We conducted a mini interview by e-mail with CSS expert Eric Meyer. His newest book, More Eric Meyer on CSS containes ten projects ranging from converting an existing web page over styling a financial report, to laying out a web log with CSS menus and all. The book is of course a must-have for anyone who wants to learn how to work with CSS. It is available at amazon.com.

At the end of the article, we publish two sidebar tips from the book, with permission of the author, of course.

IT-Enquirer: We thought the browser war was over, but many browsers including Apple’s Safari understand CSS in their own way. What is in your opinion needed to convince browser developers they should abide by the standards?

Eric Meyer: It’s been my experience that current browsers-- by which I mean those more recent than IE6-- tend to be very consistent in the way they handle CSS.  Thus I’m not sure I would agree that some browsers “understand CSS in their own way”.  It’s certainly the case that browsers aren’t precisely identical, but that’s to be expected. After all, the features of one car are not always the same as those of another, and yet drivers manage to use them.

There are two main reasons developers should stick as closely to standards as possible.  First is that it avoids lock-in as much as possible; the days of “best viewed in Browser X” are far behind us, and we’re better for it.  Second is that standards-oriented pages tend to be, on average, half as heavy as old-school pages.  Bandwidth may matter less than it used to, but page weight still matters.

IT-Enquirer: In view of the above, which browser do you in your experience, consider to be the best to view CSS pages?

Eric Meyer: Any more, it’s hard to say.  Firefox/Mozilla, Safari, and Opera are all very good, though of course none is perfect.  Once upon a time, it used to be easy to say which browser was best at CSS (and it was IE5/Mac).  These days, it’s much more difficult.

IT-Enquirer: Which program do you use? Do you use any of the GUI editors like Dreamweaver or Golive?

Eric Meyer: My tool of choice is BBEdit, because it lets me author by hand and stays out of my way.

IT-Enquirer: CSS 3 is an upcoming standard. Can you tell in a nutshell what is new about it, and why we should start preparing for it (should we already?)?

Eric Meyer: At a high level, what’s new in CSS3 is that it’s been split up into a large number of modules, just as happened with XHTML.  This allows each module to develop at its own pace.

When you look at the modules that are nearing completion, there’s far too much that’s new to fit into a bug of nuts, let alone a nutshell. On the flip side, though, very little of this new stuff is practically available.  It isn’t something I expect developers to have to worry about for a couple of years at the minimum-- unless the just-announced IE7 turns out to have huge advances in its CSS support.

IT-Enquirer: What do you think will CSS evolve into?

Eric Meyer: A more comprehensive and robust styling language.  I personally don’t expect it to ever be more than that-- but that’s quite a thing to be!

IT-Enquirer: Thanks for your time!

Two tips from the book More Eric Meyer on CSS:

TIP 1: If you want to get a look at styles used by Gecko-based browsers such as Mozilla, Firefox, and Netscape 7.x, search your hard drive for html.css. If you have more than one copy, look for the one with the most recent modification date.

TIP 2: The CSS specification actually allows hover styles to be applied to any element --not just links-- and most modern browsers actually permit it. Explorer is not among them, sadly, restricting hover effects to links. Or at least it did until Peter Nederlof found a way to extend IE/Win’s capabilities to allow arbitrary-element hover styling. You can read about it at http://www.xs4all.nl/˜peterned/csshover.html.