A father, a husband, a speaker, a conference organizer, an author, and a reader. A proud and happy resident of Cleveland, Ohio and a traveler of the world. A man of many words in print but fewer in person, an aficionado of all kinds of music, and a semi-competent coder. A veteran of the web going on 17 years now, a booster of markup and style, a creator of movements, and a defender of community and collaboration. A lover, not a fighter.
What about CSS3?
It’s here, it’s coming, it’s stalled, it’s dead… depending on which of the various CSS modules and browsers you choose to scrutinize. For example, some of the advanced CSS selectors are supported by just about every browser in use today, and they’re part of CSS3. Then there are things like CSS Transforms and Animations, which are well supported by a few browsers. And then you have CSS Math, which is potentially interesting but not implemented in browsers (as it has not been for most of the past decade).
So it’s not a question that’s simple to answer. There’s a different answer for every person.
Why reset styles?
Because browsers don’t all have the same defaults. A reset levels the playing field. However, as I’ve said many times, it’s most effective if you take a reset style sheet and alter to suit your own tastes, thus creating a personalized “reboot” style sheet. Raw reset style sheets are a starting point.
What does your typical day look like?
Some administrative work for An Event Apart, a fair amount of feed reading, and a lot of e-mail. It’s also pretty common to do content and other creative work for An Event Apart, writing talks and creating slides, and then there’s always blog, article, and book writing.
What do you do in your free time?
I work on some personal programming projects. I meet weekly online with a group of Halo 3: ODST gamers and irregularly in real life with a group of Rock Band gamers. I also try to make it to local web-related group meetings. Of course, I travel a fair amount for work so these things don’t happen as often as I’d like.
Current favorite apps?
BBEdit, Transmit, Camino, Twitterrific, Eudora, and Osmos. Runners-up: Thunderbird, NetNewsWire 2, and Darwinia.
What OS do you prefer?
Mac OS X. I’m still on Leopard mostly because I don’t have the time to devote to an OS upgrade, and also because as some of my favorite applications get older, I get more and more wary that an OS upgrade will break them.
Small picture of your workplace?
The office is halfway through being reconfigured, so it’s a total mess right now. I’ll just say it’s a smallish room in our converted attic with two windows offering a lovely view of the trees behind the house and a patch of sky where I can watch summer thunderstorms approach.
Favorite: Color, Font, Language, JS Framework?
Respectively: navy blue, New Century Schoolbook, HTML, don’t have one.
Name something that has inspired you recently?
The documentary film “Man On Wire”. What a fantastic work of art.
What do you prefer (and why): Freelance work or full time employment?
I prefer working for myself. It has a lot of advantages, not least of which is that I can really never be fired. It also lets me be closer with my family. The downside is that as a U.S. citizen, I have to pay for my own health care and health insurance, and that’s not exactly inexpensive. If I didn’t have access to a decent group plan through a local small-business coalition, it would be even more expensive.
What are your personal projects and goals for 2010?
To finish up my current book project for Wiley and start on the fourth edition of “CSS: The Definitive Guide”, and to keep focused on making An Event Apart the best event it can be and the premiere conference choice for web designers and developers.
More personally, I have a web service idea that a friend and I are going to try to build– it’s one of those “we wish this thing existed so we’ll have to make it happen ourselves” situations. I’m also hoping to finish a much better version of HYDEsim incorporating work I did in conjunction with Nuclear Darkness and some additions of my own. I’m most of the way there but my weakness at JavaScript programming has proven quite a hurdle. Once that’s done, I have some old WordPress plugins that could really stand to be overhauled and updated, and sometimes I think I should revisit S5 to take advantage of CSS animations and transforms.
I also hope to find time this year to become more conversant in American Sign Language and maybe do some carpentry.
@mrjyn
April 30, 2011
Eric Meyer | The Geek Talk
via thegeektalk.com