Tucson's Molly Holzschlag, known as 'the fairy godmother of the web,' dead at 60

Molly Holzschlag, whose pioneering work in online design standards led to her being dubbed "the fairy godmother of the web," has died at age 60.

Holzschlag, a longtime Tucson resident, dealt with a series of illnesses over the past decade, including being diagnosed with aplastic anemia. She was found dead Tuesday at her home, family said.

She was a prolific author and regular speaker about the "open web," advocating for accessible and inclusive online design standards. Also known as "mollydotcom" after her eponymous site that was one of the first blogs, she wrote or co-wrote more than 30 books, and before falling ill she was frequently appearing on Internet conference stages around the world.

"Molly has changed the world several times over," said the organizers of a 2013 GoFundMe effort that raised more than $70,000 to support Holzschlag while she underwent chemotherapy.

Holzschlag, who reported on music for the Tucson Weekly in the 1990s, founded Open Web Camp, a Silicon Valley event that ran from 2009-2013, and was a leader of the Web Standards Project in the years before that. That group successfully pushed browser developers, including Microsoft, Opera and Netscape, to adopt web standards. More than once, she challenged Bill Gates face-to-face to fix problems with Internet Explorer.

She was an "invited expert" on the CSS Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium, the body that determines the standards that run the Internet. She also served on the W3C HTML and GEO working groups.

She was steadfast in her insistence that the World Wide Web be usable by disabled people, including sites being able to be parsed by screenreader technology for people with impaired vision.

"Farewell to a tireless advocate for a kinder, more accessible, more open web. Your pain is over, now you may rest," tweeted web standards pioneer Jeffrey Zeldman, reacting to the Sentinel's report of Holzschlag's death.

Eric Meyer, who championed early work on Cascading Style Sheets — now the primary tool that determines how websites appear — posted his "Memories of Molly."

"The Web is a little bit darker today, a fair bit poorer: Molly Holzschlag is dead. She lived hard, but I hope she died easy," he wrote.

"She was one of the first web gurus, a title she adamantly rejected  —  “We’re all just people, people!”  —  but it fit nevertheless. She was a groundbreaker, expanding and explaining the Web at its infancy. So many people, on hearing the mournful news, have described her as a force of nature, and that’s a title she would have accepted with pride," Meyer wrote. "She was raucous, rambunctious, open-hearted, never ever close-mouthed, blazing with fire, and laughed (as she did everything) with her entire chest, constantly. She was giving and took and she hurt and she wanted to heal everyone, all the time. She was messily imperfect, would tell you so loudly and repeatedly, and gonzo in all the senses of that word. Hunter S. Thompson should have written her obituary."

Molly Holzschlag was predeceased by her husband, Raymond Poore, and her parents. She is survived by brothers Morris Holzschlag and Linus Kafka.