problems of statelessness and latency.

Apple Inc. (2006). Design>Web Design>Forms>DHTML

Horizontal Sizing in CSS

This article covers horizontal sizing and shows how to determine the width of elements with CSS. Once you’ve mastered both height and width, you should be well on your way to effectively using CSS.

Apple Inc. (2006). Design>Web Design>CSS

HTML Scripting Guide for QuickTime

You can use QuickTime and HTML together to present various kinds of multimedia over the Internet or from a local disk. There are specific HTML tags and parameters that cause a browser to load QuickTime and allow the HTML author to control QuickTime's behavior.

Apple Inc. (2006). Design>Web Design>Streaming>QuickTime

Human Interface Design Principles

This section provides a theoretical base for the wealth of practical information on implementing the Aqua interface elements presented in the rest of this book. You’ll undoubtedly find that you can’t design in accordance with all of the principles all the time. In those situations, you’ll have to make decisions based on which principle or set of principles is most important in the context of the task you’re solving. User testing is often an excellent way to decide between conflicting principles in a particular context.

Apple Inc. (2003). Design>Human Computer Interaction>User Interface

International Technologies

International technologies describes a collection of Macintosh technologies and resources developers can use to internationalize or localize their applications. Internationalization is the process of readying your software to handle different text systems and locale-specific features. Localization is the process of translating an application's text elements, and adjusting the user interface for a specific language or region.

Apple Inc. (2002). Resources>Language>Localization>Software

Introduction to Apple Human Interface Guidelines

These guidelines are designed to assist you in developing products that provide Mac OS X users with a consistent visual and behavioral experience across applications and the operating system.

Apple Inc. (2006). Design>User Interface>User Experience>Macintosh

Mac OS Help

Online help facilities are an important part of any software product in today's marketplace. Apple has a number of technologies specifically designed for providing both convenient to use and easy to understand online help. Interested developers can take advantage of these technologies and use them to build online help facilities into their own products. This page provides an overview of the current Apple help technologies along with links to other related resources.

Apple Inc.. Resources>Documentation>Online

Macintosh OS 8 Human Interface Guidelines

This document describes the additions and changes to Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines related to the release of Mac OS 8. Specifically, it presents guidelines for taking advantage of the Mac OS platinum appearance and the Appearance Manager. This document does not replace Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines.

Apple Inc. (1997). Design>Human Computer Interaction>User Interface

Macintosh OS X: Aqua Human Interface Guidelines

This document, which covers features up to Mac OS X version 10.2, describes what you need to do to design your application for Aqua. Primarily intended for Carbon and Cocoa developers who want their applications to look right and behave correctly in Mac OS X, these guidelines provide examples of how to use Aqua interface elements. Java application developers will also find these guidelines useful.

Apple Inc. (2003). Design>Human Computer Interaction>User Interface

Modifying Styles

With the release of W3 compliant browsers however, we now have the ability to change styles on the fly from JavaScript, using the W3C DOM. Unfortunately, due to a distinction between the way that embedded and remote stylesheet properties are exposed as opposed to the way that inline STYLE properties are exposed, this can be tricky.

Apple Inc. (2006). Design>Web Design>CSS>DHTML