Timothy William Bray (born June 21, 1955) is a Canadian software developer, environmentalist, political activist and one of the co-authors of the original

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 ...

specification. He worked for Amazon Web Services from December 2014 until May 2020 when he quit due to concerns over the terminating of whistleblowers. Previously he has been employed by

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

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 ...

and Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Bray has also founded or co-founded several start-ups such as Antarctica Systems.

Education and early life

Bray was born on June 21, 1955 in

Alberta Alberta is a Provinces and territories of Canada, province in Canada. It is a part of Western Canada and is one of the three Canadian Prairies, prairie provinces. Alberta is bordered by British Columbia to its west, Saskatchewan to its east, t ...

, Canada where his father worked for the Dominion Experimental Farm Service in Fort Vermilion. He grew up in

Beirut Beirut ( ; ) is the Capital city, capital and largest city of Lebanon. , Greater Beirut has a population of 2.5 million, just under half of Lebanon's population, which makes it the List of largest cities in the Levant region by populatio ...

, Lebanon, and returned to Canada to attend school at the University of Guelph in

Guelph Guelph ( ; 2021 Canadian Census population 143,740) is a city in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. Known as The Royal City, it is roughly east of Kitchener, Ontario, Kitchener and west of Downtown Toronto, at the intersection of Ontario Highway 6, ...

Ontario Ontario is the southernmost Provinces and territories of Canada, province of Canada. Located in Central Canada, Ontario is the Population of Canada by province and territory, country's most populous province. As of the 2021 Canadian census, it ...

. He graduated in 1981 with a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, B.S., B.Sc., SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree that is awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Scienc ...

, double majoring in mathematics and computer Science. In 2009, he would return to Guelph to receive an honorary doctorate. Tim described his switch of focus from math to computer science this way:

"In math I’d worked like a dog for my Cs, but in CS I worked much less for As—and learned that you got paid well for doing it."

Career

Bray joined

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until ...

(DEC) in

Toronto Toronto ( , locally pronounced or ) is the List of the largest municipalities in Canada by population, most populous city in Canada. It is the capital city of the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian province of Ontario. With a p ...

as a software specialist. In 1983, Bray left DEC for Microtel Pacific Research. He joined the New Oxford English Dictionary (OED) project at the

University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a Public university, public research university located in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is on of land adjacent to uptown Waterloo and Waterloo Park. The university also op ...

in 1987 as its manager. It was during this time Bray worked with

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 ...

, a technology that would later become central to both Open Text Corporation and his XML and Atom standardization work. Bray co-founded Antarctica Systems - in 2002, during his tenure as CEO for Antarctica, Bray was included in Upside magazine's ''elite 100'' list, alongside other IT leaders like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell and Larry Ellison. Bray was director of Web Technologies at

from early 2004 to early 2010. He joined

as a developer advocate in 2010 focusing on Android, and then on technologies related to ''identity'', such as OAuth and OpenID. Tim Bray in Google Scholar
/ref> He left Google in March 2014, unwilling to relocate to Silicon Valley from

Vancouver Vancouver is a major city in Western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the List of cities in British Columbia, most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the cit ...

. He started working for Amazon Web Services (AWS) in December 2014. Bray left AWS in May 2020, after being dismayed by Amazon's treatment of whistleblowers who had raised concerns over the safety of warehouse workers in relation to the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

. Bray had held the

vice president A vice president or vice-president, also director in British English, is an officer in government or business who is below the president (chief executive officer) in rank. It can also refer to executive vice presidents, signifying that the vi ...

rank, stating on his blog that "VPs shouldn't go publicly rogue", and had much praise for AWS, yet he wasn't pleased about his co-workers being fired. Bray's entrepreneurial activities include:

Waterloo Maple

Bray served as the part-time

chief executive officer A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a chief executive or managing director, is the top-ranking corporate officer charged with the management of an organization, usually a company or a nonprofit organization. CEOs find roles in variou ...

of Waterloo Maple during 1989–1990. Waterloo Maple is the developer of the Maple mathematical software.

