Re: Father of XML?

[Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>]

At 12:38 PM 20/07/01 +0800, Rick Jelliffe wrote:
>So insisting that Jon should be the sole bearer of the title "the father of
>XML" is as silly as calling Tim Bray the "inventor" 

Not nearly as silly.  No informed person could consider me the
inventor [I only ask not to be blamed for the over-enthusiasm
of conference organizers].  But XML would not have happened 
without Jon's tireless, and for a long time thankless, banging 
on doors that didn't want to open and shouting into ears that 
didn't want to listen, and his subsequent firm grip on the 
steering oar through some very swirly and dangerous waters.  
There can be no doubt that if Jon hadn't stepped up, we might 
today be living in a landscape of competing fragile proprietary 
binary kludges a la Flash and PDF, with what we'd now refer to
as "<html:class" being the state of the art in nonprocedural
markup.  Shudder.

Calling Charles "The Inventor of Markup" is arguably 
disrespectful to generations of blue-pencil-wielding scholars.
But "The Chief Inventor of Descriptive Markup" would be 100% 
accurate, and it seems to me that "Inventor of Markup" is a 
fair abbreviation for non-pedants.

As to Charles' relationship to XML, I observe that he is
probably the world's most successful publisher of XML-related
dead trees.  So virtue does not go entirely unrewarded. -Tim