Dan Connolly

Other W3C Team Members to Contact

As of June 2010, these are some other team members responsible for things I used to work on:

HTML Standards (tags and attributes)

In the HTML Working Group, the W3C team contact is Mike Smith (who works near Tokyo), and the Domain Lead (manager) is Philippe Le Hégaret (near Boston).

HTML Validation Service

Ted Guild (Boston) and various other members of the W3C systems team run the validation services. See the www-validator mailing list for discussion and support and public-qa-dev for development.

Technical Architecture of the Web

In the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG), which includes work related to URIs/URLs and HTTP, the team contact is Yves Lafon (Nice), and the chair is Tim Berners-Lee (Boston).

Semantic Web Standards: RDF, OWL, SPARQL, GRDDL

The leader of the W3C Semantic Web Activity is Ivan Herman (Amsterdam). Contact Sandro Hawke (Boston) or follow public-owl-dev for OWL work. For SPARQL work, contact Eric Prud'hommeaux (Boston) or follow public-sparql-dev. For GRDDL work, contact Harry Halpin (Edinburgh), and for all of the above, plus microformats, linked data, and related topics, follow [email protected].

XML

In W3C's XML Working Groups, the team contacts are Michael Sperberg-McQueen (Santa Fe) and Liam Quin (Toronto).

For interview requests, membership questions, etc., see About W3C: Contact.

Bio, with a Note on Collaboration

My work on HTML started a couple years after graduating from U.T. Austin, with messages such as rethinking the HTML DTD to www-talk in July 1992:

I have been troubled by the fact that HTML documents look like SGML documents, but technically, they are not. So I have tried to come up with a DTD that captures the features of HTML.

I have come to the conclusion that HTML has very little structure, and that this is by design.

I am beginning to wonder how much the needs of WWW have in common with the features of SGML.

In 2006, I was invited back to U.T. Austin by the President of the university, and the person who introduced me to the symposium had this to say:

Dan Connolly is a research scientist at MIT Computer Science and AI Lab – CSAIL – and a member of the technical staff of the Worldwide Web Consortium, also known as W3C, which develops interoperable technologies, specifications, guidelines, software, et cetera, to lead the web, as it says, to its full potential.

In particular, he's a member of the Semantic Web Coordination Group established to serve a leadership role in both the design of enabling specifications and technologies that support the automation, integration and reuse of data.

He is, I'm glad to say, a UT graduate from the CS department. He's authored several important papers and worked closely with Tim Berners-Lee on semantic web technologies and policy issues.

From '95 to '97, and this is definitely worth noting, during the struggle between Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, Dan chaired the working group which ensured that HTML remained an open standard, and for that, he was named by Interactive Magazine in '97 as one of the 25 unsung heroes of the web.

Details

• resume/vita: Computer Science degree from the University of Texas at Austin, Software Engineer at a supercomputer company (Convex) and a start-up (Dazel), then W3C work on HTML, XML, etc. Meanwhile, some MIT research (research interest: investigating the value of formal descriptions of complex systems like the Web, especially in the consensus-building process).
• publications/writings: a few academic publications, plus misc articles on programming, early design of the web, collaboration, and standards
• presentations, appearances, and events on HTML, XML, microformats, security, formal systems, Internet protocols (IETF), python programming, etc. (with some photos).