Open Text Corporation

Bray left the new OED project in 1989 to co-found Open Text Corporation with two colleagues. Open Text commercialised the search engine employed in the new OED project. Bray recalled that “in 1994 I heard a conference speaker say that search engines would be big on the Internet, and in five seconds all the pieces just fell into place in my head. I realized that we could build such a thing with our technology.” Thus in 1995, Open Text released the Open Text Index, one of the first popular commercial web

search engine A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...

s. Open Text Corporation is publicly traded on the Nasdaq under the symbol OTEX. From 1991 until 1996, Bray was senior vice president—technology'.

Textuality

Bray, along with his wife Lauren Wood, ran Textuality,Textuality
/ref> a consulting practice in the field of web and publishing technology. He was contracted by Netscape in 1999, along with Ramanathan V. Guha, in part to create a new version of the Meta Content Framework called Resource Description Framework, which used the XML language.

Antarctica Systems

In 1999 he founded Antarctica Systems, a Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada-based company that specialized in visualization-based business analytics.

Web standards

Bray has contributed to standards in technology, particularly Web standards 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).

XML

As an Invited Expert at the

between 1996 and 1999, Bray co-edited the

and XML namespace specifications. Halfway through the project Bray accepted a consulting engagement with Netscape, provoking vociferous protests from Netscape competitor

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 ...

(who had supported the initial moves to bring

to the web.) Bray was temporarily asked to resign the editorship. This led to intense dispute in the Working Group, eventually solved by the appointment of Microsoft's Jean Paoli as third co-editor. In 2001, Bray wrote an article called ''Taxi to the Future'' for Xml.com which proposed a means to improve web client user experience and web server system performance via a ''Transform-Aggregate-send XML-Interact'' architecture—this proposed system is very similar to the Ajax paradigm, popularized around 2005.

W3C TAG

Between 2001 and 2004 he served as a Tim Berners-Lee appointee to the W3C Technical Architecture Group.

Atom

Until October 2007, Bray was co-chair, with Paul Hoffman, of the

Atom Atoms are the basic particles of the chemical elements. An atom consists of a atomic nucleus, nucleus of protons and generally neutrons, surrounded by an electromagnetically bound swarm of electrons. The chemical elements are distinguished fr ...

-focused Atompub Working Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force. Atom is a web syndication format developed to address perceived deficiencies with the RSS 2.0 format.

JSON

Bray worked with the IETF JSON Working Group in 2013 and 2014, serving as editor of RFC 7159, a specification of the JSON Data Interchange Format which revised RFC 4627 and highlighted interoperability best practices, released in March 2014. He also edited RFC 8259, a further revision of JSON.

Software

Bray has written software applications, including Bonnie which was the inspiration for Bonnie++, a Unix file system

benchmarking Benchmarking is the practice of comparing business processes and performance metrics to industry bests and best practices from other companies. Dimensions typically measured are Project management triangle, quality, time and cost. Benchmarking is ...

tool; Lark, the first

processor; and APE, the Atom Protocol Exerciser.ongoing — Software
��Summary Page on Tim Bray's

weblog A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...

Environmentalism

Starting in 2018, Bray became visible as an environmentalist in the context of the Trans Mountain Pipeline dispute. On April 18, 2018, he was arrested for contempt of court at a demonstration at the Trans Mountain site in Burnaby, Canada. He also participated in an open letter from business leaders to the British Columbia government and was subsequently a public voice against the project. In 2019, Bray was the only VP-level Amazon employee to sign a letter to Amazon shareholders calling for a stop to Amazon Web Services' support for oil extraction. In 2024 Bray co-edited a book titled ''Standing On High Ground'', a collection of personal stories of individuals who were arrested while protesting the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.

Bibliography

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bray, Tim 1955 births OpenText Businesspeople in computing Canadian male bloggers Amazon (company) people Canadian computer scientists Google employees Living people Businesspeople from Beirut Sun Microsystems people University of Guelph alumni Unix people Writers from Alberta