This weeks mail bag is packed to the brim with links from a wide range of topics. Make your selection from IA, web, design, book reviews and site reports.

1. From the web reference news letter, an introduction by Mark Pilgrim to xHTML2. It reviews the <br /> and <style> and details what they have been replaced with. IN a following article he will be talking about the <img> tag which is currently generating a lot of discussion.
2. From the web reference news letter, a review of O’Reilly’s 3rd edition Essential System Administration.
3. Using Mozilla for development and debugging, apart from anything this site has a neat CSS layout
4. one of the weekly updates from the web reference list had an interview with Steve Krug (of “Don’t make me think” fame) and Lou Rosenfeld (“Information Architecture for the world wide web”), in which they were discussing User Experience (or UX [why oh why do they have to turn everything into acronyms??]). It’s just an informal chat about User Experience and their tour of seminars. Have a read here.
5. As a result of this article I had a look at Lou’s web site and found this link, which is a site dedicated to CMS’, their evaluation and show casing them.
6. A neat blog on IA, usability and UX. Interestingly the analysis of UX available here not only relates to web sites, but also to the real world.
7. Not web related in any way, but something I need to bear in mind when I move back. Freeview is Digital TV provider that uses your old bog standard aerial to transmit digital broadcasts. Once the adapter is installed you are up and running. Something I might just have to look into once I get back to sunny England.
8. A review of a book “Paper Prototyping: Fast and Simple Techniques for Designing and Refining the User Interface” by Jakob Nielsen. The bottom line, it’s better to capture early on in the process any design and usability flaws than once code has been written. “Ten times the impact if you discover a needed design change early, and 100 times cheaper to make the change. The experience from both fields is clear: early is much better than late.” Speaks for itself really…
9. Here and here are two sample chapters from the forthcoming fourth Edition of Designing the user Interface
10. Macromedia now has a usability topic centre go check it out.
11. Still on Macromedia’s site, following on from the previous beta reports here is Beta 3 and Beta 4 reports as well as a set of “under the hood” articles: report 1 and report 2. Report 1 looks at the CF MX side of things, where the second report delves into Flash.
12. More UDF info courtesy of O’Reilly. Incidently I found this link on cfhub.com, which has some great resources.
13. And this is a fantastic example of a CSS and xHTML compliant web site: Cingular. The navigation is a bullet list and the drop downs are translucent… Very nice. While you are at it check out the developers web site.
14. A fantastic free developer tool bar for web developers who use Mozilla:
15. After having taken a close look at the “Cingular” web site and took a moment to look at the site of the UE person working on the project and they had the following link to ”WEB STYLE GUIDE, 2nd edition”. This is an awesome source of information. I only looked through the page design chapter and found some great information on page structure, dimensions, length and consistency. Here is a link to the author’s site