A List Apart

The Look That Says Book

Hyphenation and justification: It’s not just for print any more. Armed with good taste, a special unicode font character called the soft hyphen, and a bit o’ JavaScript jiggery, you can justify and hyphenate web pages with the best of them. Master the zero width space. Use the Hyphenator.js library to bottle fame, brew glory, and put a stopper in death. Create web pages that hyphenate and justify on the fly, even when the layout reflows in response to changes in viewport size. Strategic Content Management

Any web project more complex than a blog requires custom CMS design work. It’s tempting to use familiar tools and try to shoehorn content in—but we can’t select the appropriate tool until we’ve figured out the project’s specific needs. So what should a CMS give us, apart from a bunch of features? How can we choose and customize a CMS to fit a project’s needs? How can content strategy help us understand what those needs really are? And what happens a day, a week, or a year after we’ve installed and customized the CMS? Apps vs. the Web

There's an app for that, and you're the folks who are creating it. But should you design a web-based application, or an iPhone app? Each approach has pluses and minuses—not to mention legions of religiously rabid supporters. Apple promotes both approaches (they even gave the web a year-long head start before beginning to sell apps in the store), and the iPhone's Safari browser supports HTML5 and CSS3 and brags a fast JavaScript engine. Yet many companies and individuals with deep web expertise choose to create iPhone apps instead of web apps that can do the same thing. Explore both approaches and learn just about everything you'll need to know if you choose to create an iPhone app—from the lingo, to the development process, to the tricks that can smooth the path of doing business with Apple. Good Help is Hard to Find

Help content gets no respect. For one thing, it is content, and our horse-before-cart industry is only now beginning to seriously tackle content strategy. For another, we assume that our site is so usable, nobody will ever need the help content anyway. Typically, no one is in charge of the help content and no strategy exists to keep it up to date. On most sites, help content is hard to find, poorly written, blames the user, and turns a mildly frustrating experience into a lousy one. It's time to rethink how we approach this part of our site. Done well, help content offers tremendous potential to earn customer loyalty. By learning to plan for and create useful help content, we can turn frustrated users into our company's biggest fans. Kick Ass Kickoff Meetings

Too many kickoff meetings squander the busiest, most expensive people's time reiterating what everyone already knows. If every meeting is an opportunity, why waste your first one? By asking stakeholders tough questions before the kick-off, and using the meeting itself to explore ideas and build relationships, you can turn a room of mutually suspicious turf battlers into an energetic team with shared ownership of the end-product and the kind of bond that can sustain the group through the challenges ahead. No One Nos: Learning to Say No to Bad Ideas

You can't create what clients need when you're too busy saying yes to everything they want. As a user experience designer, it's your job to say no to bad ideas and pointless practices. But getting to no is never easy. Proven techniques that can turn vocal negatives into positive experiences for you, the client, and most importantly, the end-user include citing best practices and simple but powerful business cases; proving your point with numbers; shifting focus from what to who; using the "positive no"; and, when necessary, pricing yourself out. JavaScript Minification Part II

Variable naming can be a source of coding angst for humans trying to understand code. Once you’re sure that a human doesn’t need to interpret your JavaScript code, variables simply become generic placeholders for values. Nicholas C. Zakas shows us how to further minify JavaScript by replacing local variable names with the YUI Compressor. SVG with a little help from Raphaël

Want to make fancy, interactive, scalable vector graphics (SVGs) that look beautiful at any resolution and degrade with grace? Brian Suda urges you to consider Raphaël for your SVG heavy lifting. Prefix or Posthack

Vendor prefixes: Threat or menace? As browser support (including in IE9) encourages more of us to dive into CSS3, vendor prefixes such as -moz-border-radius and -webkit-animation may challenge our consciences, along with our patience. But while nobody particularly enjoys writing the same thing four or five times in a row, prefixes may actually accelerate the advancement and refinement of CSS. King of CSS Eric Meyer explains why. Supersize that Background, Please!

