My sincere condolences to the family of Michael Sperberg-McQueen and the community at large. He will be sorely missed. I first met Michael at an XMLPrague conference, I think it was 2010. I had presented a poster on Engineering Succinct DOM based on my PhD research work. Michael was the final speaker of the conference, giving what I would become accustomed as famous closing keynotes summarising XML conferences. Enjoying his talk he suddenly mentioned details about my poster on succinct data structures and made links to another talk in the conference. That was a proud moment for me for someone unknown as myself. I was so amazed how he was able to unravel the topic with not much time and make links in such a way.

I moved on to work for Saxonica and got to know Michael better in the years that followed at conferences, W3C XPath/XQuery 3.1 working group calls and meet-ups.

I must end by saying Michael’s closing keynotes were so profound and you had to listen, as they always captivated one’s attention. At one Balisage conference in Canada Michael in his humility spoke like he was preaching the phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants". I don’t know if he knew it or believed it, he was a giant in every sense for what he did for the XML community and beyond.