Tim Bray

Last updated
Tim Bray
Tim Bray.jpg
Born (1955-06-21) June 21, 1955 (age 68)
Fort Vermilion, Alberta, Canada
Education University of Guelph (BS)
Employers
Known for
SpouseLauren Wood
Website www.tbray.org/ongoing

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 specification. [7] He worked for Amazon Web Services from December 2014 until May 2020 when he quit due to concerns over the terminating of whistleblowers. [8] [9] Previously he has been employed by Google, Sun Microsystems and Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Bray has also founded or co-founded several start-ups such as Antarctica Systems. [10] [11] [12]

Contents

Education and early life

Bray was born on June 21, 1955 [13] in Alberta, Canada where his father worked for the Dominion Experimental Farm Service in Fort Vermilion. He grew up in Beirut, Lebanon, and returned to Canada to attend school at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario. [14] He graduated in 1981 with a Bachelor of Science, double majoring in mathematics and computer Science. In 2009, he would return to Guelph to receive an honorary doctorate. [15] 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." [16]

Career

Bray joined Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in Toronto 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 in 1987 as its manager. [17] It was during this time Bray worked with SGML, a technology that would later become central to both Open Text Corporation and his XML and Atom standardization work. [4] [6] 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. [18] Bray was director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems from early 2004 to early 2010. [2] He joined Google as a developer advocate in 2010 focusing on Android, and then on technologies related to identity, such as OAuth and OpenID. [4] [5] [6] [19] [20] [21] He left Google in March 2014, unwilling to relocate to Silicon Valley from Vancouver. [22] He started working for Amazon Web Services (AWS) in December 2014. Bray left AWS in May 2020, after being dismayed by their treatment of whistleblowers who had raised concerns over the safety of warehouse workers in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. Bray had held the vice president 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. [23] [24] [8]

Bray's entrepreneurial activities include:

Waterloo Maple

Bray served as the part-time chief executive officer 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.” [16] Thus in 1995, Open Text released the Open Text Index, one of the first popular commercial web search engines. 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, [25] a consulting practice in the field of web and publishing technology. He was contracted by Netscape in 1999, along with Ramanathan V. Guha, [5] 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 specializes in visualization-based business analytics.

Web standards

Bray has contributed to standards in technology, particularly Web standards at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

XML

As an Invited Expert at the World Wide Web Consortium between 1996 and 1999, Bray co-edited the XML and XML namespace specifications. Halfway through the project Bray accepted a consulting engagement with Netscape, provoking vociferous protests from Netscape competitor Microsoft (who had supported the initial moves to bring SGML to the web.)[ citation needed ] 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 [26] 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. [27]

W3C TAG

Between 2001 and 2004 [28] he served as a Tim Berners-Lee appointee [29] to the W3C Technical Architecture Group. [30]

Atom

Until October 2007, Bray was co-chair, with Paul Hoffman, of the Atom-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. [31] He also edited RFC 8259, a further revision of JSON. [32]

Software

Bray has written software applications, including Bonnie which was the inspiration for Bonnie++, a Unix file system benchmarking tool; Lark, the first XML processor; [33] and APE, the Atom Protocol Exerciser. [34]

Environmentalism

Bray being arrested at the Trans Mountain Pipeline protest in 2019 Tim-at-protect-the-inlet.jpg
Bray being arrested at the Trans Mountain Pipeline protest in 2019

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. [35] [36] He also participated in an open letter from business leaders to the British Columbia government [37] and was subsequently a public voice against the project. [38] [39] 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. [40]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Document Object Model</span> Convention for representing and interacting with objects in HTML, XHTML, and XML documents

The Document Object Model (DOM) is a cross-platform and language-independent interface that treats an HTML or XML document as a tree structure wherein each node is an object representing a part of the document. The DOM represents a document with a logical tree. Each branch of the tree ends in a node, and each node contains objects. DOM methods allow programmatic access to the tree; with them one can change the structure, style or content of a document. Nodes can have event handlers attached to them. Once an event is triggered, the event handlers get executed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">HTML</span> HyperText Markup Language

The HyperText Markup Language or 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 (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScript.

A Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) is a unique sequence of characters that identifies a logical or physical resource used by web technologies. URIs may be used to identify anything, including real-world objects, such as people and places, concepts, or information resources such as web pages and books. Some URIs provide a means of locating and retrieving information resources on a network ; these are Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). A URL provides the location of the resource. A URI identifies the resource by name at the specified location or URL. Other URIs provide only a unique name, without a means of locating or retrieving the resource or information about it; these are Uniform Resource Names (URNs). The web technologies that use URIs are not limited to web browsers. URIs are used to identify anything described using the Resource Description Framework (RDF), for example, concepts that are part of an ontology defined using the Web Ontology Language (OWL), and people who are described using the Friend of a Friend vocabulary would each have an individual URI.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">World Wide Web Consortium</span> Main international standards organization for the World Wide Web

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 together in the development of standards for the World Wide Web. As of 5 March 2023, W3C had 462 members. W3C also engages in education and outreach, develops software and serves as an open forum for discussion about the Web.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">XML</span> Markup language by the W3C for encoding of data

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. The World Wide Web Consortium's XML 1.0 Specification of 1998 and several other related specifications—all of them free open standards—define XML.

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard originally designed as a data model for metadata. It has come to be used as a general method for description and exchange of graph data. RDF provides a variety of syntax notations and data serialization formats, with Turtle currently being the most widely used notation.

A web service (WS) is either:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">RSS</span> Family of web feed formats

RSS is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many different websites in a single news aggregator, which constantly monitor sites for new content, removing the need for the user to manually check them. News aggregators can be built into a browser, installed on a desktop computer, or installed on a mobile device.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ramanathan V. Guha</span>

Ramanathan V. Guha is the creator of widely used web standards such as RSS, RDF and Schema.org. He is also responsible for products such as Google Custom Search. He was a co-founder of Epinions and Alpiri. He currently works at Google as a Google Fellow.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Interface description language</span> Computer language used to describe a software components interface

An interface description language or interface definition language (IDL) is a generic term for a language that lets a program or object written in one language communicate with another program written in an unknown language. IDLs are usually used to describe data types and interfaces in a language-independent way, for example, between those written in C++ and those written in Java.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Atom (web standard)</span> Web standards

The name Atom applies to a pair of related Web standards. The Atom Syndication Format is an XML language used for web feeds, while the Atom Publishing Protocol is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources.

Web standards are the formal, non-proprietary standards and other technical specifications that define and describe aspects of the World Wide Web. In recent years, the term has been more frequently associated with the trend of endorsing a set of standardized best practices for building web sites, and a philosophy of web design and development that includes those methods.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Web feed</span> Data format

On the World Wide Web, a web feed is a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe a channel to it by adding the feed resource address to a news aggregator client. Users typically subscribe to a feed by manually entering the URL of a feed or clicking a link in a web browser or by dragging the link from the web browser to the aggregator, thus "RSS and Atom files provide news updates from a website in a simple form for your computer."

Meta Content Framework (MCF) is a specification of a content format for structuring metadata about web sites and other data.

eXist-db is an open source software project for NoSQL databases built on XML technology. It is classified as both a NoSQL document-oriented database system and a native XML database. Unlike most relational database management systems (RDBMS) and NoSQL databases, eXist-db provides XQuery and XSLT as its query and application programming languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">JSON</span> Open standard file format and data interchange

JSON is an open standard file format and data interchange format that uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consisting of attribute–value pairs and arrays. It is a common data format with diverse uses in electronic data interchange, including that of web applications with servers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Makoto Murata</span> Japanese computer scientist

Makoto Murata is a Japanese computer scientist, Ph.D. in engineering, and Project Professor at Keio University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of the World Wide Web</span> Information system running in the Internet

The World Wide Web is a global information medium which users can access via computers connected to the Internet. The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet, but the Web is a service that operates over the Internet, just as email and Usenet do. The history of the Internet and the history of hypertext date back significantly further than that of the World Wide Web.

A media type is a two-part identifier for file formats and format contents transmitted on the Internet. Their purpose is somewhat similar to file extensions in that they identify the intended data format. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is the official authority for the standardization and publication of these classifications. Media types were originally defined in Request for Comments RFC 2045 (MIME) Part One: Format of Internet Message Bodies in November 1996 as a part of the MIME specification, for denoting type of email message content and attachments; hence the original name, MIME type. Media types are also used by other internet protocols such as HTTP and document file formats such as HTML, for similar purposes.

Web syndication technologies were preceded by metadata standards such as the Meta Content Framework (MCF) and the Resource Description Framework (RDF), as well as by 'push' specifications such as Channel Definition Format (CDF). Early web syndication standards included Information and Content Exchange (ICE) and RSS. More recent specifications include Atom and GData.

