Transcript

Jen

This is The Web Ahead, a weekly conversation about changing technologies and the future of the web. I'm your host Jen Simmons and this is episode 41.

I want to say thank you to today's sponsors, the Environments for Humans JavaScript Summit and Mobile JavaScript Summit, and An Event Apart. I'll tell you more about those later on in the show.

This is another one in our series, The Web Behind. A look back at the web and where the web came from. Where in the world this stuff got invented. Along with my co-host, Eric Meyer. Hello Eric.

Eric

Hey Jen.

Jen

Is this number four?

Eric

I believe it is.

Jen

That's cool.

Eric

I know, and they've been so awesome.

We're going to have more awesomeness today, because our guest today is none other than Molly Holzschlag, who has long been an advocate of open standards. Going on a couple of decades now. She got started on the web in the early 1990s. She's the author of something like 35 books, I believe is what she told me. She has worked for multiple browser vendors. She's currently the senior open web strategist at Knowbility. She's located in Tucson, Arizona. Molly, welcome!

Molly

Thanks Eric. Thanks Jen. It's good to hear from both of you.

Eric

We're really glad to have you here. Usually, the first question we ask our guest is: when did you first find the web? What were you doing? When was it? What did you think when you first encountered the web?

Molly

For me, I think we have to step back a couple of years. I was already involved in the Internet, prior to the popularization of the web itself.

I think you know the story, but I'm not sure the audience is aware of how I came to the online world. I think it's a good story because it emphasizes why I do the work that I do.

Essentially, I got very ill in my early 20s. I was unable to continue. I was studying at the University of Arizona. I was unable to continue for awhile. I had to take time off to handle the medical issues that I was confronted with and I was pretty isolated. My little brother sent me his Commodore 64. Around Christmastime, a friend's boyfriend gave me a Hayes 300 broad modem and said, "Here, you should put these things together and look around for BBS'." And I did. I got online. For those of you who are as old as me, might remember Q-Link, which was the Commodore and Amigo network back in the mid to late 80s. We're talking pretty early that I saw live, global chat for the first time.

It was astonishing to me. I knew at the moment that I saw this, that what I was looking at was the beginning of something very different. You know how there are moments in life that you just have a sense? This is going to change you, and it's going to change everything. That's really what I felt. I couldn't articulate it as well, but in retrospect I can.

This began to fascinate me. I began to get involved in local BBS' and I began running a local BBS with a friend of mine, and multi-line BBS'. Then I was also a sysop, we called them — systems operators — for the GEnie, General Electric's network. For those of you who remember, it was $4.95 a month for nighttime access — all-you-can-eat — using a text-based interface to a proprietary platform on their servers. The General Electric servers weren't being used during certain hours and they were able to make some profit off of that.

That was a huge community. There I began to run the disabilities roundtable and got involved in a lot of other things. That was the beginning of what got me to where I am today.

As I was working on GEnie, we had an Internet group. Somebody said, "Tell Molly to look at that web stuff." They were thinking about building a gateway to the World Wide Web. That must have been late '92 or early '93. We're talking about very early on, text-only, no browser involved. Well, no, nothing other than a line browser involved.

Eric

Right. Probably Lynx.

Molly

Yeah. But it was proprietary to GEnie, at that time.

Eric

Of course.

Molly

Like AOL did. They all did that. People don't realize, I think. We were talking about the history. I think people don't realize how that came to be. That was the emergence of the communications aspect of where the web really came in, and where I've seen us try to replicate the BBS experience. When we talk about a social network... [laughs] the web and the Internet are social networks. It's very interesting to me that these like-minded groups had ben around. Had always been using technology. Once the web came along, it became almost ubiquitous. It's a fascinating thing.

It was through being ill and being isolated that I came to the online world and I came to know about the Internet and it morphed into the web. Once I hit the web, I really got intrigued. It encouraged my "left brain thinking," and I had not been encouraged to do that. I have very good powers of analysis and logic. I'm not so great with computation, but the logic and analysis... which was totally ignored in my childhood. It really filled something for me. I just began to eat it up, and here I am today.

Eric

So your first experience of the web was not only text-mode, but it was from the perspective of someone who had accessibility concerns. It was part of a community where that was the central focus. People who were online but had accessibility challenges or problems. That was a primary thing for them. Did the web seem like a next step? Did it seem incredibly different and better?

Molly

At that point, yes. Some of the projects I had been doing before the web — Gopher, and things of that nature. I was already working on doing lots of documentation that we were putting up on Gopher servers, through St John's University in New York. Medical data, disabilities outreach, all kinds of things of that nature. It was a very natural switch for me to go from doing that on Gopher to doing that in text-based web.

The computer was my assistive device. As a social person, as a person who was at that age, in the middle of her education, really close to graduating undergrad, and could not leave her home. I was bed bound and house bound. I think that really gave me a taste of what it was like. People who were using the web, at that time, who did have access issues — whether they were blind or mobility impaired or cognitively impaired — at that point, the text-based web was really an opening of the door for many people. Because it was accessible out of the box, at that point in history.

Eric

We've had this conversation before, you and I. How we started with a very accessible medium, then there was a long period where there was a whole lot of work done by a whole lot of people to just make it not accessible. Now we've tried to come back the other way.

How much did you do on Gopher? I'm just curious. How much time did you spend putting stuff up on Gopher?

Molly

It was at least a couple of years.

Eric

Wow. Good ol' Gopher. For those who are listening who don't remember, Gopher is — in many ways — regarded as the predecessor of the web. I think of it as a hybrid of the web and BBS'. It had that hierarchical, BBS structure. Yet you could link out of the document to something else. You could have a reference to an image that would, hopefully, load in its own window.

Molly

You'd have to download it to a local machine and look at it in a viewer. People don't really remember that's the way the web was, originally. [Laughs]

Eric

Exactly. Do you remember first hitting the graphical web? I assume Mosaic was the first.

