I interviewed (just a little) Roger Johansson, a webdeveloper living and working in Göteborg, Sweden. He is the driving force behind 456 Berea Street, a weblog where you will find a whole bunch of articles related to webstandards, accessibility and usability.

Roger has made a a best of archived articles on Berea Street. He describes it best himself:

This list of the articles that I think are the most useful, interesting and/or thought provoking.

About CSS, Mobile Design, Accessibility, and Food Blogs

Fadtastic: Could you share with us some tips to create future proof CSS layouts with the new shipment of browsers like IE7, (maybe other browsers). Should we continue to serve different styles for IE5 - IE6 and IE7. How do you see the future, using display: table?

RJ: In my opinion writing 100 percent future proof CSS is nearly impossible since there is no way of knowing for sure which browser vendors implement what CSS features and how well they do it. You should of course always strive to write the most future-proof CSS possible and do all you can to stay up to date with browser support.

My tip would be to keep the code for your CSS layout as simple as possible.

Serving different style sheets to different browsers is something I only do as a last resort. I always try to write CSS that works in all browsers. If necessary (well, most of the time it is) I use conditional comments to serve IE/Windows a specific stylesheet with bug fixes. I rarely make a difference between versions 5 and 6 of IE.

IE5 is almost off the radar for most of our clients, so only if something is making the site hard or impossible to use do I bother with it. As for IE7 I don’t know yet. The betas so far haven’t really impressed me with their CSS support and I have run into some issues, so it may well be necessary to use conditional comments to fix IE7 as well.

I think it will be a long time before we can use display:table to any greater extent since IE7 apparently will not support it. It’s a great shame that we have to wait at least until the next release of IE for something as useful as that. Using display:table makes many of the visual effects that graphic designers tend to like very easy to create without resorting to convoluted CSS trickery or getting hacky with layout tables. We can still experiment with display:table in the more up to date web browsers like Firefox, Opera, and Safari of course, and there are occasions when I use it in production work for a bit of progressive enhancement.

Fadtastic: Is mobile webdesign “the next big thing” which designers should be digging into - in what way should an experienced CSS coder focus on to learn to design for the mobile web? Is it like: “Hey, Opera mini - let’s make it work in there?” How should we test our websites for the mobile web? And what should we focus on/ take in account when coding for mobile devices?

RJ: I don’t think it is that big a deal actually despite more and more people (including myself) using phones and other mobile devices to browse the web. I have so far not had a reason to adapt the CSS on any of my clients’ sites specifically for mobile phones. I tend not to worry about it too much since I find that when a site’s markup is semantic and well-structured it is perfectly usable without CSS on mobile devices. How to hide CSS from those devices is a different matter since several mobile web browsers ignore the CSS media type, and CSS support unfortunately still varies a lot.

Of course there are cases where a site’s default content is not suitable for mobile devices at all. It could be because large portions of content is in an unsupported format or is larger than what is reasonable to download when you are paying per megabyte. In those cases just removing the CSS or serving a different CSS file won’t be enough.

I think the most important thing to focus on is to create lean, semantic, and accessible code.

Fadtastic: What web accessibility features do you feel are getting most attention (are available in websites) recently, what can we do to improve our websites?

RJ: Visible skip links are becoming more commonplace which is good since that way they are more obvious and make using the site easier for everybody. A common myth about skip links is that they are only meant for blind visitors using screen readers. Let me assure you that if you can’t use a mouse or are using a mobile phone to browse the web, you really appreciate skip links even if you are fully sighted.

To improve accessibility I think that after building a solid foundation on valid and semantic markup we really need to ask ourselves how and why we implement “cool” features on the websites we build. We should always consider what happens when somebody tries to use the site with JavaScript, images, or CSS disabled - graceful degradation.

A common myth about skip links is that they are only meant for blind visitors using screen readers. Let me assure you that if you can’t use a mouse or are using a mobile phone to browse the web, you really appreciate skip links even if you are fully sighted.

Fadtastic: You have a blog about coffee Kaffesnobben, Dan Cederholm has a wine blog named Cork’d, Jeremy Keith and companion about gastronomy. Do you go on restaurant with your clients or you simply like good food as good design?

RJ: Yeah it’s funny that several web design/development bloggers also have food related blogs :-). I suppose when you like high quality web design/development you tend to want other things in your life to also be of high quality.

Going to a restaurant with a client doesn’t happen a lot. Most meetings are during office hours so sometimes we will take clients to a lunch restaurant, but it’s quite rare actually.

I started Kaffesnobben because I wanted a place to write about stuff unrelated to web design and development. Since I love good coffee and happen to live in a city that has a lot of good espresso bars I thought having a coffee blog would be a good idea. I also chose to write in Swedish since that is my native language and most of the cafés and espresso bars I write about are in Sweden. Well, recently there have been a few posts about espresso bars in London since I was there in June for the @media 2006 web conference. There will also be a couple of mentions of Belgian cafés, or “tea rooms” as they call them, since I spent a few days visiting friends there in July.

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