Rick Jelliffe
Encyclopedia
Richard Alan Jelliffe (born 1960) is an Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

n programmer and standards activist (ISO, W3C, IETF), particularly associated with web standards
Web standards
Web standards is a general term for the formal standards and other technical specifications that define and describe aspects of the World Wide Web. In recent years, the term has been more frequently associated with the trend of endorsing a set of standardized best practices for building web sites,...

, markup languages, internationalization
Internationalization
In economics, internationalization has been viewed as a process of increasing involvement of enterprises in international markets, although there is no agreed definition of internationalization or international entrepreneurship...

 and schema languages
XML Schema
XML Schema, published as a W3C recommendation in May 2001, is one of several XML schema languages. It was the first separate schema language for XML to achieve Recommendation status by the W3C...

. He is the founder and Chief Technical Officer of Topologi Pty. Ltd, an XML tools vendor in Sydney. He has a degree in economics from the University of Sydney
University of Sydney
The University of Sydney is a public university located in Sydney, New South Wales. The main campus spreads across the suburbs of Camperdown and Darlington on the southwestern outskirts of the Sydney CBD. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and Oceania...

.

Career

Jelliffe is the inventor of the Schematron
Schematron
In markup languages, Schematron is a rule-based validation language for making assertions about the presence or absence of patterns in XML trees...

 schema language; its core idea of using XPath
XPath
XPath is a language for selecting nodes from an XML document. In addition, XPath may be used to compute values from the content of an XML document...

 to state constraints has been widely adopted and adapted. He is the editor of the ISO International Standard 19757-3 Document Schema Definition Languages
Document Schema Definition Languages
Document Schema Definition Languages is a framework within which multiple validation tasks of different types can be applied to an XML document in order to achieve more complete validation results than just the application of a single technology....

 - Part 3: Path Based Rule Languages (Schematron).


In 1999-2001 Jelliffe worked at Academia Sinica
Academia Sinica
The Academia Sinica , headquartered in the Nangang District of Taipei, is the national academy of Taiwan. It supports research activities in a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from mathematical and physical sciences, to life sciences, and to humanities and social sciences.Academia Sinica has...

, Taipei, Taiwan. The Chinese XML Now! website provides Chinese and English information and test files on XML. Jelliffe has also made an English/Chinese multilingual typesetting system used to publish PRC trade laws. He has been an invited expert on Internationalization to the W3C.

Jelliffe has made many contributions to web and markup-related technologies, with a broad range of concerns:
  • native language markup: the need for markup languages to allow tag names in the native language of the users—adopted into SGML (Annex J) and XML
    XML
    Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

    , based on Jelliffe's ERCS (Extended Reference Concrete Syntax);

  • the availability of Unicode character references regardless of character encoding—adopted by XML
    XML
    Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

     and the SPREAD (Standardization Project Regarding East Asian Documents) entity set;

  • the inadequacy of text formats without a reliable indication of encoding—adopted into XML
    XML
    Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

     (Appendix F);

  • the inadequacy of string formats for WWW use without an indication of natural language—adopted into XML
    XML
    Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

     with xml:lang attribute;

  • the need to make decisions about XML and other WWW textual notations based on engineering considerations—adopted into XML
    XML
    Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

     1.1 where critical code points are unavailable in direct form, a redundancy which allows encoding error detection;

  • the use of XPath
    XPath
    XPath is a language for selecting nodes from an XML document. In addition, XPath may be used to compute values from the content of an XML document...

     for validation—adopted into Schematron
    Schematron
    In markup languages, Schematron is a rule-based validation language for making assertions about the presence or absence of patterns in XML trees...

    , XForms
    XForms
    XForms is an XML format for the specification of a data processing model for XML data and user interface for the XML data, such as web forms...

    , etc.;

  • the need for extended schema languages—adopted into XML Schema ANY content model;

  • developing schemas from standard or typical modules—strong in the book, XML Namespaces and XML Schema;

  • the result of validation is not only boolean—adopted into Schematron
    Schematron
    In markup languages, Schematron is a rule-based validation language for making assertions about the presence or absence of patterns in XML trees...

     and XML Schema's outcomes (e.g. PSVI).

Dealings with Microsoft

In January 2007, Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 "technical evangelist" Doug Mahugh asked Jelliffe to correct Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...

 articles about some of the standardization efforts in which he was involved, including Ecma Office Open XML and OpenDocument
OpenDocument
The Open Document Format for Office Applications is an XML-based file format for representing electronic documents such as spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents....

, suggesting that Microsoft could pay him for the time he spent editing Wikipedia. Jelliffe commented on the offer in his blog and this led to international press coverage.

The controversial decision by Standards Australia
Standards Australia
Standards Australia was established in 1922 and is recognised through a Memorandum of Understanding with the Australian government as the peak non-government standards development body in Australia. It is a company limited by guarantee, with 72 members representing groups interested in the...

 to include Jelliffe on its delegation to the vote at the ISO
International Organization for Standardization
The International Organization for Standardization , widely known as ISO, is an international standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations. Founded on February 23, 1947, the organization promulgates worldwide proprietary, industrial and commercial...

 on standardisation of Ecma International
Ecma International
Ecma International is an international, private non-profit standards organization for information and communication systems. It acquired its name in 1994, when the European Computer Manufacturers Association changed its name to reflect the organization's global reach and activities...

's Office Open XML document format was widely criticised. Some considered Jelliffe too close to Microsoft to be impartial.

Works

  • The XML & SGML Cookbook: Recipes for Structured Information, Charles Goldfarb
    Charles Goldfarb
    Charles F. Goldfarb is known as the father of SGML and is a co-inventor of the concept of markup languages. In 1969 Charles Goldfarb, leading a small team at IBM, developed the first markup language, called Generalized Markup Language, or GML. In an , Dr...

     Series on Structured Information Management, 1998, Prentice Hal, ISBN 0-13-614223-0.

  • Editor, ISO/IEC International Standard 19757-3 Document Schema Definition Languages
    Document Schema Definition Languages
    Document Schema Definition Languages is a framework within which multiple validation tasks of different types can be applied to an XML document in order to achieve more complete validation results than just the application of a single technology....

     - Part 3: Path Based Rule Languages (Schematron
    Schematron
    In markup languages, Schematron is a rule-based validation language for making assertions about the presence or absence of patterns in XML trees...

    )
    .

  • Numerous articles on the WWW, in print, and by blog.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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