Features

Molly E. Holzschlag: Author, Speaker, and Teacher

Molly Holzschlag has worked for over a decade in the online world. She has written and contributed to over twenty books covering Internet-related topics. She has amazingly rolled out three books in the second half of 2001 including XML, HTML, XHTML Magic, Perl Web Site Workshop, and Color for Websites : Digital Media. She is the former executive editor of Webreview, a weekly site dedicated to Web professionals.

There are so many newsletters and e-zines covering web design available today, what would be valid reasons for publishing another online newsletter / ezine? How can a newsletter / ezine distinguish itself?

Right now is a time to sit back and watch. If you’re already doing publishing on either a commercial or independent basis, keep doing it, and keep trying to do it better. If you aren’t involved in publishing now, I would say put a lot of time into the observation and study of what has been and is now successful on the Web and in print, and why.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to publish a newsletter / ezine?

Start with the basic question of “who is my audience?” Designers should know that, developers should, and certainly anyone trying to publish information should know that too. Begin there. Then, clearly define your publication’s intent. Find the need in your audience, fulfill that need.

What is the PERL Web Site Workshop about? How does it differ from O’Reilly’s popular PERL series?

Perl Web Site Workshop is a book for Web designers who want to understand more about how to make Perl work on their Web sites. For the record, I don’t know anything about Perl programming, I co-authored the book with Jason Pellerin. Jason knows Perl. I contributed the designer voice and a great deal of editorial structure.

The book, interestingly enough, was originally written for O’Reilly. In the end, we mutually and on good terms decided the book would need a deep rewrite in order to match the audience (see what I mean about audience?) that O’Reilly typically caters to. While many of their books cover a very broad range of topics, they are best regarded for their advanced books on programming.

Sams Publishing has several excellent series, very hands on that help introduce products and technologies to beginning and intermediate audiences. This book was a much better suit to that audience and we’re all delighted with the way it worked out.

Many may not be aware of your book, Color for Websites: Digital Media Design, since it is published by a UK company. How is this different from Lynda Weinman’s well known color-related books? What is the focus?

Color for Websites is a highly polished, visual book published by a graphic design publishing company rather than a computer book publisher. That makes a difference, because the emphasis is on learning through visual inspiration. There are some fascinating aspects of this book, particularly the last chapter, which describes influences of culture and gender on human perception of color.

Tell us about your book, XML, HTML, XHTML Magic.

Well, this isn’t really my book at all. I was the lead author, which means also that I directed the editorial voice of the book. However, the content is totally collaborative: Christopher Schmitt, John Kuhlman, Martin L. DeVore, Jason Cranford Teague, and Steve Franklin all contributed projects.

I like this book because of its collaborative nature and because it’s well designed and fun.

You can’t make a mistake with XHTML, otherwise it wouldn’t be XHTML. What are some of the frequent mistakes encountered by users attempting XHTML?

I’m going to change this to include HTML and XHTML, because these guidelines work no matter which one you’re authoring. Follow these practices (note that not all of them are required for conformance in a given language or version, but follow this and you won’t go wrong in either):

1. Understand what a Document Type Definition (DTD) is
2. Pick a DTD for your site or project (this will be based on demographics and site intent)
3. Understand what a DOCTYPE declaration is and use it
4. Properly structure your documents (html, head, title, body; use of headers, paragraphs, and lists)
5. Wherever possible, separate presentation from structure (ie. Font from paragraph). This is done in HTML and XHTML with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
6. Wherever possible, use CSS layouts over table based layouts
7. Author all elements and attribute names in lower case.
8. Be sure to close any non-empty element (e.g. p, li) with a closing tag
9. Quote all attribute values
10. Validate your documents

In an article you wrote last year, you mentioned that XHTML was not catching on. Recently, we’ve seen a recent influx of XHTML plus CSS pages. Does this change your opinion of XHTML’s inability to catch the wave?

Absolutely! It is now becoming cool to pay attention to W3C recommendations. How weird, but great is that?

However, most of these XHTML-based pages are personal Web sites or designer Web sites rather than large company Web sites. What do you think will happen? Will the designers influence the companies?

Yes, I think that designers will influence their clients. I also think that clients in general are getting more educated. As higher bandwidth and contemporary, recommendations-compliant browsers continue to proliferate worldwide, we’ll naturally shed a lot of the cross-browser compatibility concerns that we’ve had to deal with.

In many ways, we really haven’t discovered the true way to design the Web. We’re getting closer. It’s the greatest challenge of the Web designer and developer’s profession: to create sites that are completely sound both technologically and esthetically.

Many conference, magazines, and ezines have dropped the “Web Design / Development” themes in exchange for Web services and technology leadership. What are your thoughts on this change?

The constant renaming of things confuses the masses.

In an appearance at Web Design World in New Orleans, you and Jeffrey Zeldman took a look at Web sites and commented on the good and bad. What are three important factors that make a successful Web site?

That depends upon your definition of success! For me, there’s only one real factor in a site’s success: Are you serving your audience? This holds true for commercial as well as personal sites.

And three problem areas that can ruin a Web site?

Ad banners, ad banners, and ad banners. They don’t work anyway, so can we make them go away, please?

What are you working on? What is next for you? Where can your fans find you other than at Molly.com?

I have several books in the works, which will be announced on my site and in my newsletter. I’m also starting an as yet-to-be-named new column covering contemporary techniques and issues in Web design and development. I’m speaking at a few low key events, I am glad for a little break in the very aggressive traveling schedule I used to have, but I do miss the conference scene, mostly as it kept me in regular face to face with my favorite friends and peers.

Any words of wisdom for the frustrated Web designer in today’s environment?

Look at this time as an opportunity. I’m struggling to do that myself, but I know it’s true. Despite the problems with the economy and global events-no, because of them-we must somehow find ways to work toward better goals in communications. And fundamentally, that’s what the Web is about. So let’s all learn to do it better.