Eric Meyer

Eric A. Meyer has been working with the Web since late 1993 and is an internationally recognized expert on the subjects of HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). He is the principal consultant for Complex Spiral Consulting and lives in Cleveland, Ohio, which is a much nicer city than you've been led to believe. A graduate of and former Webmaster for Case Western Reserve University and an alumnus of the same fraternity chapter to which Donald Knuth once belonged, Eric coordinated the authoring and creation of the W3C's CSS Test Suite and has recently been acting as List Chaperone of the highly active css-discuss mailing list. Author of "Eric Meyer on CSS" (New Riders), "Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide" (O'Reilly & Associates), "CSS2.0 Programmer's Reference" (Osborne/McGraw-Hill), and the fairly well-known CSS Browser Compatibility Charts, Eric speaks at a variety of conferences on the subject of standards, CSS use, and Web design. For nine years, he was the host of "Your Father's Oldsmobile," a weekly Big Band-era radio show heard on WRUW 91.1-FM in Cleveland.

Appearances

Episode 115 Predicting the future

The landscape of what's possible in web page layout is changing. Jen has a theory that this change will be a big one — perhaps the biggest change to graphic design on the web in over 15 years. Rachel, Jeffrey, and Eric join her to debate if that's true or not, and to surmise what the future might bring. This special episode was recorded live at An Event Apart Nashville.

Episode 91 Designing for Crisis

Too often, websites are designed with only the ideal user in mind — a typical person, in great health and sound mind, happy to be on your website doing a thing. In reality we humans exist in a variety of states, including panic, fear and reacting to a crisis. How could our sites be better, considering the needs of people in crisis? What are the consequences when we don't acknowledge the impact of our design decisions? Eric Meyer joins Jen Simmons to talk about his last year and a half, what he learned, and what he's thinking.

In This Episode

  • When should we think about users in crisis?
  • What are the needs of a person in crisis?
  • How Facebook and Twitter affect human relationship with their design decisions — for better or worse

Episode 48 The Web Behind, part 10

Danny Sullivan joins Eric Meyer and Jen Simmons for the latest episode in The Web Behind series. Danny reminisces about the early days of web search, directories versus crawlers, the panoply of search engines in the mid-1990s, page counts as serious bragging rights, the brief period when there were search engines that only searched other search engines, the verbing of “Google,” and more.

Episode 47 The Web Behind, part 9

Jen Robbins joins Eric Meyer and Jen Simmons for another episode in The Web Behind series. They talk about the early days of web design, O'Reilly, GNN, wrestling with technology and more.

Episode 46 The Web Behind, part 8

Tantek Çelik joins Eric Meyer and Jen Simmons for another episode in The Web Behind series. They talk about OpenDoc, Internet Explorer 5 for Mac, doctype switching, semantic data formats, and much more.

Episode 44 The Web Behind, part 7

Tom Bruce joins Eric Meyer and Jen Simmons to talk about the very earliest days of the web, writing the first Windows web browser, inventing 'marquee', and taking a road trip to NCSA with Tim Berners-Lee.

Episode 43 The Web Behind, part 6

Chris Wilson joins Eric Meyer and Jen Simmons to talk about the origins of the Mosaic Browser and his work on Internet Explorer 3 and 4.

Episode 41 The Web Behind, part 5

Molly Holzschlag has been working on the web from the very beginning of its invention. She joins Eric Meyer and Jen Simmons to talk about those days, and what it was like to be online in the time of BBSes, Gopher, and the text-only web. They discuss accessibility, the blink tag, the Web Standard Project, how Microsoft started embracing web standards and much more.

Episode 39 The Web Behind, part 4

Dave Shea joins Eric Meyer and Jen Simmons for the third episode of in The Web Behind series. They talk about the CSS Zen Garden, a website Dave created in 2003 which showed the world how radically-different designs could be with just CSS. Dave also reflects on the origins and lasting effects of the CSS Sprites technique he introduced to the world, and reminisces about the web design community of a decade ago.

Episode 37 The Web Behind, part 3

In this second episode of The Web Behind series with Eric Meyer, guest Steven Champeon talks about predecessors to HTML, the webdesign-L online community, the birth of the web standards project, how he coined the term "progressive enhancement" and much more.

Episode 35 The Web Behind, part 2

John Allsopp joins Eric Meyer and Jen Simmons for this first episode in our “web behind” series — a look back at where the web came from and the people who created it. They talk about early web design tools, community groups that shaped the web, thinkers from the mid-20th century who shaped ideas about hypertext, and much more.

Episode 34 The Web Behind, part 1

A special announcement from Jen Simmons and Eric Meyer.

Episode 18 CSS

CSS is central to the web. What happening with it these days? Author and expert Eric Meyer joins Jen Simmons to talk about the past, present and future of Cascading Style Sheets.