Blow it up with Eric Meyer

I did not take as many notes of Eric Meyer’s presentation at AEA/Boston as he mentioned that he would be posting them as a zip file, however here are a few tidbits that I jotted down.

First, Eric is a very funny guy. He has lightness to his step and always seems to be smiling. When he says that CSS3 is much more powerful, yet also more capable of blowing up in our faces, he makes it seem fun and worthwhile to experiment! His energy is about TRY IT, PLAY, FOOL AROUND, DO IT BACKWARDS, SIDEWAYS, UPSIDE DOWN and see what happens.

As a new student of all things web, he inspires me to want to learn every facet of CSS3 inside and out! Eric discovers things about CSS no one else ever thought about, even the people creating it. It was great to see him in action, pushing CSS3 to its limits: Hmmm, what will happen if I use my search element as a repeating background?  What will happen when I change the opacity of the hover command? Let us play around with the first child and see how it works.  Hey, look what happens when we rotate the type!  Gosh, I can do so much with transform.  Now we will make a 36 second animation, with a two second delay, all with CSS!

I am excited about exploring all these techniques myself… Eric said that transform is going to be a “rich vein” for design over the next few years and I’d like to know more about how to use it.  I am particularly interested in video so I will be playing around with video [auto play] and trying to figure that out as well.

Eric talked about something that browsers are doing now: ignoring tons of visited styling for privacy reasons. If you are having problems styling visited links, there is a reason.

I have one of Eric Meyer’s books, “Smashing CSS.”  I do not think I would have figured out fluid layouts without this book. I have a long way to go, but maestros like Eric Meyer provide the nuts-and-bolts information, not to mention a few fun techniques for torturing your friends, as he noted in his lecture. So, guard your computer at work.  If you leave your desk and come back to find that everything you hover disappears… well, you have an Eric fan in your midst!