Eric A. Meyer is an American web design consultant and author. He is best known for his advocacy work on behalf of web standards, most notably CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), a technique for managing how HTML is displayed. Meyer has written a number of books and articles on CSS and given many presentations promoting its use.
Meyer graduated from Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in 1992 with a BA in History, and minors in artificial intelligence, astronomy, and English.
He is married to Kathryn Meyer (born Fradkin) and has adopted three children, with two of them living: Carolyn and Joshua Meyer. In 2014, his second daughter Rebecca Alison Meyer died of a brain tumor at six years of age. The hex color #663399 was named "rebeccapurple" and added to the CSS Colors list in her memory.
From 1992 to 2000, Meyer was employed as a hypermedia systems manager at CWRU. In 1998, he developed the landmark CSS1 test suite with the help of other volunteers, allowing CSS implementors to test their software and address its rendering issues. Meyer joined the Web Standards Project in the same year and became a co-founder of its CSS Samurai, formally known as the CSS Action Committee, an advocacy group which worked with browser vendors to improve CSS support in their products.
A columnist since 1997, a book author and frequent conference speaker on CSS since 2000, Meyer has attained celebrity status in the field of web design.
In 2001, he joined Netscape as an Internet applications manager and remained with the company until 2003.
Meyer is currently a consultant for Complex Spiral Consulting as well as a founding member of the Global Multimedia Protocols Group.
On July 28, 2005, the S5 format and software was placed in the Public Domain by Eric Meyer.
In 2008, Meyer supported a Microsoft proposal for Internet Explorer 8 related to backwards compatibility modes for rendering invalid HTML and other markup.