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 or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyis ...

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 by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in ...

(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 university, public research university in Austin, Texas, United States. Founded in 1883, it is the flagship institution of the University of Texas System. With 53,082 stud ...

, earning a B.S. in computer science.

Career

In October 1991, Connolly was working on the documentation tools team at Convex Computer 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 originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...

. Soon after he started advocating for

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

to adopt an

SGML The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML; International Organization for Standardization, ISO 8879:1986) is a standard for defining generalized markup languages for documents. ISO 8879 Annex A.1 states that generalized markup is "based on t ...

document type definition. He met

Tim Berners-Lee Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, the HTML markup language, the URL system, and HTTP. He is a professorial research fellow a ...

and Robert Cailliau at the HyperText conference in

San Antonio San Antonio ( ; Spanish for " Saint Anthony") is a city in the U.S. state of Texas and the most populous city in Greater San Antonio. San Antonio is the third-largest metropolitan area in Texas and the 24th-largest metropolitan area in the ...

, 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 standard, Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster ...

'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 is the capital and most populous city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. The city serves as the cultural and Financial centre, financial center of New England, a region of the Northeas ...

in 1994, he joined the newly created

(W3C) at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

, 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 work Remote work (also called telecommuting, telework, work from or at home, WFH as an initialism, hybrid work, and other terms) is the practice of work (human activity), working at or from one's home or Third place, another space rather than from ...

er. Connolly chaired the W3C's HTML Working Group that produced the

3.2 and

4.0 specifications. Together with Jon Bosak he formed the W3C

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

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 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 The Semantic Web, sometimes known as Web 3.0, is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable. To enable the encoding o ...

. 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 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