Recently I was fortunate enough to interview Eric Meyer on the future of web design in what seems to be turning into an interesting series on this topic (See the first interview with Chris Coyier here).

And for those of you that don’t know who Eric Meyer is, shame on you. Shame. Shame. Shame.  I can’t write it any better than An Event Apart, “Eric Meyer has been working with the web since late 1993 and is an internationally recognized expert on the subjects of HTML, CSS, and web standards. Author of Eric Meyer on CSS and More Eric Meyer on CSS (New Riders), Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide (O’Reilly & Associates), and CSS2.0 Programmer’s Reference (Osborne/McGraw-Hill) as well as numerous articles for the O’Reilly Network, Web Techniques, and Web Review, Eric also created the CSS Browser Compatibility Charts and coordinated the authoring and creation of the W3C’s official CSS Test Suite.” So yeah, he knows a thing or two about web development.

Jeff: There has been a lot of talk and excitement in the web design community about CSS 3 and HTML 5. I find this interesting, mainly because I’m a dork, but it doesn’t seem like most of the major web browsers can fully implement existing agreed upon standards correctly, much less the next generation. Do you have any thoughts on this? Also I know there are bits and pieces of CSS3 and HTML5 that work in some browsers but when should we expect these technologies to go “mainstream?”

Eric: Some of them already have: ‘canvas’, which is part of HTML5, is used quite a bit for a variety of very cool purposes.  It’s also possible to use some HTML5 markup right now, either with a little CSS or a little JavaScript or both or even neither, depending on the browser. We might all groan and say, “God, the Browser Wars are back!” but really, that’s not at all the case.  Things are soo much better than they used to be that in comparison, this is at most the Browser Mild Disagreements.

Incompatibilities are the only thing we can ever count on in web browsers.  The last day of complete browser interoperability was the day before the release of the second web browser.  Browser teams don’t coordinate with each other, don’t agree on what to do or not do– and if they did, we’d probably complain that they had formed a monopoly that was unresponsive to our needs.

Jeff: Will we have to resort to some sort of battle royale street fighter kumite with everyone involved to get this done (CSS3 & HTML5 becoming widely accepted)? And if so, do you think Jean Claude Van Damme is a good fit or possibly Steven Seagal might make an appearance?

Eric: Um, sure.  Aren’t there any more recent tough guys to throw into the mix?

Jeff: What is the best way (I mean other than physically threatening or brandishing a weapon) to convince people that seem more interested in slapping code together quickly that web standards matter and it’s in their best interest to follow them?

Eric: Leading by example, sharing our experiences, making resources available, and helping when asked.  Nobody can be forced to go down the standards path, and frankly I’m not really interested in trying. People will slap together code, and it will mostly work, until the point where they want to do more powerful stuff or they get users with accessibility problems or they just start to realize that what they’re doing is clumsy and bloated and there must be a better way to do it.  When that happens, they’re ready to look at what’s been done by others and take advantage of resources and assistance.

It’s sort of a virtual apprentice setup.  Those wanting to become craftsmen learn by studying what the craftsmen who preceded them have done and said.  It isn’t perfect, but it’s working all right for now. I suspect there may emerge a system of actual, in-person apprenticeship, but it will happen very slowly.

Jeff: Designing a website to be optimized for mobile devices is a hot trend but it seems like Adobe and Apple are currently engaged in some sort of weird macho staring match about how to get Flash on the iPhone.  In addition, JavaScript and CSS have (at best) limited functionality for the majority of users with standard traditional cell phones. There seem to be a lot of roadblocks to transferring typical web interactivity to mobile devices, what are your thoughts on the future?

Eric: That one’s a stumper for me, because I’m not sure what the best mobile experiences should be, let alone what we’ll get.  There are some things one can do in a desktop browser that just seem really hard to do on a mobile device, like dropdown menus.  Maybe those will just never make it to mobiles.  Or maybe someone will come up with an interaction pattern that is recognizably a dropdown and yet is perfectly optimized for mobile environments and we’ll all wonder why nobody thought of it sooner.

Jeff: I’m going to skip explaining the part about what web 2.0 is, because quite frankly the word makes me want to smash my head through my computer monitor.  What are your thoughts on what the next version of the web will be?

Eric: It’ll be a more powerful version of what we have now, one that we sort of collectively evolve, and we’ll worry about branding it later.

Jeff: Do we go ahead and call that web3.0 or will it be so advanced that we skip directly to web 4.0?  If so, who can I sell this domain web4point0.com?

Eric: I’m sure there’s a social media guru out there somewhere who’d love to take that off your hands.

Jeff: The other day I was thinking about when I was first learning how to design websites, I made this really simple hangman game out of JavaScript.  I thought it was cool and was quite proud of myself at the time but it always seemed that JavaScript was regarded by web developers (at least the ones I knew) as this wacky weird little language that wasn’t really that powerful. Now it seems like JavaScript is everywhere you look, disguised as ActionScript in Flash/Flex, or playing a vital role in the creation of mashups, etc. Has JavaScript changed or have the attitudes of those developing websites changed more?

Eric: Both.  It’s gotten a lot more powerful, and people have started using it to do all kinds of stuff natively in the browser that would’ve been unthinkable even two years ago.  AJAX drove a lot of that change in perception, but also things like Google Maps and the various JS-based APIs.  People started to realize that no matter what you might think of JS as a language, it can be used to do a lot of cool stuff and it’s pretty much here to stay.  My contention of late is that it will be the basis on which the web will advance at a much-accelerated rate, actually shifting the basis of standards development into the hands of the community.  We’ll see.

Big thanks to Eric for the interview!