Molly

Yes. Of course, yes, I do. I had websites prior to the graphical web and I was working on the web prior to that, obviously. I have been around since the very first graphic user interfaces and went through that. You and I both have been through a lot of that history. You came in there and I think Chris Wilson, also. There's a certain number of people that began to be in the industry right at that point. Maybe that's why we're the godfathers or something. [Laughs]

It was very much at that point when we saw the tremendous shift from that accessible, information-based, document-based, minimal structure. It's like HTML5. I think you made a quip about this once. If your markup looks like it did 20 years ago, you're doing good. [Laughs] We were just very, very simplistic.

I was there throughout the entire birth of it. The emergence of the table-based layouts and all of that. That is what slammed the accessibility door, I think, was that construct within what we did. But we would not be here having this conversation if that hadn't happened. It's a give and a take.

Eric

I can agree with that. Early on, you were also teaching a lot. You wrote a zillion books and probably even more material than those books that you posted online. Why did you see yourself as a teacher? What was it that pushed you to say, "I can teach people this and I'm going to."

Molly

Being a teacher was a natural choice for me. I was already going in that direction with my education, only I was in linguistics and spoken languages. It's not exactly a big leap to see how I morphed because of my life circumstances into someone who grasped on to this emerging linguistics. I was into the study of linguistics and cognitive linguistics. I'm now just starting to look at PhD programs and think about going back and taking a few classes because things have changed so much. But that was what I was studying and working on anyway. It became a very natural transition, I think.

Of course, I come from a long line of writers and teachers. And a Jewish background. The value of education is prized very, very highly amongst many Jewish families. It is this way in my family. Both of my parents were very well educated. My brothers. Everybody is college educated with higher degrees. Some PhDs, some JDs, and some other things thrown in there, too. [Laughs] I always make a joke that my mother measures life by degrees. Which really isn't true. I like to tease her. She's a PhD and a retired professor.

I think it was in the blood, it was in the cultural environment, it was a natural step for me. A person who is very social and interested in what other people have to say.

Eric

Anyone who spends more than 30 seconds with you, certainly will pick up on that. [Molly laughs] What were some of the topics that you wrote about?

Molly

Do you mean prior to the web or after?

Eric

About the web. Among those books, what were the ones that you concentrated on the most?

Molly

There's so many of them. Some of them were just because I needed to make some money and learn a particular technology. But I do look back and see that there were certain projects that were better than others.

I think my first project was really, really interesting. I don't even have a copy of that book in my house now. It was called... I can't even remember the title. What the heck was my first book? [Laughs] This is what happens. The short shelf syndrome sets in and you can't even remember.

Eric

Well, after 35, I think you can be excused.

Molly

Yeah, exactly.

This is the piece that I wanted to get to. It was originally my masters thesis. I morphed it into a book because... I don't know if people know the story about how I became an author. This is so funny.

This is in the days of Mosaic and Netscape. We had some Netscape. There was no IE at this point, I think. We had Mosaic and Netscape out there and that's about it for desktop browsers. [Pause] Let's see. What was I... I'm sorry, I lost my train of thought. The cat just pulled the curtain down. [Laughs] Where was I going with all of that?

Eric

Uh. I forgot, too. [Laughs]

Molly

[Laughs] Great, thanks. Oh! The books. The first books.

I did my masters online, on a BBS. Which is a very rare thing for a person my age. I studied with Dr Paul Levinson, who's considered the father of online learning. That was a really great thing.

What I started writing about — which is what you're asking. I was going to tell a story about how it was a very early time. Mosaic and Netscape were our only browsers. Eudora, I think, was around for email. I believe you might still even use Eudora, Eric.

Eric

As a matter of fact, I do. But that's a whole other story.

Molly

That's a whole other story. Interesting. Anyway, that was my favorite at the time.

All of a sudden, I get an email and it says, "Hi, I'm the publisher of Prima Publishing and I was told by a mutual party that you're the one to go to, to write a book about web design." Bear in mind, there weren't really any books on web design. There were HTML books. There was Laura Lemay's HTML. Which was a huge seller. That was pretty much it, at the point that I began to write.

I really didn't believe him. I couldn't believe it. For people who are on the web now, it seems totally natural that celebrities or publishing houses talk to each other. Back then, we didn't. A publisher just writing you out of the blue, the first thing I thought was scam or spam. They didn't have a website yet — it was still too early for them to have as website — I had to literally go to the bookstore and check them out. Indeed, it was real. So I signed the contract and morphed my masters thesis into a book.

Let it also be noted that I hadn't finished my masters, for some reason. Once the book was published, they gave it to me. [Laughs] Just said, "Here, you deserve it. Have it."

Eric

That's good. What was the topic? It was just web design in general?

Molly

It was called, Techniques in Technology of the Cutting Edge. I forget exactly.

Jen

I'm looking at your Wikipedia page. It says, Professional Web Design: Theory and Technique on the Cutting Edge.

Molly

There you go. That's it.

Eric

Nice.

Jen

1996.

Molly

Yeah, 1996 was the publication date. You can imagine that I wrote that the year before.

What's really important about that book that I postulate that we have to move from the one man, one woman band scenario — as web designers — into teams. [Laughs]

Eric

Well, there you go. As you were writing that — or as you were assembling it, with a 1996 publication date — Netscape 1.1 was coming out. "Hey! You can embed images now! You can have tables!" Well, not embedding images, that came sooner, but yeah. Tables, and floating images to the side, and all of that kind of stuff. What was that like for you?

Molly

The presentational HTML days were really fun. First of all, I don't think we were taking into account how much we were creating barriers. But we were playing. It was like being a kid, literally in the sandbox. Here was this big sandbox for us to play in, and we played. That was the beauty of it. We got to try different things out. It was a different time. Nobody was on you to get the project, get the app out the door. We didn't have the infrastructure. It was a time of absorbing information, more than giving it out. That was really interesting.

Sometimes, I lament the fact that many young web designers, or people coming to web design at this point in history, missed out on some of those early days. We got to see, with our own eyes and experience, we got to have this experience of how much this changed our society. How much we went from this text-based, limited world into this very evolutionary technology and disruptive technology. It has been truly fascinating.

