Michael and I used to hang out occasionally last millennium at the SGML conferences, then we were intensely close in 1996 and 1997, turning a series of working-group decisions into the XML 1.0 spec. That Web page was produced by running horrible Perl code over a file named XML.xml, a copy of which remains in a dusty corner of the computer I’m typing this on. Many more of the words in that document were Michael’s than were mine - I joked that I wrote 40% and he wrote 80%, before the ruthless editing started.

He and I were in remarkably complete harmony during that short intense time; remarkable given the galactic scale of our combined pedantry. We argued a lot but never was a voice raised nor a feeling hurt. I remember visiting Chicago and spending hours in an airless room at the University he inhabited, bashing our heads together to produce a comprehensible description of entity declaration and interpretation. Neither of us were happy with Section 4 but then we agreed that we didn’t know how to do better.

That process had a permanent effect on how I think important work ought to be done; but I think Michael had already known the things that I learned.

I can never remember him exhibiting the slightest mean-spiritedness, nor any even slight failures of ethical and technical integrity. He enriched my life. I’m proud to have worked with him. I regret deeply that we followed diverging fields of interest that resulted in our losing touch with each other.

With Michael’s passing, the world is somewhat less good and less wise.

I am going to close with the description of Michael in my extremely long Blog entry, XML People: “C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen has a name that is unusually long by any standard and was, during our many months of teleconferences, mangled every time by the operator. He knows a great deal about the use of computers to get complicated things printed, and is a language designer of some repute. Michael is erudite on a frightening variety of subjects, speaks perfect German, is a polished writer and a competent computer programmer. He became famous in the SGML community first as a gifted and stirring speaker – the perennial closing-keynote at our big conferences – and as a leader of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). The TEI is the result of years of collaborative work by many of the world’s best humanities-computing academics. It is a family of SGML-based languages which are used to store an amazing variety of electronic scholarly texts including Chaucer, Strindberg, the correspondence of Proust, Serbian Proverbs, Voltaire, and Japanese Map Task Dialogues. Michael, about 8 feet tall, correspondingly broad-shouldered, and with a bit of middle-aged spread, would be an intimidating presence were he not so professorial. He is at all times in strict conformance with the dress code of the Midwestern academic: tweeds, checks, scarf, cloth cap. ”