Molly Holzschlag
American computer scientist (1963–2023)
Molly Miriam Esther Holzschlag (January 25, 1963 – September 5, 2023) was an American author, lecturer and advocate of the Open Web. She wrote or co-authored 35 books on web design and open standards, including The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web (co-authored with Dave Shea). She was nicknamed the "Fairy Godmother of the Web".
Campaigning for web standards
Holzschlag conceived and led the first five years of Open Web Camp, a free event in Silicon Valley from 2009 to 2013. Her work focused on Open Web technologies, web design, and accessibility. She was the 2004–2006 group lead for the Web Standards Project (WaSP), a coalition that campaigned browser makers such as Microsoft, Opera, and Netscape to support modern web standards. Her obituary in the Tucson Sentinel reported that "more than once, she challenged Bill Gates face-to-face to fix problems with Internet Explorer".
She participated as a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) invited expert on the CSS Working Group, chaired the CSS Accessibility Community Group, and was an invited expert on the HTML and GEO working groups.
Teaching work
In 2011, Holzschlag worked for Knowbility, teaching classes on Open Web technologies such as HTML5 and ARIA, with a strong emphasis on using inclusive design to overcome accessibility barriers. She also taught webmaster courses for the University of Arizona, University of Georgia, University of Phoenix, New School University, and Pima Community College.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q11638. VIAF identifies the subject as 41996622. The Library of Congress control number is n96112418. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1963, 2023, 2009 and 2013.
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This entry incorporates text from “Molly Holzschlag” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.