Eric_A._Meyer

Eric A. Meyer

Eric A. Meyer

Web design consultant and author


Eric A. Meyer is an American web design consultant and author. He is best known for his advocacy work on behalf of web standards, most notably CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), a technique for managing how HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is displayed. Meyer has written a number of books and articles on CSS and given many presentations promoting its use.[1] Eric currently works for Igalia.

Quick Facts Alma mater, Occupations ...

Personal life

Meyer was born to parents Arthur and Carol Meyer.[2] He now has a stepmother, Cathy.[3]

Meyer graduated from Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in 1992 with a BA in History, and minors in artificial intelligence, astronomy, and English.[4]

He is married to Kathryn Meyer (born Fradkin) and has three adopted children: Carolyn, Rebecca and Joshua Meyer (Now Jade Meyer).[5] In 2014, his second daughter Rebecca Alison Meyer died of a brain tumor at six years of age.[6][7] The hex color #663399   was named "rebeccapurple" and added to the CSS Colors list in her memory.[8][9]

Career

From 1992 to 2000, Meyer was employed as a hypermedia systems manager at CWRU. In 1998, he developed the landmark CSS1 test suite with the help of other volunteers, allowing CSS implementors to test their software and address its rendering issues.[10] Meyer joined the Web Standards Project in the same year and became a co-founder of its CSS Samurai, formally known as the CSS Action Committee,[11] an advocacy group which worked with browser vendors to improve CSS support in their products.[12]

A columnist since 1997,[4] a book author and frequent conference speaker on CSS since 2000, Meyer has attained celebrity status in the field of web design.[13]

In 2001, he joined Netscape as an Internet applications manager and remained with the company until 2003.

Meyer is currently a consultant for Complex Spiral Consulting as well as a founding member of the Global Multimedia Protocols Group.

Meyer is also the creator of the S5 format (Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System), an XHTML-based file format for defining slideshows. On July 28, 2005, version 1.1. of S5 was placed in the Public Domain.[14]

In 2008, Meyer supported a Microsoft proposal for Internet Explorer 8 related to backwards compatibility modes for rendering invalid HTML and other markup.[15]

Meyer currently works at Igalia.

Bibliography

  • Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, O'Reilly, 2000, ISBN 0-596-00525-3
  • Cascading Style Sheets 2.0 Programmer's Reference, 2001, ISBN 0-07-213178-0
  • CSS Pocket Reference, O'Reilly, 2001, ISBN 0-596-00120-7
  • Eric Meyer on CSS, New Riders, 2002, ISBN 0-7357-1245-X
  • More Eric Meyer on CSS, Voices That Matter, 2004, ISBN 0-7357-1425-8
  • Eric A. Meyer, Sara Wachter-Boettcher, Design for Real Life, A Book Apart, 2016, ISBN 978-1-937557-40-9

References

  1. More Eric Meyer on CSS (book review), Technical Communication (May 2005), Retrieved March 2, 2011 ("It would be difficult to learn about Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) without reading a book or article written by Eric Meyer...")
  2. Dyer, Russell (March 12, 2003). The XML.com Interview: Eric Meyer Archived June 29, 2011, at the Wayback Machine, Xml.com, Retrieved March 2, 2011
  3. "Adoption – Eric's Archived Thoughts". meyerweb.com. Retrieved November 14, 2020.
  4. Glazman, Daniel. "Re: [CfC] adding 'rebeccapurple' color to CSS Color Level 4". [email protected] mailing list archives. W3C. Retrieved October 16, 2018.
  5. Bos, Bert (December 19, 2016). "A Brief History of CSS until 2016". W3C. Retrieved March 18, 2019.
  6. Hoffman, Jay (April 10, 2017). "The Rise of CSS". The History of the Web. Retrieved March 19, 2019.
  7. Johnson, Nathan Riley (2008). "Technical Documents as Rhetorical Agency". Archival Science. 8 (3): 199–215. doi:10.1007/s10502-009-9075-4. S2CID 143992034.
  8. Kennedy, Helen (2012). Net Work: Ethics and Values in Web Design. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 181. ISBN 978-0-230-23140-5.
  9. Meyer, Eric (July 28, 2005). "S5 1.1 – Eric's Archived Thoughts". Meyerweb. Archived from the original on April 20, 2021. Retrieved December 5, 2021.

Share this article:

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Eric_A._Meyer, and is written by contributors. Text is available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.