Tantek Çelik is a Turkish-American

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

, currently the Web standards lead at Mozilla Corporation. Çelik was previously the chief technologist at Technorati. He worked on

microformats Microformats (μF) are predefined HTML markup (like HTML classes) created to serve as descriptive and consistent metadata about HTML element, elements, designating them as representing a certain type of data (such as address book, contact info ...

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

HTML5 HTML5 (Hypertext Markup Language 5) is a markup language used for structuring and presenting hypertext documents on the World Wide Web. It was the fifth and final major HTML version that is now a retired World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommend ...

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 Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

. He worked at

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

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 as IE or MSIE) is a deprecation, retired series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft that were u ...

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

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

(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 which mirrors or extends versions of the widely used HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the language in which Web pages are formulated. While HTML, pr ...

and Cascading Style Sheets 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. and created the first reset style sheet. Before working at Microsoft he worked in a variety of software engineer roles at

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American Multinational corporation, multinational computer technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Co-founded in 1977 in Santa Clara, California, by Larry Ellison, who remains executive chairman, Oracle was ...

and

Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Computer Co ...

. During his four years at Apple Computer (1992–1996), he spent most of his time on the OpenDoc 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. , Çelik began working on IndieWebCamp, 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, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...

and

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

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

References

External links

Official website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Celik, Tantek Apple Inc. employees American 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)