Biography:Gavin Nicol

From HandWiki
Short description: American software developer and researcher


Gavin Nicol (Gavin Thomas Nicol) is a software developer and researcher who has made contributions to the development of the World Wide Web and on the Document Object Model (DOM).[1]

Career timeline

Nicol was a member of the team at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that developed the first version of the DOM specification, which was published in 1998.[2] He was the primary author of the initial interface definitions and developed the initial DTD[3] used for defining the programming API’s and the processing pipeline for converting the XML specification into HTML and interface definitions in various programming languages. Derivatives of this were incorporated into the W3C documentation practices and later gave rise to WebIDL.[3]

Nicol is also known for his work on HTML Internationalization (I18N), starting with the publication of “The Multilingual World Wide Web” in 1995,[4][5][6] along with proposals for improving MIME support for I18N.[7] This work culminated in the joint development and publication of RFC 2070 “Internationalization of the Hypertext Markup Language”[8] in 1997, which was included into later standardization of HTML. He was an early proponent of using Unicode[6] on the World Wide Web and proposed an alignment of Unicode, ISO 10646 and SGML, leading to HTML adopting a broader character set, allowing for multilingualism and later adoption of Unicode and UTF8 as de-facto standards for the web. Nicol has spoken widely about Unicode and at Unicode conferences about how Unicode applied to markup languages.[9][10]

In addition to his work on the DOM and I18N, Nicol has also made contributions to other areas of web development, including XML,[11] SVG, VRML, XSLT,[12] XML Linking, XPath, XPointer, XEXPR,[13] XTND[14] and other web technologies. He is a proponent of generic markup[15] use on the World Wide Web and evolutionary standards development.[16][17]

Outside of Web technologies, Nicol has been an active researcher into alternative markup technologies such as LMNL,[18] developing a formal model for markup Called “Core Range Algebra”[18][19] and Attributed Range Algebra.[19] He is also an open source proponent and author.[20] A significant portion of Nicols’s research was done while developing into the award-winning DynaWeb[21][22] application, which was the first server that supported the stylesheet-driven conversion of HTML from SGML/XML sources.[23] This in turn was based on the DynaText publishing system from Electronic Book Technologies.

He has also written and spoken about web technology[24] and has been active in the web development community for many years. Nicol is also an entrepreneur and inventor, receiving multiple patents for technologies developed over the years.[25][26]

References

  1. ↑ Chaudhri, Akmal; Jeckle, Mario; Rahm, Erhard; Unland, Rainer (2003-07-01) (in en). Web, Web-Services, and Database Systems: NODe 2002 Web and Database-Related Workshops, Erfurt, Germany, October 7-10, 2002, Revised Papers. Springer. ISBN 978-3-540-36560-0. https://books.google.com/books?id=BTVuCQAAQBAJ. 
  2. ↑ "W3C announces DOM Core". https://www.w3.org/Press/DOM-core.html. 
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 "W3C XML Specification DTD (XMLspec)". https://www.w3.org/XML/1998/06/xmlspec-report-v20.htm. 
  4. ↑ Linguistics., International Conference on Computational. Proceedings of COLING.. Association for Computational Linguistics. OCLC 227005413. http://worldcat.org/oclc/227005413. 
  5. ↑ "Restrospective on ERCS". http://xml.coverpages.org/jelliffeERCSRetro.html. 
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 "The Multilingual WWW". http://xml.coverpages.org/nicol-multwww.html. 
  7. ↑ "MIME Header Supplemented File Type" (in en). IETF Datatracker. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-nicol-mime-header-type/. 
  8. ↑ Yergeau, François; Adams, Glenn; Dürst, Martin J.; Nicol, Gavin T. (1997-01-01). "RFC ft-ietf-html-i18n: Internationalization of the Hypertext Markup Language" (in en). https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2070. 
  9. ↑ "DynaWeb: Interfacing large SGML repositories and the WWW". https://www.w3.org/Conferences/WWW4/Papers/112/Overview.html. 
  10. ↑ "Tenth International Unicode Conference - Conference Program". https://www.unicode.org/iuc/iuc10/program.html. 
  11. ↑ "W3C SGML Working Group". https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/SGML/WG/Overview.html. 
  12. ↑ "A Proposal for XSL". https://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-XSL-970910.html. 
  13. ↑ "XEXPR - XML Expression Language". https://www.w3.org/TR/2000/NOTE-xexpr-20001121/Overview.html. 
  14. ↑ "XTND - XML Transition Network Definition". https://www.w3.org/TR/2000/NOTE-xtnd-20001121/Overview.html. 
  15. ↑ Wolf, Misha. "Eleventh International Unicode Conference - Conference Program" (in en). https://www.unicode.org/iuc/iuc11/program.html. 
  16. ↑ "xml-dev - RE: Will XML change the character of W3C? Was: Re: sunshine andstandard". http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200010/msg00454.html. 
  17. ↑ "The Rush to Standardize". https://www.xml.com/pub/2000/10/18/standards/index.html. 
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 Cover, Robin. "New Website for Layered Markup and Annotation Language (LMNL).". http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2002-10-02-a.html. 
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 "dblp: Extreme Markup Languages® 2002" (in en). https://dblp.org/db/conf/extreme/extreme2002.html. 
  20. ↑ Nicol, G. T. (1993). Flex : the lexical scanner generator (Ed. 1.03, for version 2.3.7 ed.). [Cambridge, MA]: Free Software Foundation. ISBN 1-882114-21-3. OCLC 31825274. https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/31825274. 
  21. ↑ "Inso Corporation Announces DynaWeb® 3.1; First Web Publishing Solution To Support Interactive Mathematical Equations". http://xml.coverpages.org/dynaweb3-dvi.html. 
  22. ↑ "DynaWeb: Interfacing large SGML repositories and the WWW". https://www.w3.org/Conferences/WWW4/Papers/112/Overview.html. 
  23. ↑ , Steven J.; James Apple & Gavin T. Nicol et al."Computer system and method for customizing context information sent with document fragments across a computer network" patent US6167409A, issued 2000-12-26
  24. ↑ "Command Line Heroes: Season 7: A Language for the Web" (in en). https://www.redhat.com/en/command-line-heroes/season-7/html. 
  25. ↑ , Steven J.; James Apple & Gavin T. Nicol et al."Computer system and method for customizing context information sent with document fragments across a computer network" patent US6167409A, issued 2000-12-26
  26. ↑ , Dan; Sam CRITCHLEY & Rich PIZZARRO et al."System for enhanced management of social networks on mobile devices" patent US8332471B2, issued 2012-12-11




Retrieved from "https://handwiki.org/wiki/index.php?title=Biography:Gavin_Nicol&oldid=2503770"