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Design and Accessibility: Part II

Content, Structure, Presentation and Low-Vision Readers

In the first article in this Design and Accessibility series, Linda illustrated the importance of HTML and XHTML validation, the difference between the two documents, the importance of and the proper use of the DOCTYPE element in Website design, and the difference between usability and accessibility. That was quite a bit of information – but, there’s more...

In this article, you can learn about separation anxiety, or the definitions of content, structure, and presentation, and whether content can be separated from structure or even from presentation in Websites designs. This debate sparked the “separation anxiety” issue and Linda will add her own theory to this discussion. In addition, she’ll use the Opera browser to support her viewpoint and to illustrate how low-vision readers might visualize two sites which she used in the previous article – Montrose Citizens for Responsible Growth and Target.

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Linda Goin
1312

Creating a contacts application with AJAX part 2

In the first part of this tutorial, we looked at some of the theory behind AJAX, a new approach to building Web applications. AJAX uses XML, XSLT, XHTML and CSS, JavaScript and the DOM and the XMLHttpRequest object to create applications. The key advantage is that data loads asynchronously, so there’s no need to reload the page each time the user requests new data. This creates a more responsive application and an improved user experience.

In the second part of the tutorial, we’ll build a simple address book application. We’ll start by displaying a hyperlinked list of contacts. When we click each contact’s link, we’ll show the details of the contact below. We won’t need to reload the page each time we click a link, speeding up the browsing process

Note: If you have difficulties downloading the source files or PDF, you might have a problem with your cookies. Delete the cookies from your machine and try again. In Internet Explorer, you can do this by choosing Tools > Internet Options... and clicking the Delete Cookies... button on the General tab.

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Sas Jacobs
1871
FREE

Free! - Build a Body Mass Index Calculator in PHP

This video tutorial  shows you how to create a body mass calculator application in PHP and Dreamweaver.

This great tutorial shows you how easy it is to create a calculator using PHP. It uses a step by step teaching method that takes you all the way from setting up your PHP page to testing the final application.

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Aron K
12762

Contribute: Part 1

Setting up a Contribute Site in Dreamweaver 8 and Contribute 3

Content may be king, but only if the content is up-to-date and relevant. Do Search Engine Tips from 1998 have any validity today? Not much. How about Mac Rumours about the cool new toys Steve Jobs will unveil at the 2005 MacWorld Expo? Who cares? It’s long past and everyone’s seen an iPod Shuffle by now. These are just a couple examples of top results I clicked on from recent web searches in Google. I was looking for current information, not old news. It’s not that Google is to blame. These sites are just out-of-date. For historical reasons, I suppose, they don’t want to delete pages with old information, but for most purposes these out-of-date pages do no one any good.

So what’s the solution? Well, I don’t pretend to have one to solve the out-of-date content across the entire web, but there are ways that your sites can stay timely and useful for your site visitors. Just update your content frequently! That was easy. Article over.

But wait! How do we update content frequently? Of course, that’s the tricky part. Luckily there are a number of content management solutions on the market that make updating content as easy as possible. In this article, I’ll concentrate on Macromedia Contribute, but we’ll also take a quick look at some other types of Content Management Systems (CMS) that may also suit your needs.

This article is part one of a two-part series on setting up and administering a website using Dreamweaver and Contribute. Part one details 1) Why Contribute may (or may not) be a good choice for your website; 2) How to setup a Contribute-enabled site in Dreamweaver; 3) Tips for trouble-free Dreamweaver Templates and CSS; and 4) Other tips to get your Contribute-enabled site started with minimal hassles.

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Zac Van Note
1509

Image Catalogue Web Service with Dreamweaver

The posts are all over the newsgroups, Dreamweaver developers trying to use Web Services in their website and applications but to no avail. The most common error being posted is the “Unable to Generate Proxy” message when users try to implement a WSDL file from a Web Service.

It’s clear Dreamweaver developers are trying to use this feature but are having a hard time understanding exactly how to do so. There seems to be very limited help regarding the subject as well. In fact, a well known author has even stated that it’s “impossible” and to just use Visual Studio.NET.

