A blog post of this nature is never easy. She was so larger than life that she puts a print on each of us, who have discovered the Web early on.
My first discovery of Molly Holzschlag was through the WebTechniques magazine published from 1996 to 2002. This was a real magazine about the Web. You would recognize early writers like Laura Lemay, Lynda Weinman, etc. She had a column there called Integrated Design. She started writing it on Web Techniques. September 1999.
Style sheets are one of the most effective innovations for designers; they make it easier to manage style elements via a single, linked sheet. When the time comes for a minor style update, such as a change in the color of article headers, the change can be implemented throughout the site in a few seconds.
Then she was part of the WaSP (Web Standards Project), including Jeffrey Zeldmann and others, an effort to bring interop in between browsers and educate Web developers on using Web Standards.
A capture of Molly's site in 2000.
I was hired at W3C in July 2000 to work on improving the quality of W3C specifications. And I had a long time interest in also improving the knowledge of W3C specs for the French community.
On May 2002, I was attending the World Wide Web Conference in Hawaii and I met Molly there for the first time. We had a long discussion (seating on chairs near the pool) about evangelization efforts, the W3C, WasP and the role that each could play. Together with Olivier Théreaux (working at W3C at that time), we had also a strong desire to have a better relationship of W3C with the Web developers community and were discussing similar efforts.
We created the public-evangelist mailing-list at W3C. She introduced herself on the list.
Then I met her regurlaly in my professional career, on conferences, at meetings and we even worked together in the Opera Developer Relations Team in 2011.
Today on Mastodon and blogs, you will see a lot of messages on how important she had been in the life of people from many continents, many places, for people who praised the Web profession as a craft.
Thanks for all the magical memories and your unconditional love for the Web.
Otsukare!