Internet Related / Web Developing, -also: usability

As I find more links I will edit this post and add them. Anyone else knowing of any good tutorial sites for HTML / CSS (and books), please post them in this thread!

BOOKS:

CSS Visual Quick Start Guide, from Peach Pit Press

Stylin' With CSS, by Wyke-Smith; from New Riders, 2005

Wrox Publishers: Beginning CSS - (actually, I don't think this was such a great resource)

Cascading Style Sheets: A Beginner's Guide

LINKS:

CSS: The No Crap Primer

Web Monkey - CSS for Beginners - some articles on here are quite old, but if you're a beginner, they may help you anyway

CSS Tutorial Net

CSS: An Interactive Tutorial for Beginners (Dave's CSS Guide) - stresses CSS 1.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Tutorials for Web site designers - list of links to many more CSS tutorials

Web Site Tips CSS Page

Echo Echo

Max Design - mainly menus / lists

HTML Dog (also has CSS stuff)

West Civ's tutorials

MaKo 4 CSS / CSS Shark

Usability of Websites for Teenagers

Summary:
When using websites, teenagers have a lower success rate than adults and they're also easily bored. To work for teens, websites must be simple -- but not childish -- and supply plenty of interactive features.

That sounds like a Jakob Nielsen (however he spells his name) kind of article.

I used to read his columns frequently about five years ago. He almost always had something interesting on his site.

I bet he's changed his mind about links.

In one of his old columns, he was big on the use of blue for unvisited links and purple being the color for visited links. That was the standard back in the day.

I can see how that was a good thing back in the early days on the web, but I think by now most people realize that links can come in many different styles, including non- underlined.

It is. Above the title on that page:

I thought this was kind of related to Knight's post.

Researchers Study Software Gender Gap

SEATTLE (AP) — For more than a decade, academics and technology executives have been frowning at the widening gender gap in computer science. Everyone has a theory, but no one has managed to attract many more women.

Now, some computer science researchers say one solution may lie in the design of software itself — even programs regular people use every day.

Laura Beckwith, a new computer science Ph.D. from Oregon State University, and her adviser, Margaret Burnett, specialize in studying the way people use computers to solve everyday problems — like adding formulas to spreadsheets, animation to Web sites and styles to word processing documents.

A couple of years ago, they stumbled upon an intriguing tidbit: Men, it seemed, were more likely than women to use advanced software features, specifically ones that help users find and fix errors. Programmers call this "debugging," and it's a crucial step in building programs that work.

Beckwith decided to investigate why women and men might interact so differently with the same software. She pored over 30 years' worth of books and academic papers from psychologists, education researchers, economists, computer scientists and others about gender differences in problem solving and computer use.

One theory grabbed her attention: High confidence correlates with success. Both men's and women's confidence in their ability to do a challenging task affects their approach and the outcome. And most studies indicated that women — even ones who study computer science — have less confidence than men in their computer skills.

So Beckwith wondered, could that be one of the culprits? Are women less confident than men when it comes to software debugging? Are women less willing than men to try using these advanced features?

Beckwith tackled these and other questions in her dissertation, with guidance from Burnett and Susan Wiedenbeck of Drexel University.

She started by asking a group of women and men, in a questionnaire, whether they believed they could find and fix errors in spreadsheets filled with formulas.

Then, she sat them down in front of a computer with two spreadsheets. One tracked students' grades, and another calculated employees' paychecks.

Beckwith buried five errors in each one without telling the participants. She gave them a time limit and asked them to test all the formulas and fix any bugs.

The program included a debugging feature that helped the users spot miscalculations by the formulas underlying the spreadsheet and other errors. When they clicked on a number that seemed wrong — a grade point average that looked too low, given the student's test scores, for example — cells in the spreadsheet grid that contained the possible source of the error changed color. If the participants were sure a formula or value was correct, they could check it off.

In this experiment, the key to success was using the debugging feature. Both men and women who used it were better at finding and fixing the bugs.

The level of confidence expressed by the participants in the questionnaire about debugging, however, played a much different role for the genders.

For men, it didn't really matter whether they believed they could complete the task. Some men with low confidence used the debugging tools, and some with high confidence didn't.

But for the women, only those who believed they could do the task successfully used the automated debugging tools. The women with lower confidence in the task relied instead on what they knew — editing formulas one by one — and ended up introducing more bugs than when they started.

Beckwith was faced with a conundrum. From questionnaires handed out after the experiment, she knew women understood how the debugging tools were supposed to work, so it seemed their confidence level was lower than it deserved to be. She also knew that one way to boost confidence is through successful experiences. But it was this low confidence that was keeping women from using the debugging tool and having a successful experience.

As a computer scientist, Beckwith wasn't interested in changing women's confidence levels. She was interested in whether changing the software could help women over this hurdle.

So she explored whether a gentler presentation of the debugging tool, one that seemed to require less confidence, would appeal to women.

In the first study, the debugging tool let users mark values "right" or "wrong." To mark something as wrong, participants had to right-click with the mouse.

In later studies, Beckwith added two more choices: "seems right maybe" and "seems wrong maybe." The "maybe" buttons worked just like the more certain-seeming ones, but used softer colors to indicate possible errors. She also changed the program so that no one needed to right-click the mouse, something less-experienced computer users are reluctant to do.

