Eric Meyer

on CSS

cover image
Available now!

Old News

An archive of previous news from the main page of this site.

15 February 2003

I've finally managed to catch up with my e-mail (well, mostly) and a goodly number of errata have been added to the site. You can also see the errata for each project on the page devoted to that project.

Russell Dyer recently published an interesting review of the book over at Linux Journal.

12 December 2002

Eric Meyer on CSS has successfully completed what I call "The Dash to One Hundred Stars": as of Tuesday, 10 December 2002, it had twenty Amazon.com reader reviews, every single one of them five stars!

9 December 2002

I've become very backlogged in my e-mail response, and am trying to get caught up. As of today I'm up to about a month ago, so if you sent me mail in November, I hope to respond to you in the next few days. As I responded to earlier mail, I found out about a few new errata in projects 3 through 5, so those are all documented on the errata page as well as in each project. I've also added a new link to the "Designs" page, so check that out if you're so inclined.

I also found out recently that the first printing of the book sold some time in the last two months, which means somewhere around 7,000 copies had sold at that point. A new print run of about 5,500 was ordered and rolled off the presses last month, so if you've been on back order, there should now be copies available. Many thanks to everyone who's purchased a copy and spread the good word about the book!

22 October 2002

The bonus chapter "Picking a Rendering Mode" is now available in Dutch! Thanks to the folks at Naar Voren for their efforts in spreading the information to the Netherlands.

25 August 2002

Reader Andrew McKay wrote in to point out a small swarm of errata, which are now available on the main errata page as well as the information pages for Projects 8 and 11. That's right—Andrew found the first error in an even-numbered project! Some of them are small and get corrected within a few paragraphs, but others are just plain bad. Take a look if you're working in either of those projects.

12 August 2002

A small herd of errata thundered through my Inbox recently, and here's what I spotted through all the dust:

  • There has been some confusion regarding some rules that appear on page 12 of Project 1. Thus, I've added some commentary to the project page which will hopefully dispel the confusion.
  • New errata were added for Project 3, including a premature rule and a typographical error that threw off a figure.
  • The aforementioned typographical error was in the project files, so readers should download the Project 3 files in order to get the corrected file ch0318.html.
1 August 2002

James McNally of Consolation Champs is running an Eric Meyer on CSS Haiku contest, offering a free copy of the book as the prize for the winning haiku. Be sure to read the contest rules, and good luck!

31 July 2002

The incomparable Brett Merkey recently brought to my attention some errors in projects 3 and 5, and so the errata are now online. The one in project 5 is fairly significant, at least in my opinion.

Brett also observed that IE5.x/Win may be more forgiving to hover-driven background changes (as discussed in project 4) than I claim in the book. My tests as I wrote the book indicated problems with background changes in IE/Win, but it may have been a case of a particular installation causing trouble. While this isn't (yet) an errata, it's something worth checking into more closely when working through that project. It could be that browsers are more capable than I thought, which would be a great change of pace!

26 July 2002

webreference.com's 25 July 2002 newsletter contains a very nice review of the book, and rates it "highly recommended." A few choice quotes: "As you're reading the book, you get the feeling Meyer isn't fighting the medium, he's working with it in almost a Zen-like way... Meyer's prose is also easy to take, peppered with pithy quotes and humorous headlines. The net effect feels like you are looking over his shoulder, watching and listening to him redesign web sites that will be 'forward compatible' and made to last."

Unfortunately the process of writing a book isn't always Zen-like in its perfection: new errata in Projects 1 and 7 have been uncovered, as well as another errata in "Picking a Rendering Mode." The online version has been corrected, but the PDF is still incorrect. We'll work to get it updated as soon as possible.

Also, it was discovered that the file ch03proj2.html was inadvertently left out of the downloadable archive for Project 3 and the all-project archive. The missing files has been added in, so if you've already downloaded either one of those archives, you should get the Project 3 archive so that you can work on the second half of the project. My deepest apologies for the oversight.

16 July 2002

The PDF version of "Picking a Rendering Mode" has been corrected and is now available!

16 July 2002

There have been reports that Windows XP users get asked for a password to open up the ZIP archives. This is something of a mystery, since there is no password! These same users, upon using WinZip to open the files, were able to expand the archives without incident. Until we figure this out, please use WinZip to open the files under XP.

Reader Laurence Barsh wrote in to point out an omission in Project 1, where an important bit of markup was left off of page 17. A correction has been posted to the Errata and Project 1 pages.

9 July 2002

Over the weekend, InformIT posted an article that contains the complete main text of Project 4, "Bringing Hyperlinks To Life." As of this writing, it's the top article on both the main page of the site and the "Articles" section. To support this, I've posted a short excerpt from the same project in the Bonus Materials area. The different is that the local copy has most of the sidebar notes that didn't make it into the InformIT version of the project. Check it out!

I've had to temporarily remove the PDF version of "Picking a Rendering Mode," as it contained a fairly serious error. The Web-based version of the chapter is fine, so far as we know. If you've already downloaded the PDF file, note that Figure 2 is incorrect, and watch this space for an announcement of a corrected PDF file. Thanks to Rob Cherny for pointing out the error so we could fix it!

6 July 2002

Christopher Schmitt has an excellent article in Digital Web titled " Web Page Reconstruction with CSS." While similar in nature to Project 1 of Eric Meyer on CSS, Christopher's redesign is much more ambitious than mine: he completely eliminates the use of tables in the CSS-driven layout! It's an article worth reading for anyone interested in moving from HTML-based design to CSS-driven design, as well as anyone interested in how floating and positioning can be used for layout. Christoper's upcoming book, Designing CSS Web Pages, will be available from New Riders later this year.

Digital Web is also home to the first review of Eric Meyer on CSS. They seem to have liked it.

2 July 2002

The companion site has been expanded to include:

  • Pages for all 13 projects, with previews of each one and project files in both ZIP and Stuffit formats for every project.
  • A centralized download area, in case you want to grab several different files at once or download single archive files containing all of the project files for all of the projects.
  • Bonus materials that didn't make it into the book, including a glossary and two appendixes!
  • Links to CSS tools, resources, and CSS-driven designs.

So far, we don't have any errata, but if any show up they'll appear on both the project pages and the main errata page.

1 July 2002

The system glitches have been largely sorted out, and you can now order a copy of the book directly from New Riders! Most e-tailers are still claiming that the book won't be out until mid-August, which is incorrect; the exception seems to be Barnes & Noble, which provides a very realistic availability date of 9 July 2002. We're told that the other e-tailers should get things sorted out this week, but in the meantime, placing a pre-order with those sources should still mean you'll get your copy in mid-July.