Today we are taking a moment to remember Molly Holzschlag, an early pioneer of the web, who died in early September at age 60. Molly was a board member and instrumental in helping the World Organization of Webmasters (now Web Professionals Global) grow over the past decades, and she was a recipient of our Web Professional of the Year award in recognition for her passion for the web and forward thinking.
Our Executive Director, Mark DuBois, first met Molly in 2005 at a talk she gave at Joliet Junior College in Joliet, IL. Nicknamed “the fairy godmother of the web,” Molly was passionate about promoting web standards and accessibility long before others took up the cause. She traveled around the world to web conferences, always seeking opportunities to discuss the web and teach the next generation of web designers and developers.
She was a prolific author, writing over 30 books about the web. Her career included serving as Project Leader from 2004-2006 for the Web Standards Project (WaSP), a coalition that pushed browser makers such as Netscape and Opera to support modern web standards. Molly was an “invited expert” on the CSS Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium, which is the body that determines the standards that run the web. Additionally, she served on the W3C HTML and GEO working groups and performed consulting services for multiple companies including Microsoft.
Molly never stopped fighting for her vision of a more egalitarian web and was once quoted as saying, “Anybody who creates a software product for the Web that is not usable and accessible by as many browsers as possible, by as many people as possible—we have failed the greater idea of the Internet.” Along with Dave Shea, she launched CSS Zen Garden in May 2003, which was “built to demonstrate what can be accomplished visually through CSS-based design.”
At Web Professionals Global, we will continue working toward web standards and accessibility, the causes that were so close to Molly during her life. Molly will be missed by our entire community of web professionals, and we offer our sincere condolences to all of her family and loved ones.