Background images that fill the screen thrill marketers but waste bandwidth in devices with small viewports, and suffer from cropping and alignment problems in high-res and widescreen monitors. Instead of using a single fixed background size, a better solution would be to scale the image to make it fit different window sizes. And with CSS3 backgrounds and CSS3 media queries, we can do just that. Bobby van der Sluis shows how.

accessibility web - Google News

Splash the Flash into your Website for Higher Visibility - lonad News
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 07:38:33 GMT+00:00

Splash the Flash into your Website for Higher Visibility lonad News When it is done in correct format, you can expect profits like better SEO, usability and accessibility. Webmasters consider flash as one of the best web ... and more »

AIMediaComms Delivers Web Accessible Media Relations Software to Epping Forest - PR.com (press release)
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 07:11:41 GMT+00:00

AIMediaComms Delivers Web Accessible Media Relations Software to Epping Forest PR.com (press release) Web accessibility is an important issue for all UK government organisations, referring to the practice of making websites usable by people of all abilities. ...

HP Delivers "Just Right IT" Portfolio for Small Businesses - MarketWatch (press release)
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 11:52:08 GMT+00:00

HP Delivers "Just Right IT" Portfolio for Small Businesses MarketWatch (press release) (1) These printers include HP ePrint and print apps, allowing users to send print jobs from any mobile device(2) and directly access content from the web ... and more »

Can Your Web CMS Perform Effective Web Content Governance? - CMSWire
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 19:10:44 GMT+00:00

Can Your Web CMS Perform Effective Web Content Governance? CMSWire These run the gamut from accessibility, SEO (findability) to capabilities for customer engagement. Your website is a strategic asset and often the ...

FCC Slowly Revamping Website, Data Access - Dslreports
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 21:13:23 GMT+00:00

FCC Slowly Revamping Website, Data Access Dslreports Another major criticism is that the FCC's web site is stuck somewhere around 1996 in terms of both ease of use and data accessibility. ... and more »

SEO Must Change, Says CEO of Webnauts Net - PR Web (press release)
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 23:28:39 GMT+00:00

SEO Must Change, Says CEO of Webnauts Net PR Web (press release) “Search engines are tightening their requirements for accessibility and usability, and are moving closer to a truly semantic web every day. ... and more »

Every Cloud has a silver lining; Only “GIS as a Service” has Potential to Meet ... - DirectionsMag.com (press release)
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 15:53:44 GMT+00:00

Every Cloud has a silver lining; Only “GIS as a Service” has Potential to Meet ... DirectionsMag.com (press release) But still today GIS usage is constrained by factors such as excessive cost, unnecessary complexity and lack of accessibility. ... and more »

: Reports Critical NEWS ALERTS -- GreenMan Technologies, Inc. (OTCBB: GMTI ... - Trading Markets (press release)
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 09:03:33 GMT+00:00

: Reports Critical NEWS ALERTS -- GreenMan Technologies, Inc. (OTCBB: GMTI ... Trading Markets (press release) Since this is a client site, access to this live web cam will be limited; however the client may allow the Company to provide weekly snap shots to BEHL ... and more »

Magic Logix Launches New Section 508 Website for New Client, Accessology, Inc. - dBusinessNews Dallas (press release)
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 10:40:06 GMT+00:00

Magic Logix Launches New Section 508 Website for New Client, Accessology, Inc. dBusinessNews Dallas (press release) Accessology, Inc. services go far beyond ramps and striped parking spaces; they create equal opportunity, in order to remove barriers that deny access for ...

New Kindle 3 - Boosh News (press release) (blog)
Wed, 08 Sep 2010 07:56:41 GMT+00:00

New Kindle 3 Boosh News (press release) (blog) Kindle 3 offers not only free 3G access in the US and over 100 countries; it even allows readers to access the web or store outside of the 3G area. ... and more »