Beckwith tested the new feature during several other experiments. When she tallied up the numbers, she found that in some experiments, women used some form of the debugging feature almost as often as men did. In others, they used the debugging tools even more than men did.

Although these experiments homed in on a tiny aspect of a computer user's life — debugging spreadsheets — the implications could be quite large.

Burnett, the Oregon State professor, estimates that 55 U.S. million computer users of both genders are essentially writing programs even if they don't know it — such as when they set up filters on their e-mail.

While software used by the country's 3 million professional programmers include ample debugging tools to ensure their code works as it should, the increasingly complex software used by everyday PC users doesn't.

Research like Beckwith's may help ensure that when the industry starts adding new features for those everyday computer users, differences between men and women aren't left out of the equation.

What's more, making complex everyday software more accessible to women could help get more of them interested in computer science, Beckwith and Burnett believe.

As it is, the percentage of bachelor's degrees in computer science awarded to women fell from 37 percent in 1985 to just 22 percent in 2005, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, even as women made gains in other science and math-based fields.

Most gender-gap theories today have more to do with computer science's image as a haven for solitary male geeks. Industry groups and high-tech companies tend to suggest remedies like mentoring girls, and changing computer science education to better show how the field is connected to everyday topics thought to be of more interest to girls, like media, sharing and communicating.

While Beckwith and Burnett acknowledge that there are numerous social and developmental factors behind the gender gap, they say their research adds a new dimension to the debate.

"The first time you as a girl sit down at a computer to do some real problem solving," Burnett said, "and the software you're using isn't a good fit for your learning style, your problem solving style, how likely are you to be to say, `I'm going to grow up and be a computer scientist?'"

Julie Jacko, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and president of the Association for Computing Machinery's group on human-computer interaction, said research like Beckwith's could end up changing how young women feel about computers.

"We know from our colleagues in psychology and sociology that there are gender differences that can be very important to take into account in human-computer interaction and software design," Jacko said. "Projects like this can help us have a better impact, even at younger ages, where I believe interventions need to happen."

The research may be early, but the software industry is paying attention. Beckwith's first job isn't in academia — it's at Microsoft Corp.

There, she'll put her research experience to work helping the team that designs software for programmers. That group has never given much thought to the user's gender, said Susan Todd, Beckwith's boss-to-be.

"In the past, since we concentrate so much on developers — and as you know, there are not a lot of women developers — we haven't really gone in that direction," Todd said. "I think it's going to be something that will be really quite interesting for us to look at."

But don't expect "Excel for Women" any time soon. Beckwith and Burnett point out that there are male computer users whose learning styles and problem-solving skills have more in common with the typical female user, and vice versa.

As Burnett said, "We're not advocating a pink version of blue version of software, because that wouldn't fit anybody."

Same story from Washington Post

I dunno about that...I do 'debugging' all day or rather troubleshooting. I am not intimidated by any advanced features, or the help file (a lot of people avoid reading the help file or any documentation that comes with the application, which is utterly annoying to me, who does tech support in addition to writing the tech manuals and testing the software).

You know you've been on the internet too long -and I mean over the years, I'm not talking hourly segments- when some joke e-mail you get this week is the same one you first saw years ago.

I just got the "Aunt Karen" e-mail from a friend.

I can't believe this is still in circulation!

I'm sure all of you are familiar with the "Aunt Karen" joke e-mail, but on the off chance one of you has no idea what I'm talking about
(did you just get on the web for the first time in your life today???? ), here it is

A teacher gave her fifth grade class an assignment: Get their parents to tell them a story with a moral at the end of it.

The next day the kids came back and one by one began to tell their stories.

>> 'Tony, do you have a story to share?'
>> 'Yes ma'am. My daddy told a story about my Aunt Karen. She
was a
>> pilot in Desert Storm and her plane got hit. She had to bail out over
>> enemy territory and all she had was a flask of whiskey, a pistol, and
a survival knife.
>>
>>She drank the whiskey on the way down so it wouldn't break and then
her parachute landed right in the middle of twenty enemy troops.

>>She shot fifteen of them with the gun until she ran out of bullets,
>> killed four more with the knife, till the blade broke, and then she
>> killed the last Iraqi with her bare hands.'

>> 'Good Heavens' said the horrified teacher.

>> 'What kind of moral did you r daddy tell you from this horrible story?'

>> 'Stay the F*!# away from Aunt Karen when she's drinking.'

It's funny, it's good, but it's been around for eons.

I can't believe this.

After eons of web developer gurus and experts yelling and screaming at all of us web design dabblers that tables are evil, EEEEEEVIL I say!, and we should only use DIVs, floats, and aboslute/relative positioning for page layout, they're now telling us it's okay to use table-like layouts.

No, I'm not kidding.

Newer browsers are making use of the "display: table" property, that's why they're suddenly oakey-doakey with it.

Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong - using the Table Display property

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I don't like Fire Fox 3.5.7. It's filled with bugs and is waaaaay too slow. A bunch of people in the reader comments on this page agree with me:

Mozilla Firefox 3.5.7: Update Details

Something called "Better Privacy" downloaded for my browser today. I'm wondering why they chose a pie with a slash through it as their product's logo?

I like pie as much as the next person, but I don't see what a "no pie" symbol has to do with privacy.