Thoughts From Eric
Eric Meyer — CSS pioneer, author of CSS: The Definitive Guide
CSS legend and web standards pioneer. Foundational writings on design and web development.
meyerweb.comThere is a lot, and I mean a lot, of room for variability in web technologies. We work very hard to tame it, to deny it, to shun it. Too much, if you ask me.
Eric Meyer helped define how CSS works — he wrote the definitive guide, co-created the An Event Apart conference, and his daughter inspired the rebeccapurple color in the CSS spec. Twenty-six years in, his blog still reads like watching a master craftsman think out loud, probing browser edge cases and inventing new techniques with the same curiosity he brought to the web in 1999. Posts are unhurried and precise, and the personal writing, when it appears, is devastating in its plainness.
Written by Eric Meyer since 1999.
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Publishes a few times per month
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English
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Targeting by Reference in the Shadow DOM
I’ve long made it clear that I don’t particularly care for the whole Shadow DOM thing. I believe I understand the problems it tries to solve, and I fully acknowledge that those are problems worth solving. There are just a bunch of things about it that don’t feel right to me, like how it can break accessibility in a number of ways. One of those things is how it breaks stuff like the commandFor attribute on <button>s, or the popoverTarget attribute, or a variety of ARIA attributes such...
Custom Asidenotes
Previously on meyerweb, I crawled through a way to turn parenthetical comments into sidenotes, which I called “asidenotes”. As a recap, these are inline asides in parentheses, which is something I like to do. The constraints are that the text has to start inline, with its enclosing parentheses as part of the static content, so that the parentheses are present if CSS isn’t applied, but should lose those parentheses when turned into asidenotes, while also adding a sentence-terminating period whe...
Parenthetical Asidenotes
It’s not really a secret I have a thing for sidenotes, and thus for CSS anchored positioning. But a thing I realized about myself is that most of my sidenotes are likely to be tiny asides commenting on the main throughline of the text, as opposed to bibliographic references or other things that usually become actual footnotes or endnotes. The things I would sidenote currently get written as parenthetical inline comments (you know, like this). Asidenotes, if you will. Once I had realized that...
Bookmarklet: Load All GitHub Comments (take 2)
What happened was, I wrote a bookmarklet in early 2024 that would load all of the comments on a lengthy GitHub issue by auto-clicking any “Load more” buttons in the page, and at some point between then and now GitHub changed their markup in a way that broke it, so I wrote a new one. Here it is: GitHub issue loader (20250913) It totals 258 characters of JavaScript, including the ISO-8601-style void marker, which is smaller than the old version. The old one looked for buttons, checked the...
No, Google Did Not Unilaterally Decide to Kill XSLT
It’s uncommon, but not unheard of, for a GitHub issue to spark an uproar. That happened over the past month or so as the WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group, which I still say should have called themselves a Task Force instead) issue “Should we remove XSLT from the web platform?” was opened, debated, and eventually locked once the comment thread started spiraling into personal attacks. Other discussions have since opened, such as a counterproposal to update XSLT in the...
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