Jen

Let's talk about one of our sponsors today. Environments for Humans is having two more of their fabulous online summits. The JavaScript summit and the mobile JavaScript summit. The JavaScript summit itself is three days long and goes really in-depth into a whole bunch of things about JavaScript. Different libraries or frameworks that you can use to build out JavaScript. Tons and tons of stuff that you want to know. It's an online summit, so you stay home and log in, get on the website, and watch everything from where you're at, from the comfort of your home or office or home office. You can get an individual ticket or a meeting room ticket where a whole group of people — perhaps at your job — can get together in a meeting room and watch the whole event as a group. Because it's a live event, there's a chat room and a way for you to interact and ask questions of speakers. To get more of an experience that you would get being in person at a conference. Meanwhile, getting a chance to stay home and not travel. There's also a one-day mobile JavaScript conference all about mobile and optimizing your JavaScript for slower connections for smaller devices. For devices that don't have as powerful of a chip in them. Weaker or not as powerful of devices. Hot to debug. You're writing JavaScript for a mobile device. How do you debug that? All kinds of other information. Go check them out. There's two websites: jssummit.com and mobilejssummit.com. You can use the coupon code WEBAHEAD to get 20% off at either conference. Thanks so much to Environments for Humans for being so supportive of The Web Ahead.

Eric

Tell the truth. Did you ever completely change all of the preferences in Mosaic to mess up every document that you came across?

Molly

That was par for the course for people who were playing in the sandbox. If you were interested in the technology, you did everything like that. [Laughs] It was a time of great experimentation. We began to see the wonderful art of multiple skull tiles. [Eric laughs] Multiple eggs in the background. For awhile, I forget which version, when animated GIFs came out. Then there were one or two browsers that allowed for the background — it must have been IE. I think it was IE. [Laughs]

Eric

I'm pretty sure it was both of them, at a certain point. Somebody figured out, "Wow, we can tile images. What if I took an animated GIF and I put it in the background... oh my god! It animates!" And it was everywhere. The spinning skull on fire repeating throughout the entire background of the page.

Molly

[Laughs] I really feel sorry for people who missed that. It was an amazing time to be alive.

Eric

I mean, hamster dance is still available, isn't it?

Molly

I think so. But that was even a little later.

Eric

That's like, 40% of what you really need to know from that time. Hamster dance. [Molly laughs] That and Jason Scott has text files. Have you seen his under construction page?

Molly

No, I haven't.

Eric

He's collected literally hundreds of under construction banners, animated and non-animated. They're all on the same page. It's amazing.

Molly

And liable to set people off with epileptic seizures. [Laughs]

Eric

Yes, actually, that's probably true, and we should probably mention that. It is a page that probably should trigger a seizure.

Molly

It could. It's not only that it could, there's a very specific type of photosensitive epilepsy. I have a mild case of this and you don't realize it until you get into that flashing. To me, it's like motion sickness. For my brother, he gets incredible migraines. You don't necessarily see the actual seizure, but there are symptoms and people get very sick.

This comes around very nicely. It segues very nicely into the types of things that we began to do while we were playing in that sandbox that created barriers. We have now had to go back and create guidelines, very complicated guidelines on how we address those things. Because of the dangers inherent to that sort of thing.

Eric

Did you stay involved with the accessibility communities that you'd been involved with before the web, after the web? Or did they break up?

Molly

They'd break up. It's like everything in our ever-changing current situation. Facebook is a perfect example. You might have lost somebody along the way, but they find you. Even the exes that you don't want to find you. [Laughs] They find you. I'm only slightly teasing.

But quite seriously, many people that I worked with on GEnie, before the web, I have now met via CSUN. Which is the international conference each year on disabilities out of California. A lot of people from back in the early days I've met face-to-face due to the ongoing, communicative nature of what we've created.

Eric

Right. Facebook, as you say, seems to be really good at connecting up with people that you haven't heard from in 20 years. Maybe you wanted it that way.

Molly

Yeah, exactly, exactly. [Laughs]

Eric

We were talking about photosensitive seizures. Of course, the poster child for that would be the <blink> tag.

Molly

Yes indeed. Or <marquee>s. A lot of it has to do with flicker rates. It's flicker rates and perception. It also depends on how sensitive the person is. Some people who have that syndrome or problem, there are multiple causes of it. Nobody's really sure what it is. Sometimes it's just very sensitive sensory inputs. I tend to be one of those people. I'm very sensitive to sensory input, in general. Anytime you get bombarded with it, it can cause problems.

What exactly did you want to know? If I left that?"

Eric

The reaction from the accessibility community's point of view, when <blink> and <marquee> came out.

Molly

I'm just going to say what I thought happened. This is not actual, this is definitely just an observational opinion.

Eric

That's fine.

Molly

It seems like, for the first few years after the GUI browser and the table-based, presentational-based layouts were in play — and all of this blinking and marqueeing and crazy stuff going on. If that wasn't enough, we also added JavaScript. You'd have things blinking on the page, you'd have things in the chrome moving around. [Laughs] It was just really bad news. Just think about the average person, from a usability standpoint. Where do you put your eye? We began to really think about these things.

For a few years, the accessibility community at large was really flummoxed. It went from being a very open technology to being a very problematic technology to work with.

Eric

I would think, from their point of view, it would have been like, "This was so friendly to us and now it's so hostile and we don't understand what happened. What did we do?"

Molly

Exactly. We slammed the door in the face of accessibility. We did that. It was not with malice and it was not with intent. It was through the excitement of kids in a sandbox, back to that metaphor.

I often say this, Eric. The way the web has been built, thus far, as been to put the cart before the horse and let the horse push it wherever it goes. [Eric laughs] We're finally starting to move the cart, because we now have a critical mass of information to look at and experience. We have that critical mass now. But back in '93, '94, '95, it was really a brave new world. We had to push the boundaries. I believe it was truly necessary to screw it up like that. You know as well as I do, sometimes to clean something up you have to make a big mess. [Laughs] That's both metaphorical and literal. [Both laugh]

Eric

I suppose to truly understand the system, you have to break it and repair it. In a lot of ways, we did that.

