Interview with Eric Meyer: Death of Netscape, CSS, Standards and Star Wars

CSS guru and Netscape Standards Evangelist Eric Meyer talks about AOL, Netscape, CSS, Web Standards and Star Wars and answers DMXzone members' questions in this interview conducted immediately before the news that Netscape has been discontinued (and one question asked immediately after the Netscape deathblow).

On a scale of 1 to 10 (1=Amish, 10=slashdot), how geeky are you?

(Bruce)

8.53973.

When can we expect the second edition of "Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide"?

(Paul Martin)

It's difficult to be certain. We were aiming for publication by the end of 2003 but it may be early 2004 instead.  The book is about 70% written, but since it covers both CSS2 and CSS2.1, to an extent its completion depends on the completion of CSS2.1.  If CSS2.1 remains unfinished for too long we may at some point just decide to publish anyway, and hope nothing major changes.

There's a feeling out there that "you can spot a CSS site a mile off", meaning (I guess) that CSS sites are limited in range. Do you agree?

[Nong Jan]

Until recently, I would have, yes.  This is not surprising, because most CSS early-adopters were people like me.  I know CSS really well, and can write HTML by hand... but I'm no graphic designer, and I know it.  Take my advice about CSS, but don't ask me how to make your site look better.  If I knew that, I'd already have done it for my site.  Any more, though, you really can't spot a CSS site a mile off, assuming the designer knows what he or she is doing.  Well, that and a vaguely current browser.  The CSS Zen Garden is the best current example of this.

"Take my advice about CSS, but don't ask me how to make your site look better."

For a while, a lot of people were borrowing CSS design ideas outright, like the example layouts at glish.com and bluerobot.com, Zeldman's designs, and even stuff that I'd done.  In a learning phase, this is to be expected.  Back in the mid-90's, there was a period where every commercial Web site looked pretty much the same, because everyone was doing whatever Dave Seigel was doing.  As people learned how to do their own thing, they did, and sites began to acquire distinctive styles.  The same is now happening in the CSS arena.  A lot of people are moving beyond those first steps and doing compelling Web design work that just happens to be driven by CSS.  As the tool has become better understood, artists are using it to expand the range of what we think is possible.

There's one other reason that CSS-driven sites all tended to look the same.  Because CSS1 is great for styling text, it was used on sites that were centered around text, not images.  The boxes-of-text and dotted-line stereotype of CSS sites springs from the fact that most such sites were trying to style the same kinds of information.  That's less and less the case, since CSS2 support allows for a lot more than just text styling.

Are you, or have you ever been, a techno-fascist?

(Bruce McCarthy)

(editors note: Eric was accused of being such in an amazon review)

Yes, I think it was right around the time you stopped beating your wife.

Hey, who told you about me beating my wife?

A friend of mine downloaded the videos.

Do you feel that CSS will be with us for the long-term or that it will eventually be replaced (just as presentational mark-up has been replaced) with something more advanced? If so, should web designers with the intent of building forward-compatible sites be at all concerned?

(Michael Cacciottolo)

Eventually it will be replaced by something, the same way Gopher was replaced by the Web and, as you say, HTML-based design is being replaced by CSS-driven design.  We just have no idea what that might be, so CSS appears likely to stick around for a while yet.

What does this mean?  It means authors who build forward compatible sites will be ahead of the game.  They'll be much better able to transition to whatever comes next if their sites are truly forward compatible.  It's the authors that don't take this step who need to be concerned.

"Authors who build forward compatible sites will be ahead of the game."