RIP Molly Holzschlag. I went to several Web2000 events in San Francisco during my dot-com startup and E*Trade days in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Molly was an incredible fixture and inspiration for thousands of young programmers and digital marketers. I’m a little slow in posting this, as she died nearly a month ago, but I think everyone in the digital and web world owes her a little thanks.
https://ten7.com/podcast/episode/molly-holzschlag-www-matriarch-and-fairy-godmother
There is a special remembrance ceremony today (October 5) at 10AM. Details can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1239730630053134
Some notes from the Facebook page:
Molly’s illustrious career in tech and the web started in the early 1990’s as an online systems operator. From that point on until the onset of her debilitating illness, she went on to writing and co-authoring 35 books on web design and open standards, including The Zen of CSS Design, which she co-authored with Dave Shea. In addition to writing, some of her most notable achievements included: speaking at web conferences around the world, being instrumental in The Web Standards Project (WaSP), serving as an invited expert in the CSS, HTML, and GEO groups of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C); and being awarded the 2015 Net Award for Outstanding Contribution to the industry. Through her passionate work, she gained the moniker of “The Fairy Godmother of the Web.”
Her friend, Eric Meyer, had this to say about Molly:
I could tell so many stories. The time we were waiting to check into a hotel, talking about who knows what, and realized Little Richard was a few spots ahead of us in line. Once he’d finished checking in, Molly walked right over to introduce herself and spend a few minutes talking with him. An evening a group of us had dinner one the top floor of a building in Chiba City and I got the unexpectedly fresh shrimp hibachi. The time she and I were chatting online about a talk or training gig, somehow got onto the subject of Nick Drake, and coordinated a playing of “ Three Hours” just to savor it together. A night in San Francisco where the two of us went out for dinner before some conference or other, stopped at a bar just off Union Square so she could have a couple of drinks, and she got propositioned by the impressively drunk couple seated next to her after they’d failed to talk the two of us into hooking up. The bartender couldn’t stop laughing.
