June 2010: Thanks for a great 15 years at W3C.
I expect to continue to visit #swig and the FreeNode developer community as DanC, and I hope to surface in Mad Mode from time to time (for example: A new firehose to drink from: bioinformatics).
My pgp key is 6E52C29E. I renew it
from time to time.
Over 2500 messages to public W3C mailing lists going back to
October 2004 bear the fingerprint, D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541 0875
0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E, establishing a preponderance of evidence (as
discussed in Reagle's 2002 article).
As of June 2010, these are some other team members responsible for things I used to work on:
For interview requests, membership questions, etc., see About W3C: Contact.
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.