Molly

Absolutely.

Eric

It's always interesting. Things like accessibility were driving goals of Tim Berners-Lee when he designed the system. Basically, that was all there and something you could take for granted. Then we just completely overwrote that. [Laughs] I see what you mean. There's the hard-won knowledge of, "We had this and we deliberately lost it and now we've learned why it's important and how to bring it back."

Molly

It's an ongoing struggle with the accessibility. Which just comes down to best practices in development, in computer science. Period. It shouldn't be a political issue. It's a technology issue and it should just be dealt with. Really. We have the means, we have the ways.

I think what happens is, because of that model — the cart before the horse — we got into a situation where all of our processes, whether it be our workflow process, whether it be when and where we design, where we break away from the visual and into the code, all of these questions. We found ourselves building and tacking on usability. "Now let's make the website more accessible," "Now let's make the website more usable," "Now let's look back and see, what is our information architecture?" Basically, you have to re-engineer those websites to those deep sciences. Those are now deep sciences and deep parts in the web.

It's very fascinating to me how quickly we went from this very simple... it was a simple construct. To this very complex thing that we do now.

Eric

It's interesting to me how much effort developers or designer go to. In the process of creating websites, there's a whole lot of effort that goes into recreating what used to be just simple, taken for granted things. The way that Twitter clients will show you the most recent messages and scroll down. I always see that and I think, "Man, just like a BBS."

Molly

It's really funny, because I think the same thing. Especially with forums and social networks. They are absolutely the recreations of BBS systems in the web format. It took years to duplicate. This is what is very interesting to me about that. Coming from the background of both commercial and hobbyist BBS'. Looking at the way we were able to communicate with each other without all of the... I hate to say this, and don't be mad at me, designers. But without all of the stuff in the way. Not just design. Even function. Without all of the layers of interface in the way. It was a very easy and quick way to communicate.

Of course, you have to remember we were communicating over 300 broad modems. [Laughs] It wasn't like it is today with broadband in the US and many places of the world. We're quite fortunate to have that.

Eric

Absolutely. When we were talking about blinking and marqueeing, I was remember the JavaScript animation of the status bar, to make things marquee past in the status bar of the browser.

Molly

Yeah, that's what I was referring to. You'd have the marquee, you'd have blink, and you'd have JavaScript. Then changing colors on the chrome. That's just crazy. It's crazy stuff! [Laughs]

Eric

Everyone's favorite, which is to open the body tag, open a blink tag, open a marquee tag, then close them right before you close the body. [Sighs]

Molly

[Laughs] Thanks. I'm sure some of the audience who, perhaps, have never done anything with those elements, you've just inspired them. [Laughs]

Eric

Go for it, people. Just don't put it up publicly, that's all we ask. Leave it on your hard drive, where it belongs.

Molly

Andrew Kay did that to me in Australia once. Were you there? Yes! You were there that year.

Eric

I might have been, I don't remember.

Molly

It was hilarious. This is a very funny story. We were in Sydney, Australia for a conference. This guy, Andrew, a really funny guy. We're listening to a conversation about JavaScript. I had made a comment about marquee and blink and he did exactly that. He wrapped a blink, a marquee, and some JavaScript and made the entire... [Laughs] I'm sitting a couple of rows behind him in a lecture hall at a university and he turns the computer around and shows me and the whole room is just laughing.

So go out and have some fun with that if you've never done it. Just don't put it anywhere where photosensitive epileptics can see it.

Eric

Have fun with it but keep it to yourself.

Or the other one. You can't do this anymore. There was a version of Netscape where if you had a hundred <title> tags in a row, it would render them one at a time in the title bar. You could actually animate the title bar.

Molly

I forgot about that. That's a good one. [Laughs]

Eric

Yup. I suppose we can probably recreate that with JavaScript these days. In a way, that's illustrative of the constraints we were operating under at the time, right? If we had a hundred title tags that had a bunch of non-breaking spaces or whatever, each frame of this text animation would be displayed at a reading speed because that's how fast computers were. Reading these tags one at a time, up on the screen one at a time. Probably one "frame" every 1/10 of a second or something.

Molly

It's a push technology.

Eric

[Laughs] It totally was. And it happened at human speed because the computers and browsers were so slow. You kids, you don't know how good you have it.

Molly

They have no idea. [Laughs] I find myself sometimes getting frustrated with a slower network. I have to remind myself where we've come from.

Eric

Right. But of course, at the time, we were pushing much less data. It was all text.

Molly

That's exactly the point. That brings us to an important issue and one that I really, really want to talk about. One that I'm really concerned with, as we come from that messy background and move into what eventually became... by the 2000s, we were already moving the cart from in front of the horse and cleaning up our markup and looking to CSS because we could. We finally could. From that time, things did change quite a bit. I think it's been a lot cleaner.

But it's like having a house. The bigger the house, the more we fill it up. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. Just because we have the space doesn't mean we should.

Where I see things are now, people put so much into... this is not to say that all of these things are not important. It's just to say there are a lot of barriers between us and the content. We, as individuals, and the community at large. It's especially hard to feel that on the side of people who had that door open for them at one time.

One of the things now with accessibility, we end up tacking it on at the end and re-engineering. Not only is that expensive, it's also very difficult to do. I don't blame designers, I don't blame developers. I really believe that's just part of evolutionary technology. However, where we need to fix things, in my opinion, is in education. Education has got to speed up to match the speed of the world. It's not doing that, in many cases. That's where, I think, the new drive — and with The Web Standards Project — moving towards an educational environment.

Back to the teacher issue. To go back around and talk about what made me that way. Not only was it inherent in my nature, but I think I began to see that there was a real need for basics. I thought, this far into my career, talking about Tim Berners-Lee's original vision, talking about what the web is supposed to be. I can't believe I'm still doing the same darn lectures because people still don't know.

