Eric Meyer, world renowned CSS/HTML/Standards maven, and author of some of the essential books on CSS, chats about the challenges and advantages of CSS and shares his favorite CSS resources.
Thanks for taking some time to talk to us about CSS, Eric. Let me start with the most basic of questions: why CSS?
Largely because it's the best presentation system we have for web pages, and that will probably continue to be the case for quite some time to come. It isn't perfect-- nothing is-- but it's the best thing around.
Also because it confers a lot of great advantages, like keeping the structure lean and mean, allowing the look of a site to be updated quickly and from one place, and speed benefits due to the styles being in a separate, cacheable file.
What would you say is the biggest challenge designers new to CSS face?
Getting into the mindset. We're used to drawing grids on the page and saying, "This is how things will be laid out." CSS is like the web itself-- more fluid. And there are also some limitations in how layouts can currently be described with CSS, unfortunately. For that, I apportion roughly equal blame to the people who write the CSS specification and the browsers that are supposed to support it.
Beyond that, the biggest challenge is finding time to practice and writing CSS and XHTML in smart ways. There's just no substitute for experience.
Do you have a particular roadmap to learning CSS that you recommend to beginners?
No, because everyone is different. There are tons of web sites to look at, tutorials to take, and books to read. There are also a variety of online communities focused on web design and CSS and that sort of thing.
Whatever fits your learning style, there's a path for you.
What I would counsel those starting out is that there's an initial easy learning curve, which can kind of lull you into thinking it's all going to be a breeze. And then, once you've gotten a handle on all the basics, there's this sudden steepness in the learning curve. Past that, things get easy again, but it's a tough wall to climb. It's very similar to learning, say, woodworking. You can learn
how all the various tools and machines work pretty quickly, but getting from there to being good at using them takes a lot of time, effort, and practice.
Has the dust truly settled in the way browsers represent CSS now? Or is cross-browser compatibility just as difficult to achieve as ever?
It's not as difficult to achieve, no. Things are so much better now than they were a few years ago that it's like night and day. But even with the
massive convergence we've seen, there are still inconsistencies, some of them quite maddening. I think that's always going to be the case. I've yet to
see any technology whose consistency survived contact with a second piece of software.
Have you had a chance to look at Internet Explorer 8? If so, how has CSS rendering changed in this upcoming version? And, perhaps most importantly
to current designers, are there any modifications to existing sites needed to accommodate the upcoming browser?
It's hard to tell exactly how things will change. There are a lot of improvements in Internet Explorer 8 beta 1, but at the same time, there have been some
obvious regressions, stuff that can only be explained by major overhauls or outright replacements of parts of the rendering engine.
At this stage, I don't think there's any call for, or sense in, changing existing sites to accommodate Internet Explorer 8 beta 1.
We need to get at least a final-release candidate on our hands before thinking about that sort of thing.
The Web is brimming with CSS resources. Could you point out a few of your favorites?
Sure thing!
