Eliot came to the notice of the SGML world when, as an employee of IBM, he (in co-operation with Wayne Wohler, who deserves some mention in these notes simply for being the first person that I know of to have proposed a minimal SGML) engineered the IBM IDDOC document architecture, a system for automating technical pubs that probably remains unmatched in its ambition and comprehensiveness.
Eliot has moved on to employment with smaller companies than IBM, and to editorship of the ISO HyTime (10744) standard. In the XML discussions, his voice was often raised to point out with brutal clarity what we would lose by discarding this feature or that from SGML. Despite his enthusiastic championing of the utility of the most arcane features of SGML, he has been a strong supporter of the basic XML idea both in theory and in practice.
Copyright © 1998, Tim Bray. All rights reserved.