The fact is using Web Services with Dreamweaver is not impossible at all; it simply requires a thorough understanding of the .NET framework and its commands. The average developer is not going to have this kind of expertise, especially regarding something as daunting and complex as the .NET framework.

In this tutorial we will accomplish two things: First we will implement a demonstration Web Service which returns a list of thumbnail images, and second, we will learn how to implement this Web Service correctly within Dreamweaver and create a demonstration page which will dynamically render the thumbnail images onto a Web Form in ASP.NET.

Because the Web Service itself is built using Visual Studio.NET you must have it installed in order to follow through the steps of building the Web Service. If you don’t have Visual Studio.NET you can still use the portion of this tutorial regarding the implementation of the Web Service, however you need to have the full .NET SDK installed, not just the .NET framework.

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Kevin Koch
2158

Design and Accessibility: Part I

Accessibility Apathy: Are you guilty?

Apathy about accessibility in Web site designs seems to be a common malady. Have you given up or do you compromise accessibility standards because they seem to whittle your design down to nothing? If you don’t comply with accessibility standards, does this mean that are you ignorant about these issues, or do you harbor malicious intent against people with disabilities? Or, have you developed apathy about accessibility because the issues seem obtuse or downright silly?

If the Web designer understands accessibility issues and applies them to design elements and principles, the incomprehensible may become understandable and usability of your site may come to life for many more readers. Plus, you could avoid legal issues and possibly increase profits. In this article, Linda Goin begins to address the difference between usability and accessibility and also begins to provide step-by-step solutions which can be addressed immediately as she analyzes a blog/CSS Website. Even if you are allergic to blog layouts, you’ll discover that the issues addressed here apply to all Website designs.

Who Needs to Be Concerned?

Frankly, my guilt and frustrations about Web accessibility issues drove me to write this article. First, I know that the sites which I design could and should be more accessible to a wider variety of users. Secondly, I know that “alt” tags should be utilized in my sites, but that’s about all I knew about the standards before I began my research. And, there were times when I wondered if I needed to be concerned, because my clients consist of small businesses, sole proprietorships, and start-ups. None of my clients are as large as Target, a company which the National Federation for the Blind has sued for the exclusion of “alt” tags in their mark-up.

Target’s code now includes some “alt” tags, at least on its homepage.

On 15 Feb 2006, Matt May commented on the Web Standards Project that the lawsuit against Target was a bit overworked, since other sites violate accessibility with a seeming vengeance. One example May used in comparison to Target was Costco, a bricks-and-mortar business which prides itself on its “outstanding business ethics.” While Costco may utilize these ethics in their physical location, their Website violates quite a few accessibility standards with excessive tables, JavaScript, and hidden subcategories.

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Linda Goin
2214

Interface Widgets Time picker Spinbox Component

Introduction

Those of us who use Visual Studio and similar tools for desktop application development are completely spoiled by the wide range of interface components available in the development environment. Sliders and menus, date pickers and datagrids – drag them, drop them, enter your parameters and off you go.
When it comes to building application interfaces for the Web and you are stuck with HTML (no Flash or JAVA) your options are rather limited to a pathetic drop of form elements.


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Alex July
8952

New drawing features in Flash 8 - part 2

Welcome to the second article about the new drawing features of Flash 8. If you read the first article, you’d have seen some of the new drawing features within Flash including the Rectangle and Oval tool settings dialog boxes, working with Drawing Objects and creating enhanced strokes and joins. However, you don’t need to have read that tutorial first. In this article, we’ll cover the expanded Gradients and the new 9-slice scaling feature in Flash 8.

You’ll need a copy of Flash 8 to see the new features explored in this article and the areas that I’ll cover apply to both versions of Flash Basic 8 and Flash Professional 8.  You can download a trial version of the software from the Macromedia Web site.

You can also download the source files for the tutorial from the blue Properties box that contains the article PDF. There's a heading titled Code Download and you can click the Details link next to it to get the zip file. The download includes the starter files you'll need as well as the completed files.

Note: If you have difficulties downloading the source files or PDF, you might have a problem with your cookies. Delete the cookies from your machine and try again. In Internet Explorer, you can do this by choosing Tools > Internet Options... and clicking the Delete Cookies... button on the General tab.

We’ll start by looking at the new options for working with gradients.

