This month we were honored to welcome Molly Holzschlag to Refresh Detroit. Molly is considered one of the godmothers of the Web. Her talk centered on“From Documents to Apps: Evolving an Open Web”.
As an advocate for open standards, she outlined how the open web allows for the empowerment of all individuals via global access.
She started her talk with a quote from Hillman Curtis I’m fond of and wanted to share:
“Be prepared to reinvent yourself. Be prepared to go out on a limb occasionally, and be prepared to do the things that you feel strongly about”
- Hillman Curtis
A few things that stood out for me while she went through her presentation and interacted with the audience were:
- Setup a personal advisory committee, no one person knows everything about the web.
- It’s survival of the most adaptive, not survival of the fittest.
- On the Web nothing matters, browsers, OS, data format, or language.
- The definition of “open” often means transparency. But the preference is to mean authenticity.
- The many things rule: Never look at one thing and think it is just one thing.
- Adopt an error forgiveness. We cannot know it all.
- ARIA is the important piece that most Web sites are missing.
Molly gave us five main points to move forward
- Support existing content
- Ensure interoperability
- Define the user agent behavior (Solve problems from real-world issues)
- Better handle errors
- Evolve what we have
Refresh Detroit 