Tim Bray

I am a Canadian; I graduated from the University of Guelph in 1981 in math and CS. After on-the-job training from Digital (R.I.P.) and GTE, I got the best job in the world in 1987, managing the New Oxford English Dictionary Project at the University of Waterloo. This project led to the founding of Open Text Corporation in 1989, and an Internet IPO. XML was my first project after I became an independent consultant in 1996.

I had never really done any serious standards work, let alone written a specification, before this project. My main motivations in the XML project were:

• To produce something that programmers could implement,
• To make sure the internationalization was thorough and usable, and
• To make sure that XML would provide good support for search and retrieval applications.

Back-link to spec