Eric

Well, people are always entering the field. But sometimes there is definitely that feeling of, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Molly

Yeah. It's very disconcerting to me when I walk into a room and I have very enthusiastic, very smart people there. I put up a photo of Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau. Chances are, 25% will know TBL and zero will know Robert. But 25%? That's so low for an industry. This is the father of our industry. What the heck is going on? What the heck is going on, is that they're not being educated. This would be a core course in a university. This is Web 101 or Web 100. You would go and learn the principles, right?

It's also been made worse by the web because of the immediacy of information. Just because information is immediate doesn't mean that one's critical analysis skills are strongly in place and able to decide and determine, "Is this the best thing or are there better materials?"

Eric

Interesting. Around 2000, you were saying we were starting to shift. Isn't that about the time that you got involved with the web standards project and Microsoft?

Molly

It was a little later, actually. Web Standards Project was 1998. I believe it was right around 2000-2001, when Jeffrey decided he had other things he wanted to put his energies into, like A List Apart and An Event Apart with you, ultimately. He was also tired of being the web standards guy. He wanted go and be more creative. I can totally understand that. We had a lot of conversations within the group.

He was the one who said, "You, Molly, I think you'd be very good for this." He pointed out a couple of people who had interest and motivation in the organization, as well as in the industry at large. He said, "If you would like to move this forward, please move this forward." That's what we did.

For a long time, it was Steve Champeon, and I as co-lead. He was handling all of the technology and doing a really good job with that. I was hopefully doing at a god job at herding cats.

We all know about the IE 6 woes and what happened there. The Microsoft issue came when there was so much pushback from the developer community. Which is as it should be. The Web Standards Project in the Jeffrey years — and for a few years thereafter — was really into the sting. We were activists. We were dealing with uncooperative companies, non-communicative companies, so of course we had to be that way. But then that shifts. The word is "transparent," which is a word I really don't think is accurate. Just because something is transparent doesn't mean what's on the other side of that transparency is real. So I like the word "authentic." But I did see that.

That's when Microsoft began to open up. They realized, at some point, "Oh man, we really screwed up here." This is when we see Chris Wilson coming out and starting to talk. We see people coming out at Microsoft and starting to open up. I said, "This is a good. People are talking." I said to The Web Standards Project, "I want to go in a different way. I want to talk to Microsoft about creating a task force together." And we did. Of course, there was pushback. You can imagine there was pushback from certain individuals who really felt that was playing with the enemy. I can totally understand it. But we also had to go with the changes in the social construct of what we were doing, because the web is disruptive and it is changing companies from their core. I think Microsoft is a great example of that. Because it was the people who brought them to that realization that they had to clean up their mess or they were going to lose whatever grasp on the web they had.

Eric

I know there was at least some internal advocacy at well, which was good. There were people within Microsoft who definitely believed that. Without them, who knows what could have happened. They certainly made it easier.

Molly

Unfortunately, the people on the inside had to work surreptitiously and made lifelong enemies. It was a very bloody and brutal thing for them. As an outsider, it was less bloody for me. It was, it truly was. I have more empathy for those that were on the inside because I know how much it affected their lives. It was truly a huge accomplishment, I think, on behalf of all of the people who worked. We took it to the highest level. We took it to Bill Gates. He took it to him twice. It wasn't just one time, we were invited back. Jonathan Snook was in that second round. Kelly Goto was the only other person that went to two of those meetings with Bill.

Eric

Tell us about those meetings.

Molly

The WASP had formed this Microsoft Web Standards Project Task Force. We had begun discussing how we could advocate and how we could be helpful to them in their quest to improve standards, compatibility, and compliance with IE.

Jen

What version of IE would this be?

Molly

This is during IE 6 when it became obvious that Microsoft was either going to have to get out of the web game or build browsers again. They decided to build browsers again. At that point, when that decision was made, it was right between IE 6 and the years before IE 7 and IE 8. Right in that period of time, about a year or two span of time. Of course, I'm very web-like — I'm non-linear — so I do not remember things in a linear way. [Laughs]

They were doing a series of conferences called MIX. If anybody out there has been to them, they were a lot of fun. Huge. Big Microsoft-style shows. They were real shows. They wanted technologists as well as other key people in the industry to come and help decide what was going to be the various topics for the content in the MIX conferences.

I was invited to a Mix and Mash, which is basically a full day with a group of people. At the end of the day, we got an hour to sit with Bill and each of us got a chance to talk to him and have a conversation on our own topic. It was like an audience with the Pope, at the end of the day. [Eric and Molly laugh]

Eric

Did he wear a hat?

Molly

No, he didn't. In fact, he impresses me as a very good human. He impresses me as somebody who really got it and was able to initiate that change in his company before he went off to do the good works that he does now.

The transcripts are out there. You can look for the transcripts of the whole conversation, so it's there in text. I surreptitiously recorded it, which I wasn't really supposed to do. [Laughs]

Eric

Oh, Molly. That's my Molly.

Molly

There's actually a recording of me speaking with Bill Gates on the issue of standards, and it's hilarious.

But in it, he takes full responsibility. He says, "Ok, we will do the mea culpa. Anything that the standards bodies need, we're going to work with that." And they have. The commitment has been completely there since that day. I'm very impressed with that whole process. I really thank all the many people. Especially those people who bled on the inside for that win. It's a huge win for everybody.

Eric

You said two meetings. Was that at two successive MIX conferences?

Molly

Yeah. At the next conference, they decided to do the same thing. But I think they felt that they had too many journalists. They wanted more heavy tech, so it was a different group of people. Like I said, from the web world we had Kelly Goto and Jonathan Snook and I was there. There were a lot of other computer science folks that were there.

You were asking me this earlier. The story is — I don't know if this is really true, and I've asked a few people and they don't know either. But when I received the invitation, I was told by the people who invited me back, that Bill Gates had said, "Bring that annoying standards girl back." [Eric laughs] Which I think is one of the best... if he really said that, I am so very honored. [Laughs]

Eric

We so totally have to get Knowbility to change your job title to Annoying Standards Girl.

Molly

[Laughs] I know! I'm the annoying standards girl.

Eric

I would have that printed on every business card I ever owned, if someone had called me that. Even Annoying Standards Guy. That would just be my title forever.

