Gavin Nicol

Nicol was a member of the team at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that developed the first version of the DOM specification, which was published in 1998.[2] He was the primary author of the initial interface definitions and developed the initial DTD[3] used for defining the programming API’s and the processing pipeline for converting the XML specification into HTML and interface definitions in various programming languages. Derivatives of this were incorporated into the W3C documentation practices and later gave rise to WebIDL.[3]

Nicol is also known for his work on HTML Internationalization (I18N), starting with the publication of “The Multilingual World Wide Web” in 1995,[4][5][6] along with proposals for improving MIME support for I18N.[7] This work culminated in the joint development and publication of RFC 2070 “Internationalization of the Hypertext Markup Language”[8] in 1997, which was included into later standardization of HTML. He was an early proponent of using Unicode[6] on the World Wide Web and proposed an alignment of Unicode, ISO 10646 and SGML, leading to HTML adopting a broader character set, allowing for multilingualism and later adoption of Unicode and UTF8 as de-facto standards for the web. Nicol has spoken widely about Unicode and at Unicode conferences about how Unicode applied to markup languages.[9][10]

In addition to his work on the DOM and I18N, Nicol has also made contributions to other areas of web development, including XML,[11] SVG, VRML, XSLT,[12] XML Linking, XPath, XPointer, XEXPR,[13] XTND[14] and other web technologies. He is a proponent of generic markup[15] use on the World Wide Web and evolutionary standards development.[16][17]

Outside of Web technologies, Nicol has been an active researcher into alternative markup technologies such as LMNL,[18] developing a formal model for markup Called “Core Range Algebra”[18][19] and Attributed Range Algebra.[19] He is also an open source proponent and author.[20] A significant portion of Nicols’s research was done while developing into the award-winning DynaWeb[21][22] application, which was the first server that supported the stylesheet-driven conversion of HTML from SGML/XML sources.[23] This in turn was based on the DynaText publishing system from Electronic Book Technologies.

He has also written and spoken about web technology[24] and has been active in the web development community for many years. Nicol is also an entrepreneur and inventor, receiving multiple patents for technologies developed over the years.[25][26]