The future of CSS: An interview with Eric Meyer
JL: CSS rendering in web authoring tools, including Dreamweaver, has been working hard to keep up. Do you think this has had an impact on the kinds of pages coming from current web designers?
EM: Absolutely. I talk to newly minted designers and they can’t wrap their heads around the concept that anyone ever used tables for layout. They just do not get it. That shift in the field is as much due to what tools like Dreamweaver output as it is advances in browser support. (The two being inextricably linked, of course.)
JL: My company, WebAssist, and you recently collaborated on a new extension for Dreamweaver called Eric Meyer’s CSS Sculptor. Does having your name above the title in a piece of software get you a better table at a restaurant or change your life in any other ways?
EM: Well, sure — people at conferences are constantly throwing the horns at me now. So thanks for that, Joe. Also — and please don’t mention this to my city’s architectural review board — I’ve installed an Olympic-size pool in a specially built sub-basement of my house to store all the cash that’s come pouring in, thus fulfilling my long-standing dream of becoming a real-life Scrooge McDuck.
Otherwise, no, not really.
JL: Seriously, though, do you think CSS Sculptor has changed the general landscape for Dreamweaver designers? If so, how?
EM: I’d like to think it enables more rapid CSS-based layout development. I know it’s one of the few interface-driven products I’d consider using myself, which is a pretty high compliment given that I’m an old-school hand-coder. (You’ll have that in a 14-year veteran of the field.)
But I think what is really important about Sculptor is the way it exposes nearly all the CSS properties one can use in a compact interface; and that it shows the document tree, with the application of CSS to it, in a relatively intuitive way. Those two things allow designers to better internalize how CSS applies to the document, and what can be applied. They make Sculptor a learning tool in addition to a development tool, and that makes me happy.
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