On Our Radar: Precious Humans

Molly Holzschlag is a great educator, tough fighter, and vital friend of what folks are now calling “the open web,” and she needs our help.

She took over as project leader when I left The Web Standards Project in 2002. In that role, Molly did hugely important (and often thanklessly unheralded) work bringing improved compliance, plus a renewed respect for web standards, to some famously intractable browser companies. She also directed The Web Standards Project’s important and multi-dimensional educational outreach effort.

Between those efforts, her two decades of public speaking, and the dozens of web development books she has written, Molly has contributed meaningfully to the foundational thinking and understanding of tens of thousands of web developers, designers, and engineers. If you don’t know her name and her work, you don’t fully understand this industry.

Molly has been diagnosed with chronic pancytopenia, a life-threatening blood disorder, and her insurance is about to disappear. She’ll need the support of friends and strangers to afford lifesaving blood treatments and medications. Pray for her, chant for her, help her if you can. —Jeffrey Zeldman, founder and publisher

Your weekend reading

1. I’m a big fan of the Library of Congress Flickr feed (mostly for the old-timey photographs of the type that Shorpy cleans up and posts) and recently they’ve been posting old graphic posters from the collection. Like this poster for a 1938 photography exhibition in New York City. The description for each piece links back to the Library of Congress, where they often have very high-resolution images available to download. —Mike Pick, creative director and designer
2. This week, Wired talked up new startup Doxa, which aims to use an “OKCupid-like” algorithm to match women with tech companies where they’re likely to thrive. It’s an interesting approach to getting beyond “diversity” percentages, and it’s nice to see Wired lead with the truth: “Tech has a diversity problem.” But I was more convinced by Danilo Campos’s take: that “shoving underrepresented people into the existing startup order”—even using smart algorithms—won’t make those organizations actually ready to support diverse employees. “If you’re serving at a place where no one in leadership understands your needs, getting accommodation for those needs can become challenging—or even alienating, when you’re misunderstood,” he writes. In other words, crunching survey data to help women find a better fit might be nice, but real change happens when leadership teams are as diverse as the people they’re trying to hire. —Sara Wachter-Boettcher, editor-in-chief
3. Richard Rutter has Kickstarted a book he’s writing on web typography. I remember first reading an article Richard wrote for us on the topic back in 2007, and this book has been in the works since before then. Richard lives and breathes this stuff: he helped set up Fontdeck, and has also run several installations of Ampersand Conference. I have a feeling this book is going to be the canonical reference on web typography for years to come. —Anna Debenham, technical editor
4. I was doing some reading on SVG this week for a project we’re working on. I came across Jake Giltsoff‘s SVG on the Web, a single-purpose site outlining the use of the SVG format. Giltsoff went into quite a bit of depth, addressing the use of SVG as an image type from a development perspective, and responsive approaches to using the format. It’s a bookmark-worthy resource for in-depth or at-a-glance referencing. —Erin Lynch, production manager
5. I was privileged to hear Leslie Jensen-Inman speak last week, and she explained how adding a single question to the daily stand-ups at Center Centre has helped the team create an environment that is enthusiastically supportive of ongoing learning. “What is the most important thing I learned since the last time we met and how will what I learned change the way I approach things in the future?” In Leslie’s Meet for Learning, she goes into more detail about the ways this open-ended question has changed their work culture for the better. —Aaron Parkening, project manager

Overheard in ALA Slack

Your Friday gif