Laura Lemay
I started writing web pages in the 1990's. At the time, it wasn't as if you could run over to your local bookstore and pick up a book on HTML. I remember spending hours with the MS DOS Edit program. I'd edit my web pages in Edit and test them on mosaic. I became really good at making a change and reloading it to see it's effect. In fact, to this day my process is pretty much the same. I use different programs but the idea of editing in one program and seeing the effects in another hasn't changed.
At some point books started to hit the shelves on how to edit HTML. There was The Mosaic Handbook for Microsoft Windows [1565920945]. I don't remember being pretty excited about finding it. Some time later I discovered a book by Laura Lemay - Teach Yourself Web Publishing In 14 Days [1575210142]. I remember devouring that Lemay book. Not only did it explain how to write HTML but it went into detail about style and best practices. She would offer advice on creating links seamlessly and avoiding the "click here" malady suffered by so many HTML writers at the time. In short, she offered a holistic approach towards writing web pages. She also had a knack for delivering the information so that it was easy to understand. Unlike some elitist technophile authors who expect you to figure out the preliminaries on your own, she explained things so that you could start editing right away.
A friend of mine liked the book so much that they ended up borrowing it permanently. When I last saw it, it was marked up like a religious fanatic's bible. Highlighter marks and post-its littered the pages like the frantic markings of someone who saw the future racing towards them faster than ever before. As it turns out, that's pretty much what happened. The web spread like a virus and changed everything.
Not surprisingly, Lemay became a prolific writer of web howto books in the years to follow. If you wrote HTML in the 90's you no doubt recognize the name. Recently, I was making a reference to an idea in one of Lemay's books. I decided to add a link to Lemay's Wikipedia page in case the intended recipient of the email didn't recognize the name. I was surprised to discover that there wasn't already a Laura Lemay Wikipedia page. In an attempt to correct that obvious oversight, I've added a new Wikipedia page. It's terribly basic but I'll add more when I find the time. Aside from my trivia note on the daisy bell page, it's the only contribution I've made so far to the Wikipedia site.