There is a long list of folks who I'll never meet, but for whom I'd love to buy a beer, and Meyer is at the top.

After the dot-com crash I found myself coding again, and fell into CSS with his book, and managed to carve out a spot for myself as a bit of an early CSS guru in my professional network. Doing that saved my house, quite literally.

CSS can be gnarly and frustrating. This was even MORE true back then when you basically had to create parallel implementations of the same layout to support IE's willfully wrong interpretations of the box model (oh, and its bugs). But it beat the everliving crap out of what came before.

I've long since left that part of my career -- I mostly talk and tell people what to do now -- but I'll always love CSS a little for that period of my life.