The Markup Community has Lost a Giant:
CM Sperberg-McQueen died on 16 August 2024
Michael described himself as:
- Principal, Black Mesa Technologies.
- Visiting professor, Program in Digital Humanities, Dept. of Linguistics and Literary Studies, Technical University of Darmstadt (Institut für Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft, Technische Universität Darmstadt) summer semester (April - July) 2015 (my TU home page).
- Co-chair of Balisage: The Markup Conference (every August in Rockville, Maryland or most recently, virtually).
- Participant in the W3C Invisible XML Community Group, which has developed and published the invisible-XML spec.
- I have a blog called Messages in a bottle. It's mostly about markup, with digressions to other things on my mind.
He summarized his background this way:
- A member of the technical staff at the World Wide Web Consortium from 1998 to 2009. While at W3C, I filled several roles: member and later chair of the W3C XML Coordination Group; Member and staff contact of the W3C XML Schema Working Group and co-editor of the XSD 1.1 specification; Member and staff contact of the XSL Working Group; Member and staff contact of the Service Modeling Language (SML) Working Group; member and alternate staff contact of the XML Processing Model Working Group; member and alternate staff contact of the XML Query Working Group. I served as the leader of the W3C's Architecture Domain from July 2001 to September 2003, before escaping back to technical work. Administratively, I was attached to the MIT host site and was thus an employee of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
- Co-editor, Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 spec (1998).
- Co-editor, with Lou Burnard, of the Text Encoding Initiative's Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange (1994).
- Co-chair from 2000 through 2006 of the annual conference Extreme Markup Languages (before helping to form the new Balisage conference).
- Served as Editor in chief of the Text Encoding Initiative, an international cooperative project to develop and disseminate guidelines for the encoding and interchange of electronic text for research (1988-2000).
- Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Stanford University (1985).