Eric A. Meyer is an American web design consultant and author. He is best known for his advocacy work on behalf of

web standards Web standards are the formal, non-proprietary standards and other technical specifications that define and describe aspects of the World Wide Web. In recent years, the term has been more frequently associated with the trend of endorsing a set of s ...

, most notably

CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone t ...

(Cascading Style Sheets), a technique for managing how

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

is displayed. Meyer has written a number of books and articles on CSS and given many presentations promoting its use.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...") Eric currently works for

Igalia Igalia is a private, worker-owned, employee-run cooperative model consultancy focused on open source software. Based in A Coruña, Galicia (Spain), Igalia is known for its contributions and commitments to both open-source and open standards. Iga ...

Personal life

Meyer was born to parents Arthur and Carol Meyer. He now has a stepmother, Cathy. Meyer graduated from

Case Western Reserve University Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) is a private research university in Cleveland, Ohio. Case Western Reserve was established in 1967, when Western Reserve University, founded in 1826 and named for its location in the Connecticut Western Res ...

(CWRU) in 1992 with a BA in History, and minors in

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

astronomy Astronomy () is a natural science that studies astronomical object, celestial objects and phenomena. It uses mathematics, physics, and chemistry in order to explain their origin and chronology of the Universe, evolution. Objects of interest ...

, and

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national id ...

.Dyer, Russell (March 12, 2003)
The XML.com Interview: Eric Meyer
, ''Xml.com'', Retrieved March 2, 2011 He is married to Kathryn Meyer (born Fradkin) and has three adopted children: Carolyn, Rebecca and Joshua Meyer. In 2014, his second daughter Rebecca Alison Meyer died of a brain tumor at six years of age. The

hex color Web colors are colors used in displaying web pages on the World Wide Web, and the methods for describing and specifying those colors. Colors may be specified as an RGB triplet or in hexadecimal format (a ''hex triplet'') or according to their ...

#663399 was named "rebeccapurple" and added to the CSS Colors list in her memory.

Career

From 1992 to 2000, Meyer was employed as a

hypermedia Hypermedia, an extension of the term hypertext, is a nonlinear medium of information that includes graphics, audio, video, plain text and hyperlinks. This designation contrasts with the broader term ''multimedia'', which may include non-interact ...

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. Meyer joined the

Web Standards Project The Web Standards Project (WaSP) was a group of professional web developers dedicated to disseminating and encouraging the use of the web standards recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium, along with other groups and standards bodies. Foun ...

in the same year and became a co-founder of its CSS Samurai, formally known as the CSS Action Committee, an advocacy group which worked with browser vendors to improve CSS support in their products. A columnist since 1997, a book author and frequent conference speaker on CSS since 2000, Meyer has attained celebrity status in the field of web design. In 2001, he joined

Netscape Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was on ...

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 The Global Multimedia Protocols Group (GMPG) was founded in March 2003 by Tantek Çelik, Eric A. Meyer, and Matt Mullenweg. The group has developed methods to represent human relationships using XHTML called XHTML Friends Network (XFN) and XHTML ...

. 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. In 2008, Meyer supported a

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

proposal for

Internet Explorer 8 Windows Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is a web browser for Windows. It was released by Microsoft on March 19, 2009, as the eighth version of Internet Explorer and the successor to Internet Explorer 7. It was the default browser in Windows 7 (later def ...

related to backwards compatibility modes for rendering invalid HTML and other markup.From Switches to Targets: A Standardista's Journey
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Bibliography

* ''Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide'', O'Reilly, 2000, * ''Cascading Style Sheets 2.0 Programmer's Reference'', 2001, * ''CSS Pocket Reference'', O'Reilly, 2001, * ''Eric Meyer on CSS'', New Riders, 2002, * ''More Eric Meyer on CSS'', Voices That Matter, 2004, * Eric A. Meyer, Sara Wachter-Boettcher, ''Design for Real Life'', A Book Apart, 2016,

References

External links

*
CSS mailing list
{{DEFAULTSORT:Meyer, Eric A. Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American bloggers Case Western Reserve University alumni Netscape people Web designers Web developers