Molly

Somebody called me that. It may have been Bill Gates or somebody close to him. Nobody is telling me. They're like, "I don't know if he really said it." [Laughs] Nobody wanted to take responsibility for it. They think I'm offended, but I think it's hilarious.

Eric

At the time, they probably didn't want it showing up in ZDNet or whatever.

Molly

Exactly, right? But it's hilarious.

Eric

"Bill Gates Insults..." blah blah blah. They don't need that.

Molly

[Laughs] It was not an insult. I didn't care if he remembered my name, he remembered why I was there. That was what the job was about. That's the bottom line. The point is, it was many, many people. It was many people involved and it was brutal. It was a brutal thing. At the end of the day, we're all happy it's over and that Gates really was behind that. He's good to his word. He said, "From this point forward, you will get what you need." He said, "If you need anything, you let me know and I'll make sure Dean gets the message." Dean Hachamovitch, who was — still, maybe — I don't know the infrastructure at Microsoft so much anymore.

Eric

Yeah, Dean Hachamovitch.

Molly

He is, or was, at one time, the product manager.

Eric

Yeah, for Internet Explorer. It's amazing to think back on that time, when Bill Gates basically had to say, "We'll do our mea culpas because we really screwed up. We let the browser wither on the vine." Didn't quite let it die. And now, if you look at IE 10, they were the first with grid layout implementation and pushing forward with a lot of stuff.

Molly

They're kicking butt. They're great in the Working Group. In the CSS Working Group, Microsoft is kicking butt. Adobe, also. I'm seeing tremendous things from them as well.

We see a lot of shifts within the culture. You can remember, 20 years ago, Microsoft was the evil empire. Adobe was like Apple, it never let anybody out to talk about anything. Even Apple to starting to soften around the edges with that.

Eric

Maybe a little bit.

Molly

It's interesting to see how the web and the openness is challenging these old school paradigms. Change is possible. We see it in our own industry.

Eric

It certainly happened several times. There was a time when Netscape basically had the Microsoft of, "We own the market. Why do we need to pay attention to these standards things? We can just make up our own." Then that didn't really last. [Laughs]

Molly

That didn't really work. We see what happened to Netscape as a result of that, and IE is still there. For all the pain they caused us, we have to remember that IE 6 would never have lasted close to five years with workarounds and hacks to get the things we wanted, if it hadn't had really advanced CSS in it to begin with. It was, at the time, a very good browser, in terms of following standards.

Of course, Chris Wilson, he was always involved in that. He's always been very much involved in the W3C and had a lot of that weight on his shoulders, I think, to try to figure that out.

What I find very interesting is, they actually hired me at once point. That's when I had to leave The Web Standards Project because I was getting money from Microsoft. It was like, "This might be a little conflict of interest." [Laughs] So I went for two years. I was working with them. I actually did trainings for their software developers to understand standards. It was very interesting, because a lot of their software developers had never been exposed to the actual principles. Because they're software developers. They're implementing according to spec. It was very fascinating.

Eric

That is interesting. That they would be picking up a specification, trying to do things just based on what they found there.

Molly

I know. Anybody who reads W3C specs knows that they're vague as hell. Which is something we're working very hard to change at the W3C. I think it is working, in certain working groups, that change is upon us. At that time, they were really hard. With HTML5, the call to be more highly specific in the implementer language is really a good practice. I think that's something we should continue at the W3C.

Also, modularization with CSS has helped a great deal. To harmonize some of these issues in browser evolution.

Jen

Let's talk about our second sponsor today, An Event Apart. An Event Apart is a series of conferences held throughout the United States. There will be eight of them in 2013, all over the place. Seattle, Boston, San Diego, San Francisco, Atlanta. A bunch of different places. With really smart, sharp industry experts on all of these things. Responsive web design, web standards, mobile, content-first, mobile-first, all of the techniques that people are using to create really great websites in 2012-2013. You can go to a two day event. Two days of one hour presentations and also a full day workshop. The third day is a whole day of workshops. If it's in your town, perhaps you just go to the workshops alone and learn more about specific technologies that you've been struggling with. You should go over to aneventapart.com and check out their website for information about all the different speakers and all the different towns. They also have in their blog news section, they posted a video of Jeff Veen presenting at An Event Apart San Diego a couple of years ago. You can watch that video and go deeper into their archives to check out other information about speakers and videos of previous talks. An Event Apart is a really great company, brand, event, series, family. Really, a family, I guess, of people. You could come see me speak in Seattle next April. I'll be there talking about HTML5 APIs and how to design for a lot of this new technology. Thanks so much to An Event Apart for supporting The Web Ahead. Please go check them out. There's a coupon code. You can use the code AEAWBHD for $50 off for a two or three day event. Thanks so much.

Eric

You also worked for Opera for awhile. Were you doing the same sorts of things there? I wouldn't think they would need as much help with understanding the basic principles.

Molly

They had asked me to come to work for them approximately six years prior to my actually saying yes. I would often get a call saying, "Come work for us. Come on, just come work for us." Because obviously at that time, with the Jon von Tetzchner, who also carries the dream of open web and really embraced a lot of those ideologies out of Tim Berners-Lee's days. Say that ten times fast.

Eric

Not another ten times fast conversation.

Molly

[Laughs] That's right! We have them online. That's funny. We'll get to that later.

I live in Tucson, Arizona. I have a palm tree in my front yard. So I was saying, "No, no. I don't want to move to Oslo. it's just not going to happen. I'm not leaving the desert, where it's beautiful and I have a pool year around. I can just walk out my front door and fall into it. To live in the North Pole."

Eric

You could have sculpted a palm tree out of snow or something.

Molly

Yeah, yeah, right. Or ice. That would have been cool. An ice palm. Oo. That's a good idea. At my next party, we'll have ice palms, ok?

Eventually I gave in and they said, "You don't have to come live here. You can just visit us at least four times a year and travel for us." This was for the developer relations team out of Opera. At the time that it was being built, it had — and still to this day — some of the greatest and most fun people that I know in the industry. Like Bruce Lawson and Chris Mills. When I just came in, Henny Swan was there. Just some really great people on that team. David Storey, who's now gone. Quite a few people have come and gone. As is the nature of the industry.

