Contributors
Timothy Appnel has 13 years of corporate IT and Internet systems development experience and is the principal of Appnel Internet Solutions, a technology consultancy specializing in Movable Type and TypePad systems. In addition to being a technologist, Tim has a background in publications which includes cofounding and managing Oculus Magazine, a free indie music and arts 'zine, for over seven years. He is an occasional contributor to the O'Reilly Network and maintains a personal weblog of his thoughts at http://www.timaoutloud.org/.
Tara Calishan is the editor of the online newsletter ResearchBuzz (http://www.researchbuzz.com) and the author or coauthor of several books, including the bestselling Google Hacks (O'Reilly) and Spidering Hacks (O'Reilly). A search engine enthusiast for many years, she began her foray into the world of Perl when Google released its API in April 2002.
John Cowan is the senior Internet systems developer for Reuters Health, a very small subsidiary of Reuters, a wire service and financial news company. He was responsible for Reuters Health's current news publication system, which distributes about 100 articles per day to about 200 wholesale news customers, mostly in XML. (Yes, so most of them want HTML and get XHTML. Deal.) John is a member of the W3C XML Core WG (and the editor of the XML Infoset and XML 1.1 specifications) and the closed Unicore mailing list of the Unicode Technical Committee. He also hangs out on far too many other technical mailing lists, masquerading as the expert on A for the B mailing list and the expert on B for the A mailing list. His friends say that he knows at least something about almost everything, while his enemies say that he knows far too much about far too much. In his copious spare time, John constructed and maintains TagSoup, a SAX-compatible Java parser for ugly, nasty HTML, and the Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Simple Hypertext DTD, a small subset of XHTML Basic suitable for adding rich text to otherwise bald and unconvincing document types (now available in RELAX NG, too). He is interested in languages?natural, constructed, and computer?and is the author of The Complete Lojban Language. He is also the current maintainer of FIGlet, the world's only Unicode rendering engine that uses ASCII characters instead of pixels.
Leigh Dodds is an application developer and designer specializing in Java and XML. He currently manages a small engineering team at Ingenta (http://www.ingenta.com/), and is responsible for developing bibliographic content management and document delivery systems and services. Leigh is also a freelance author and has contributed numerous articles and tutorials to xmlhack.com, XML.com, and IBM developerWorks. Leigh is based in Bath, United Kingdom.
Micah Dubinko is a software engineer who lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with his wife and child, and works for Verity, Inc. (http://www.verity.com/). He is the author of XForms Essentials (O'Reilly), available online at http://xformsinstitute.com. He also served as an editor and author of the W3C XForms specification (http://www.w3.org/TR/xforms/), and participated in the XForms effort beginning in September 1999, nine months before the official Working Group was chartered. He was awarded CompTIA CDIA (Certified Document Imaging Architect) certification in January 2001.
Bob DuCharme (http://www.snee.com/bob) is the author of XSLT Quickly (Manning Publications), XML: The Annotated Specification (Prentice Hall), SGML CD (Prentice Hall), and Operating Systems Handbook (McGraw Hill). He writes the monthly "Transforming XML" column for XML.com and has contributed to XML Magazine, XML Journal, IBM developerWorks, XML Developer, and XML Handbook (Prentice Hall). A consulting software engineer at LexisNexis, Bob received his BA in religion from Columbia University and his master's in computer science from New York University.
Hans Fugal is the author of desert.vim, the number-one rated color scheme at vim.org (http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=105). He also wrote rnc.vim, a Vim syntax highlighting specification for the RELAX NG compact syntax (http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=387). He is the author of the gdmxml schema, an XML implementation of the GENTECH Genealogical Data Model (http://gdmxml.fugal.net). He has a bachelor's degree in computer science from Brigham Young University and is preparing to pursue a PhD in computer science. He is very interested in computer music and maintains a few computer music-related packages in Debian. He plays the piano and the organ. He is presently employed as a system administrator at Wencor West, Inc. (http://www.wencor.com/).
Jason Hunter is the author of Java Servlet Programming (O'Reilly) and coauthor of Java Enterprise Best Practices (O'Reilly). He's an Apache Member, and as Apache's representative to the Java Community Process Executive Committee, he established a landmark agreement for open source Java. He is publisher of Servlets.com and XQuery.com, an original contributor to Apache Tomcat, creator of the com.oreilly.servlet library, and a member of the Expert Groups responsible for servlet, JSP, JAXP, and XQJ API development, and he sits on the W3C XQuery Working Group. He co-created the open source JDOM library to enable optimized Java and XML integration. He works at Mark Logic (http://www.marklogic.com/), where he has been working on their XQuery implementation since June 2002.
