It was really down to so many different people it would take years to name them all but they did an amazing job at bringing together just the right folks although of course you can only imagine that when it got to me I really didn't have much to say did I hahaha
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Bill Gates and I were sitting two and a half feet across a conference table eye-to-eye. Well I was never nervous about that I realized the weight of the significance of what was happening and that was the first time and maybe only time in my life where I got nervous.
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It took me a little time to get those first words out but he masterfully took a few beads after my question and made a rather dark joke about well I don't know it would be like to own the web it sounds attractive and the entire room just lost it laughing we sparred for a while
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Generally Charming a little invasion was finally he says well what is this obscure thing you need implemented which was not obscure at all it was the CSS specification which he promised then and there to ensure would move forward and made a public commitment to make it happen.
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So things begin to align we had rigorous markup oh, far better ways of doing CSS including the emergence of what we call Progressive design and adaptive design from Ethan marcotte and Aaron Gustafson respectively. Things started getting exciting and we had some browser equality.
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So this guy Dave in Vancouver started project where he did a proof-of-concept using more meaningful xhtml non presentational but what we would term semantic as in meaningful as much as possible use of elements to the content. So this guy Dave build a clean XHTML Hage with content
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Sorry xhtml page with content nobody could touch that they could only add CSS leaving a proof-of-concept that would appeared on the visual screen was beautiful while the underlying content and markup was accessible clean and the same. Shout out if you remember or did a design!
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Juicy stuff! IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, any browser of the day was rendering now a to stack layer with markup and content in xhtml that was accessible, diverse beautiful. Fonts Dynamic CSS menus using no JavaScript and on and on a list of awesome transcending the constraints
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I was working on some book here in Tucson one day in my office and I get an email. The email was so polite and kind and said hey my name is Dave I want to thank you for inspiring me through one of your books to take my what I believe was an art degree or graphic design degree
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He adds by the way I'm the Dave if you've not seen it who's been working on the proof-of-concept project this CSS zen garden of course I've seen it I fell out of my damn chair and there was your Miss Molly not knowing whether to laugh cry or both so I did both
May 23, 2022 · 4:24 AM UTC
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I finally pick myself up and was just humbled and in awe of an experience of knowing that we can change the world together even if we are apart. It was the moment is teacher became a humble student indeed. Fast forward a few months we meet up at South by Southwest in Austin Texas
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We start talking and he's picking my brain about book writing and ideas and it comes upon us that hey maybe together with his design abilities and his genius idea and my book writing experience and organizational experience we could have a potential game-changer on our hands
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At this point the CSS zen garden had grown so large with so many brilliant beautiful design work and I went off to the Waterside conference who where the agency for book authors such as myself and I ran into New Riders publisher Nancy who said hey got any ideas Molly?
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And so one of the best selling web design books in history Zen of CSS design was born as an idea. Dave lived in Vancouver I was traveling as well as living in Tucson Arizona we somehow figured out a workflow got with the designers picked out what we were going to work
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And that wonderful book was born. The advantage of the book is that an extended the experience of what Dave had done other designers and developers who got involved and created one of the most beautiful web destinations proving content markup CSS and accessibility we're beautiful
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The one thing left out however was JavaScript and behavior and in the next few years as browsers began to evolve and Microsoft lose the long and Google became powerful and JavaScript via ecma and @BrendanEich as well as the Mozilla team Advanced JavaScript as well.
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For me it was one of the most exciting moments in web history to see those things come together this lasted a few years where evangelism and growth and better compatibility really started coming together along with other cool things like xmlhttprequest Ajax, restful development
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Of course Matt Mullen Woods wonderful WordPress and other platforms begin to emerge including sweater which had already been taking off and Facebook as our primary social networks with bloggers and other independent blogs becoming the new of the day. The phone rings in my office
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I pick it up and it's one of my friends from the Bill Gates Microsoft crew who said hey Molly still wants the annoying web standards girl back and so along with a new group of folks including Jonathan Snook Julie Lerman and the whole list of people at that second mix and mash
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Got to meet up with Bill again and this time it was ideate which had problems of its own but we're still moving forward happened and the mix Conference of that year in Las Vegas was enormous. I sat down on the couch exhausted in one of the Showcase rooms.