There's also a big shift in Opera's focus, I think. They stopped doing the accessibility stuff. They dropped speech and audio, which they had been doing great work on. They dropped a lot of things for other enhancements. Eventually, I think, the mobile focus with them is really the important thing. For their business model to survive, I think they've really had to go in that direction.

It became less about the open web and less about accessibility, for me. I'm not saying it's Opera. But for me, it became less about doing that job and feeling more like I had to be responsible for product pushing, which I don't do.

We just came to a different point. Jon had left as CEO. The day after I left, he completely left the company. These things happen in a timely way. There was a shift in the culture. It was necessary for them, from a business perspective, to take it in a different way. I think they'll continue to do great work. I have great and deep respect for that company, especially for giving me the opportunity to do some really cool things and learn a lot about the mobile space at a time when it was becoming extraordinarily relevant in the United States to do so.

Eric

Absolutely. And you were speaking for them, sort of? They were sending you around to speak? You've been a speaker for a long time. When did you start with that?

Molly

My first word was paradox right after I came out of my mother's womb. [Laughs]

Eric

I meant public speaking.

Molly

That was public! There were people in the room.

Eric

Ok. [Molly laughs]

Molly

I have a history of performance and performance art in my background. And teaching. I had already done student teaching and I had done other forms of leadership. I've always been one of those people who was just naturally extroverted. Born an extrovert. The kid who's always going, "Hey! Let's go find this adventure." And of course, getting into lots of trouble along the way. [Laughs] But that's me. It's an adventure.

Eric

But nothing that was ever proven in a court of law.

Molly

[Laughs] I take the 5th on that one.

Eric

Oops. Sorry. [Molly laughs]

Molly

That's for... what are we calling it? That's the after hours, right?

Eric

After dark.

Molly

After dark, yeah.

Eric

That's when we spin off a series called Behind the Markup, just like Behind the Music.

Molly

That's a great idea! I love that. [Laughs]

Eric

"Everything was going great from Microsoft, then an addiction to marquee brought it all down."

Molly

Dun-dun-dun! [Laughs]

Eric

They still support marquee, don't they? There's a CSS Marquee Module, I should point out.

Molly

You know why? [Laughs]

Eric

Uh oh.

Molly

We almost lost our charter at one point [Eric laughs] because... no, it was seriously. We were dealing with the monolithic CSS 2.1. Which, like HTML5, is in the words of Steven Pemberton, "A monolithic lump." [Laughs]

Eric

Right.

Molly

It's true. Getting down to the modularization — at least in CSS, I'd love to see HTML5 do some of that. Although we do see a lot of APIs breaking out into their own. And that's ok. But modules would still help that, I think. Anyway, in CSS, we started that. What was the question again?

Eric

The marquee module.

Molly

Marquee! Right. The point that I wanted to make is that it was our top priority when we started working on CSS 3. Guess why? Can you guess why it was our top priority?

Eric

Uh.

Molly

Why would marquee be of utmost importance?

Eric

Because Bert Bos thought it was the greatest thing ever. [Laughs] Sorry.

Molly

So not true. [Laughs]

Eric

That's an in joke for people who know Bert.

Molly

That's an in joke. To this day, I watch his fists turn white, his knuckles turn white, because he's holding his tongue. [Laughs]

Eric

Was he an editor on the marquee module?

Molly

I don't know. The Marquee module is really for the mobile device and alternative device market. Because they want to do their ticker tapes, right? Their Bloomberg and their whatnot. I was sitting next to Kevin Lawver, who was a member of the working group at the time. You know Kevin, of course. He... [Laughs] He was quipping. He was just making the funniest jokes about how marquee is the most important thing. This is well into late 2000s already. Really funny that we would have to come back to marquee. But it was one of the highest requested features for the mobile device market.

Eric

Well, it is, in fact, as of the 5th of December 2008, was a candidate recommendation and the sole editor is, in fact, Bert Bos. [Laughs]

Molly

That's hilarious.

Eric

I don't know what he did in a previous life.

Molly

He sticks. He really is very...

Eric

... principled.

Molly

That's a good way to say it. He wants to keep the language declarative and it's become more and more programmatic. There's no way that it's going to stay as declarative as it is. It's already gone over into the side of... CSS is getting much more programmatic as days go on and as life goes on. I think he has a very justifiable point of view. It's not what's going to win, unfortunately. [Laughs] Or fortunately.

Eric

It's good to have advocates for those points of view, even if you assume they're not going to win. Just someone to say, "Is this a good idea?" or reasons why it might not be a good idea.

Molly

Or, "Bear in mind, I was there when we did this and it sucked." [Both laugh]

Eric

To some degree, that's what this is about. Not necessarily that it sucked, but, "We were there when this was done and here's what results." Sort of like, people made a blinking marquee and that was a problem for people who were photosensitive epileptics.

Molly

Exactly. There are still many things, many movements — depending on flicker rate — that effect me in the modern web. Mostly, people are good. I noticed this the other day. People don't give you an option to turn stuff off. Which is a fundamental principle of accessibility.

Let's say you've got a video running or some animation running. You have to give the person controls. I ran across something the other day. I forget which site it was. It's probably better that I did, otherwise I'd have pissed off developers going, "Why did you bring that up?" [Laughs] But it was like, there was no control on anything, audio or video. I had to be at the mercy of what they had to developed.

Eric

Yeah. Auto-start is nobody's friend, really. Sadly.

Molly

That's a very good point. Auto-start is one thing, but if I can't turn it off, that's even worse.

Eric

I actually have muscle memory that can immediately find the mute key on my keyboard.

Molly

Exactly. Because you came through that time. That's when you might be listening on your own iTunes and all of a sudden to get to somebody's site and it's blaring out. [Laughs]

Eric

Part of the muscle memory, I have to admit, is being online on places like YouTube during election season. Because, man, political ads. "Mute! I don't care who you are, I don't want to hear it." I don't need an ad to tell me. Anyway.

