Dan Connolly (born 1967) is an American computer scientist who was closely involved with the creation of the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web ...

as a member of the

World Wide Web Consortium The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working ...

(W3C).

Early years and education

Connolly was born in 1967 and grew up with four siblings in Prairie Village, in the Kansas City metropolitan area, where he attended Bishop Miege High School. From 1986 to 1990 he attended

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,07 ...

, earning a B.S. in computer science.

Career

In October 1991, Connolly was working on the documentation tools team at

Convex Computer Convex Computer Corporation was a company that developed, manufactured and marketed vector minisupercomputers and supercomputers for small-to-medium-sized businesses. Their later Exemplar series of parallel computing machines were based on the ...

when he joined the Web project's mailing list to discuss the browser he had written for the

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wi ...

. Soon after he started advocating for

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaSc ...

to adopt an SGML document type definition. He met Tim Berners-Lee and

Robert Cailliau Robert Cailliau (, born 26 January 1947) is a Belgian informatics engineer, computer scientist and author who proposed the first (pre-www) hypertext system for CERN in 1987 and collaborated with Tim Berners-Lee on the World Wide Web (jointly wi ...

at the HyperText conference in

San Antonio ("Cradle of Freedom") , image_map = , mapsize = 220px , map_caption = Interactive map of San Antonio , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name = United States , subdivision_type1= State , subdivision_name1 = Texas , subdivision_t ...

, TX, in December 1991. With Berners-Lee he was co-editor of the initial

Internet Engineering Task Force The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster or requirements and a ...

's draft specification for

. He was also the principal editor of the HTML 2.0 specification and co-created one of the early HTML validators. Moving from Texas to

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

in 1994, he joined the newly created

(W3C) at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

, where Connolly took a position as research scientist at the Laboratory for Computer Science. He stayed in Boston for two years before returning to Texas while continuing to work for W3C as a remote worker. Connolly chaired the W3C's

HTML Working Group The HTML Working Group was an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working group from 1994 to 1996, and a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) working group from 1997 to 2015. The working group was co-chaired by Paul Cotton, Sam Ruby, and Maciej ...

that produced the

3.2 and

4.0 specifications. Together with

Jon Bosak Jon Bosak led the creation of the XML specification at the W3C. From 1996–2008, he worked for Sun Microsystems. XML Tim Bray, who was one of the editors of the XML specification, has this to say in his note on Bosak in his annotated version o ...

he formed the W3C

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable ...

Working Group that created the W3C XML 1.0 Recommendation. Connolly chaired the first RDF Data Access Working Group, and served on the W3C

Technical Architecture Group The W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) is a special working group within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) created in 2001 to: * to document and build consensus around principles of Web architecture and to interpret and clarify these prin ...

and the first Web Ontology Working Group. He was involved in the application of RDF in calendar software. His research interests include investigating the value of formal descriptions of chaotic systems like the Web, particularly in the consensus-building process, and the Semantic Web. He is mentioned in Tim Berners-Lee's book, ''Weaving the Web'', where he is referred to as an expert in web technology, hypertext systems, and markup languages. In June 2010, Dan left the W3C and took a position with

University of Kansas School of Medicine The University of Kansas School of Medicine is a public medical school located on the University of Kansas Medical Center campuses in Kansas City, Kansas, and also Salina, Kansas, and Wichita, Kansas. The Kansas City campus is co-located with ...

as a Biomedical Informatics Software Engineer in their Department of Biostatistics. As of 2021, he works as a software engineer for Agoric.

References

External links

Dan Connolly's home page at W3CMadMode: Dan Connolly's tinkering lab notebook
his blog
Dan Connolly's Advogato page
* Living people 1967 births American computer programmers Web developers University of Texas at Austin College of Natural Sciences alumni Internet pioneers World Wide Web Consortium Bishop Miege High School alumni {{US-compu-bio-stub