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Talk about freaky on one side of me Douglas Crockfordd on the other none other than John resig. Here's these guys sitting on either side of this Miss give me my mark up CSS and accessibility has JavaScript the good parts to my right John JavaScript framework jQuery on my left.
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Oh yes kids something was afoot if only I could know then what I knew now? within several use with Frameworks and JavaScript itself then the iPhone and my very mixed feelings on HTML5 and here we were looking at application development for the World Wide Web.
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Weather for good for bad for ugly for otherwise I don't believe innovation and the growth of the World Wide Web as an applications platform as well as a platform of the documents soon emerged unfortunately we took a loss at the w3c when the HTML xhtml w g lost its Charter.
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This has always nod at my personal sense of confusion. The vision of a very semantic document-based web for research and Science in Academia Etc using real semantics, aunt ologies 4 publishing collapsed as did everything declarative and we came to a world of web apps everywhere.
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I couldn't really understand that one had to be more important than the other but the constant promise of HTML5 semantics I think full many ads as an educated lexical semanticist I was not convinced. I wanted all of it why not? A lot of this was happening without the w3c
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Why couldn't we have it all? Moreover why couldn't we have it all and retain not just a declarative but the empowerment of the declarative to keep things truly semantic to keep our initial web design principles and to keep the idea that applications could evolve.
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As many know I got very sick with a rare disorder not so rare as it killed two famous women Madame Marie Curie and Eleanor Roosevelt. A GoFundMe account raise the money I needed for advanced g-csf granulocytes Colony stimulating factors that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars
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Well now I get weepy because I get to tell the story of how you saved my life guess what you saved my life. It was a long hard road and it still is but in 2016 I got to return see Folks at the w3c and work a bit with other browsers before my husband and mother died the same year.
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Absolutely devastating but never did I stop paying attention Edward Snowden had just a few years earlier whistle blown and was in Russia and Brenda Nike came out with a new browser called Brave and The Onion network with TOR browser based on the last remaining independent engine
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Another chapter began this time much darker and a lot of different worlds in which we saw a merge. But we didn't stop and we haven't stopped and JavaScript via ecma 6 and CSS working group worked and we saw strengthening of accessibility and a push from Missoula politically
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And we entered a time we are in now where we see a proliferation of so many Frameworks libraries B pieces of applications the whole no code low-code approach Rage Against the Cascade and CSS and then return to really sloppy markup apis Galore that powerful indeed we saw a problem
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We had no Global standardized consistent adaptable sustainable education that met the needs of our industry to keep us learning languages as well as innovating with reusable code and Frameworks and other advantages of tooling which is part of my concerns today. Add to that
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The political rise of separatism around the world inverter intervention and malicious advertising via social networks and predatory capitalistic ideals on what was meant to be a free and open platform websites going to the side well everything application coming to the Forefront
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We need a call to Arms. We need to secure our platforms we need checks and balances it is not a joke at all to say that we have lost incredible people to internet freedoms and the right to do evolutionary technology open and collaborative way. So what are we to do?
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These are dark times we have separatist, racist, binary fights, a world of malicious advertising, Bots, misinformation, agitation to violence, and yet a spirit Among Us that perseveres. Sir Tim berners-lee is working on solid his idea of one solution we have so much work to do
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We also have in my opinion way too much technical fragmentation in framework development CSS moving away from declarative and don't tell me it isn't because I see syntax from the C language in there a little too much and well JavaScript is strong we need to reset a full stack
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We need to know a little more about how to shore up our stack we need to secure every layer of the internet the world wide web and we need to deal with single stakeholder agreed as we see with social networks oh stop do we need alternative networks like onion?
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I think we need to reframe our world wide web first as accessible and I'm not speaking about the technology of accessibility or the idea that it has anything to do with disability rather we empower ourselves with tools so strong and do not obfuscated content. We refine our tools.
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I don't need to force a web specification to make an application when an application language to do it just as well what we do need to do is look at our tool box and say hey this tool is best for this and that one for that and not be hammering screws and screwing nails.
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