Molly

It's all advertising.

Eric

These days, what is it you're doing?

Molly

It's kind of a good segue because we talked about Opera. I left Opera in August of last year. So it's been a year and a half or so that I've been gone. It was interesting. I spent the first few months just thinking about what I wanted to do and where I belonged. I went to CSUN because I could. I felt like going. I was asked back.

Obviously, when I went to Opera, because Opera is a member of the W3C, I switched to member. But then the CSS Working Group had me come back as an invited expert right after that. I was very fortunate to be able to continue doing things in outreach and work with them as an educator. The work there that I do is an advocacy for the developer and designer voice in the CSS Working Group.

That's another example of transparency and openness. The W3C is changing so much with that. There are some really good people that are helping to make that happen. Douglas Schepers, and a couple of people that are involved. Lea Verou. This a time when the W3C has outreach. I'm interested in seeing that.

Knowbility, of course. I went to CSUN, I went to TPAC. Those were the two big things I went to during the down time that I had taken just to figure out what next steps would be. While I was at CSUN, I got a sense that going back to the original issues of accessibility was like old home week for me. I also found that many of the people there, they're more in my age group. This is not to say that I don't love all people and that I'm ageist or anything. But there are realities of aging. Things that must happen to you. That does make a peer group. It creates a peer group of common issues. Changes in your eyesight, whatever. So you're going through these changes and working with technology. I became aware that those were the more mature people who had been in areas like I had, prior to the web. It wasn't just about web anymore, it was opening up to other things.

That's why I joined with Knowbility and stay in close touch with Paciello Group and other things of that nature. Because that's really where my heart was when I came in. I'm doing that and I'm also working with the W3C. We're going to be hosting the CSS Working Group here is Tucson. A joint effort by the University of Arizona and the city of Tucson and myself. I was taunted by he-who-shall-not-be-named at the W3C as this being avery ambitious thing. I'm like, "When did you ever know me to do anything small?" [Laughs]

We've got serous buy-in from the economic development. It helps that my brother is a land law judge here. [Laughs] and the University of Arizona. The system program, which is under their computer sciences department. It's an integrated program that's really fascinating the trying to get attention.

We're not sure where we'll be. We're looking at places. Biosphere 2 is on the list. That should be interesting. The CSS Working Group in the Biosphere.

Eric

You're going to be in the Bio-Dome? Awesome.

Molly

We may. The major problem with that is it's kind of far away from civilization. You have to go a little farther out, but it's beautiful. It would be really cool. You stay on-site, there are casitas and everything. It's an amazing thing. We'll see. One way or the other, the point is to bring the dot gov — the open government, open.edu — the W3C, advocates, the community, and the corporations together.

This goes back to the education issue. We all have needs. The corporations are not able, necessarily, to fill jobs. The junior jobs they can fill, it's the senior jobs they can't fill. This is worldwide. I really hope that this is a message and it works out. I really want everybody to think good thoughts for me, and any way that the audience can think of to be of help in making this come to bear.

It's really to bring these factions together. Whereas, during our early days at the W3C, the W3C was the ivory tower. People were up there making the rules. No, it's all of us now. That's really the message that I'm interested in seeing.

I think as time goes on, I will be less and less on the stage and more and more into research and the classroom again.

Eric

Well, that sounds like a great place to wrap things up. You and I could talk for hours, probably. We'll have to do this again at some point. Maybe we can talk about some of the more backroom stories that we might have.

Molly

Yeah! We should do that. I actually got invited back to a conference. Not because they liked my talk but because the after hour party was all about Eric Meyer stories. [Laughs]

Eric

Oh, really?

Molly

Yes. The National Association of Government web masters We had a blast. [Laughs]

Eric

Those wacky, wacky government webmasters.

Molly

They love you.

Eric

It's the fact that you could impress them with Eric Meyer stories that really kind of makes me feel sorry for them. [Molly laughs] Because there are so much better stories out there. Or so I'm going to claim.

Alright, so. [Laughs] It's been great having you on. Talk you so much for joining us.

Molly

Always wonderful. Thank you, Eric, and thank you, Jen, for thinking of me. This has really been fun.

Jen

It's been great having you. There's a group in the chat room who have been madly collecting links to all these things that you were talking about. Photos of you with Bill Gates and other people.

Molly

Oh, cool!

Jen

They found some of the transcripts and such. [Molly laughs] If people want to go check that stuff out, they should go to 5by5.tv/webahead/41 and all the links that have been collected will be there.

Molly

Thank you, that's great. I probably don't know where half that stuff is, so I really want to thank everybody for helping me out.

Jen

Yeah, some people were digging through old email archives that they had. Going through archive.org to find stuff.

Molly

That's awesome. I'm very glad to hear your audience is really responding that way. That's fabulous. Thank you so much, again. It was really great.

Eric

We have a pretty fantastic audience. We have a fantastic audience because they come for fantastic guests, so thank you again.

Jen

If people are listening and you know of other links, you can send them to me. There's a contact form on the 5by5 website. You can send them to me and I'll add them to the show. Because I know, Eric, you're collecting a lot of this information to have as an archive and a body of work that maybe we'll do something with in the future. People should keep adding to it.

Eric

Awesome.

Jen

They can follow you, Molly, on Twitter, @mollydotcom, right?

Molly

Yeah, @mollydotcom, right.

Jen

Or go to your website, molly.com.

Molly

Yeah, I don't spew there much anymore. [Laughs] Twitter has made it very easy for me to express myself the way I think, in short, sharp little bursts.

Jen

Nice. People can also follow Eric @meyerweb on Twitter, or me @jensimmons on Twitter, or the show @thewebahead on Twitter. Subscribe to the show on iTunes, go rate us, review us. That would be a really big help. And listen again. You can always go to 5by5.tv to see if you want to listen live, which is totally fun. See the schedule, see what's coming up next week. Yeah. I guess that's it. Thank you so much for coming, Molly.

Molly

Thank you, Jen. Thanks again, Eric. This was really fun, and yes, I think we should do the night version.

Eric

Oooh.