Rick Jelliffe is CTO of Topologi Pty. Ltd. (http://www.topologi.com), a company making XML-related desktop tools, and spends most of his time working on editors, validators, and publishing-related markup. His current main standards project is editing an upcoming ISO standard for the Schematron schema language (http://www.ascc.net/xml/schematron), which he originally developed. As well as his work with ISO SC34 and the original XML group at W3C, Rick was a sporadic member of the W3C Schema Working Group and the W3C Internationalization Interest Group. He is the author of XML & SGML Cookbook: Recipes on Structured Information (Prentice Hall PTR). He lead the Chinese XML Now project at Academia Sinica Computing Centre (http://www.ascc.net/xml). He lives in Sydney, Australia, and has an economics degree from Sydney University.
Sean McGrath is CTO of Propylon, an XML solutions company. He is an internationally acknowledged authority on XML and related standards. He served as an invited expert to the W3C's Expert Group that defined XML in 1998. He is the author of three books on markup languages published by Prentice Hall and writes the weekly "e-business in the enterprise" newsletter for ITWorld (http://www.itworld.com/). His blog is at http://seanmcgrath.blogspot.com.
Sean Nolan founded Software Poetry (http://www.softwarepoetry.com/), and was the CTO for drugstore.com, where he was the fifth employee and led the design and implementation of their award-winning e-commerce systems. While at drugstore.com, Sean was honored as one of the nation's Premier 100 IT Leaders for 2001 by Computerworld magazine.
Thomas Passin is a systems engineer with Mitretek Systems (http://www.mitretek.org/), a nonprofit systems and information engineering company. He graduated with a BS in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and studied graduate-level physics at the University of Chicago. He has been active in XML-related work since 1998. He helped to develop XML versions of message standards for Advanced Traveler Information Systems (http://www.sae.org/its/standards/atishome.htm), including translations of the message schemas from ASN.1 to XML. He developed an XML/XSLT-based questionnaire generation system. He is also active in the area of Topic Maps, and developed the open source TM4JScript Javascript topic map engine. Mr. Passin is the author of Explorer's Guide to the Semantic Web, forthcoming from Manning in 2004 (http://www.manning.com/passin).
Dave Pawson is from Peterborough in the United Kingdom. He has an aerospace background, and is currently working for http://www.rnib.org.uk on web standards accessibility. In his spare time, he maintains the XSLT FAQ (http://www.dpawson.co.uk/xsl/xslfaq.html) and a DocBook FAQ (http://www.dpawson.co.uk/docbook/). His interest in DSSSL and XSL-FO led to the publication of the O'Reilly book XSL-FO.
Dean Peters is a graying code-monkey who by day is a mild-mannered IIS/.NET programmer, but by night becomes a not-so-evil Linux genius as he develops software and articles for his blogs, http://HealYourChurchWebSite.com and http://blogs4God.com.
Eddie Robertsson finished his master's degree in computer science at the Lund Institute of Technology in Sweden in 1999. Shortly thereafter he moved to Sydney, Australia for employment at Allette Systems, where he worked as an XML developer and trainer specializing in XML schema languages. During his last few years in Sydney, Eddie worked very closely with Rick Jelliffe and Topologi with the design and implementation of Topologi's suite of XML tools. In mid-2003, Eddie moved back to Sweden, where he continues to work with software engineering and XML-related technologies.
Richard Rose began life at an early age and rapidly started absorbing information, finding that he liked the taste of information relating to computers the best. He has since feasted upon information from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, where he earned a BSc with Honors. He lives in Bristol but currently does not work, and he will be returned for store credit as soon as somebody can find the receipt. Richard writes programs for the intellectual challenge. He also turns his hand to system administration and has done the obligatory time in tech support. For fun, he juggles, does close-up magic, and plays the guitar badly. He can also be found on IRC, where he currently is a network operator known as rik on the Open and Free Technology Community (irc.oftc.net).
Michael Smith is a software non-executive living and working in Tokyo, with a particular fondness for RELAX NG and DocBook. He's a member of the DocBook Technical Committee (http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=docbook), is involved with the DocBook Open Repository development team, and is the owner/moderator of the xml-doc mailing list (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xml-doc/). In the good old days, he wrote for the xmlhack.com web site in some pretty select company, among whom were Uche Ogbuji, Edd Dumbill, Micah Dubinko, Simon St.Laurent, and Eric van der Vlist.
Simon St.Laurent is an editor with O'Reilly Media, Inc. Prior to that, he'd been a web developer, network administrator, computer book author, and XML troublemaker. He lives in Dryden, New York. His books include XML: A Primer, XML Elements of Style, Building XML Applications, Cookies, and Sharing Bandwidth. He is an occasional contributor to XML.com.