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Sas Jacobs
2563

Creating a Custom DropDown Control

Creating a Custom DropDown Control

When working with a true OO (Object Oriented) language framework such as .NET it’s sometimes difficult to know exactly what is available to you as a developer. Some developers who come from C++ or Java backgrounds have a strong grasp of OO concepts, what they mean, and most importantly how to use them in everyday situations. A lot of developers are familiar with OO concepts but fail to grasp precisely how they can use them in real world development scenarios.

In this tutorial we will look at one of the more widely known OO concepts called inheritance. Instead of reviewing the meaning of the concept we will put in into direct action, in a visible demonstration to literally watch inheritance in action on a web page and design-time environment with Visual Studio.NET.

To demonstrate the concept we will build our own custom DropDown web component. We will see how we can derive from the existing ASP.NET DropDownList component, and how we can extend the component to include our own customized functionality.

Additionally, we will see how we can interact with our custom DropDown component in the visual designer of Visual Studio.NET to update and reflect changes made to our custom component at design-time. By being able to watch our custom component visually on a Web Form the concept of inheritance becomes much clearer as we can literally see the inheritance in action in real time.

Note: The custom DropDownList component will be implemented in both VB.NET as C#

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Kevin Koch
23060
FREE

Free! - Text on Path using Fireworks 8

Have you wondered how to get text to wrap around a curve? How about editing the curve and the text without removing the path? You can do some pretty cool stuff using Fireworks 8. In this movie you'll see how to do all these things plus put text on the top of an ellipse and the bottom!

View the movie>> 

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Joyce Evans
19084

Creating a contacts application with part 1

In this tutorial, we’ll look at a new approach to building Web applications called AJAX. What’s so great about AJAX? Basically, you can create applications that don’t require users to continually reload Web pages. The AJAX approach isn’t suitable for every application but it can really enhance the user experience in simple applications.

The tutorial is split into two parts. In part 1, we’ll cover some of the theory behind AJAX and look at its advantages compared with server-side applications. You’ll see how we can work with XML content in the Web browser using JavaScript. We’ll cover:

  • Understanding AJAX?
  • Using the XMLHttpRequest object

In part 2, we’ll create a very simple AJAX address book application that takes its content from a series of XML documents. The application will display a list of contacts from an XML document. When the user clicks a contact name, we’ll load the details from another XML document and display them WITHOUT refreshing the page in the browser.

The application will use several different technologies. First, we’ll use JavaScript with the XMLHttpRequest object to load the content into our application. We’ll style the content with CSS and we’ll generate XHTML from the XML documents using XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) stylesheets. If you’re not familiar with XSLT, it transforms a source XML document into a results document. In our case, we’ll use it to create XHTML from an XML document.

If you have a good understanding of the technologies involved in AJAX, you may want to skip part 1 and move straight to part two. However, stick around if you want a refresher or are new to the area. We’ll start with some of the theory behind AJAX.

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Sas Jacobs
3056

New drawing features in Flash 8 - part 1

Flash 8 includes some great new drawing features that may change your approach to drawing and will certainly make using Flash much easier. In addition to the Object Drawing model, there is a new method for adding rectangles and ovals to your movies as well as some additional options for drawing lines. I’ll cover both of these topics in this article.

Other new drawing features include enhanced gradients and the ability to specify scaling for objects. I’ll cover both of those features in part 2 of this topic.

You’ll need a copy of Flash 8 to see the new features explored in this article and these areas apply to both versions of Flash Basic 8 and Flash Professional 8. You can download a trial version of Flash 8 from the Macromedia Web site.

You’ll find the source files for the tutorial in the blue Properties box that contains the article PDF. There's a heading titled Code Download and you can click the Details link next to it to get the zip file. The download includes the starter files you'll need for the exercises in this article as well as the completed files, in case you want to see my solutions.

Note: If you have difficulties downloading the source files or PDF, you might have a problem with your cookies. Delete the cookies from your machine and try again. In Internet Explorer, you can do this by choosing Tools > Internet Options and clicking the Delete Cookies button on the General tab.

We’ll start by looking at a new way to draw rectangles and ovals.

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Sas Jacobs
2646
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