Tantek Çelik is a Turkish-American

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (a ...

, currently the Web standards lead at

Mozilla Corporation The Mozilla Corporation (stylized as moz://a) is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates and integrates the development of Internet-related applications such as the Firefox web browser, by a global community of open- ...

. Çelik was previously the chief technologist at

Technorati Technorati was a search engine and a publisher advertising platform that served as an advertising solution for the thousands of websites in its network. Technorati launched its ad network in 2008, and at one time was one of the largest ad network ...

. He worked on

microformats Microformats (μF) are a set of defined HTML classes created to serve as consistent and descriptive metadata about an element, designating it as representing a certain type of data (such as contact information, geographic coordinates, event ...

and is one of the principal editors of several Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) specifications. He is author of ''

HTML5 HTML5 is a markup language used for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web. It is the fifth and final major HTML version that is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation. The current specification is known as the HTML ...

Now: A Step-by-Step Video Tutorial for Getting Started Today (Voices That Matter)'' ().

Career

Çelik gained bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science from

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is considere ...

. He worked at

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washingt ...

from 1997 to 2004, where he helped lead development of the Macintosh version of

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Microsoft Wind ...

. Between 1998 and 2003, he managed a team of software developers that designed and implemented the Tasman rendering engine for Internet Explorer for Mac 5. During his time at Microsoft he also served as their alternate representative (1998–2000) and later their representative (2001–2004) to a number of

working group A working group, or working party, is a group of experts working together to achieve specified goals. The groups are domain-specific and focus on discussion or activity around a specific subject area. The term can sometimes refer to an interdis ...

s at 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 to ...

(W3C); he is credited on a number of recommendations relating to

XHTML Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) is part of the family of XML markup languages. It mirrors or extends versions of the widely used HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the language in which Web pages are formulated. While HTML, prior ...

and

Cascading Style Sheets Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...

due to this work. While working for Microsoft, he also developed the "box model hack" that is used by web designers to work around the Internet Explorer box model bug. Before working at Microsoft he worked in a variety of software engineer roles at

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, th ...

Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas. In 2020, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. The company sells da ...

and

Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company b ...

. During his four years at Apple Computer (1992–1996), he spent most of his time on the

OpenDoc OpenDoc is a defunct multi-platform software componentry framework standard created by Apple in the 1990s for compound documents, intended as an alternative to Microsoft's proprietary Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). It is one of Apple's ea ...

project, first as a ''senior software developer'' and then as a ''technical lead''. In 1996, he left Apple to form a software development and consulting company specialising in OpenDoc development, 6prime, with another OpenDoc technical lead Eric Soldan, however in 1997, Aladdin Systems purchased 6prime's main product ''REV'' releasing it as ''Flashback''. At Technorati, he led the adoption of better standards support (including

) throughout the company, including their website's front page. He was also involved with the special Election 2004 section of the website, including writing the initial version. He serves as a founder at the

Global Multimedia Protocols Group The Global Multimedia Protocols Group (GMPG) was founded in March 2003 by Tantek Çelik, Eric A. Meyer, and Matt Mullenweg. The group has developed methods to represent human relationships using XHTML called XHTML Friends Network (XFN) and XHTML ...

. , Çelik began working on

IndieWebCamp IndieWebCamp is a technology BarCamp that was founded in Portland, Oregon and has since been held all over the world, including at the offices of the ''New York Times'' and in Brighton, England. It describes itself as a 2-day creator camp focused o ...

, an effort to coordinate a community of people to build tools to complement and eventually provide an alternative to social networking services like

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, an ...

and

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Mosk ...

. He is the owner of the Twitter account @T.

References

External links

Official website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Celik, Tantek Apple Inc. employees Computer programmers Web developers Mozilla people Microsoft employees American people of Turkish descent Stanford University alumni Living people Year of birth missing (living people) Place of birth missing (living people)