References

  1. ↑ Bray, T. (1996). "Measuring the Web". Computer Networks and ISDN Systems. 28 (7–11): 993–1005. doi:10.1016/0169-7552(96)00061-X.
  2. 1 2 Khare, R.; Barr, J.; Baker, M.; Bosworth, A.; Bray, T.; McManus, J. (2005). "Web services considered harmful?". Special interest tracks and posters of the 14th international conference on World Wide Web - WWW '05. p. 800. doi:10.1145/1062745.1062758. ISBN   978-1595930514. S2CID   13543260.
  3. ↑ Teaching Glass, Ongoing, 2014-05-13
  4. 1 2 3 Tim Bray at DBLP Bibliography Server OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
  5. 1 2 3 Tim Bray in Google Scholar
  6. 1 2 3 Tim Bray author profile page at the ACM Digital Library
  7. ↑ Roger Debreceny (2009-06-18). XBRL for Interactive Data. Springer. ISBN   9783642014376.
  8. 1 2 Bray, Tim (December 1, 2014). "Amazonian". Ongoing. Retrieved January 2, 2015.
  9. ↑ Bray, Tim (April 29, 2020). "Leaving Amazon". Ongoing. Retrieved May 3, 2020.
  10. ↑ Interview with Tim Bray from Canada on Rails 2006, discussing Ruby, Rails, REST, XML and Java
  11. ↑ Tim Bray @ FOWA Expo 08 — The Fear Factor [ permanent dead link ]
  12. ↑ Interview with Tim Bray from QCon San Francisco 2008, discussing the future of the web
  13. ↑ Bray, Tim. "The New 40". Ongoing. Retrieved 15 September 2019.
  14. ↑ Weise, Karen (22 July 2020). "The Amazon Critic Who Saw Its Power From the Inside". The New York Times. Retrieved 4 March 2021.
  15. ↑ "Eight to Receive Honorary Degrees". June 1, 2009.
  16. 1 2 Joe Cellini. "Tim Bray: Biomedical Visualization". Apple Inc. Archived from the original on 2004-04-04.
  17. ↑ Blake, G. E.; Bray, T.; Tompa, F. W. (1992). "Shortening the OED: Experience with a grammar-defined database". ACM Transactions on Information Systems. 10 (3): 213. doi: 10.1145/146760.146764 . S2CID   16859602.
  18. ↑ "Antarcti.ca CEO Tim Bray joins technology's elite". geospatialworld.net. 23 January 2002. Retrieved 4 May 2020.
  19. ↑ Tim Bray (2010-03-15). "Now A No-Evil Zone". Archived from the original on 2013-10-19.
  20. ↑ Tim Bray (2012-06-29). "Now On Identity". Archived from the original on 2013-11-09.
  21. ↑ Bray, Tim (2013). "Golang Diaries I". tbray.org. "a really good time to write about something is while you're still discovering it, before you're looking at it from the inside" —Tim Bray
  22. ↑ Bray, Tim (February 19, 2014). "Leaving Google". Ongoing. Retrieved February 21, 2014.
  23. ↑ "'VPs shouldn't go publicly rogue': XML co-author Tim Bray quits AWS over treatment of staff at Amazon's Retail division". The Register. 4 May 2020. Retrieved 4 May 2020.
  24. ↑ "Coronavirus: Amazon vice-president quits over virus firings". BBC. 4 May 2020. Retrieved 4 May 2020.
  25. ↑ Textuality
  26. ↑ "TAXI to the Future" . Retrieved 2012-07-08.
  27. ↑ Tim Bray. "ongoing · The Real AJAX Upside". Ongoing. Retrieved 2008-10-26.
  28. ↑ "W3C TAG History, thru 2004 WebArch Recommendation". W3C.
  29. ↑ Dan Connolly. "TAG - representation "from the larger Web community"?". W3C.
  30. ↑ David Becker. "How does XML measure up?". CNET Networks . Retrieved 2008-10-26.
  31. ↑ Bray, T. (2014). Bray, T. (ed.). "RFC 7159: The JSON Data Interchange Format". doi: 10.17487/RFC7159 .{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  32. ↑ Bray, T. (2017). Bray, T. (ed.). "RFC 8259: The JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) Data Interchange Format". doi:10.17487/RFC8259. S2CID   263868313.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  33. ↑ Lark—the first XML processor
  34. ↑ ongoing — Software—Summary Page on Tim Bray's weblog
  35. ↑ Cruickshank, Ainslie (18 April 2018). "More protesters make court appearances as Kinder Morgan pipeline protests go global". The Star. Retrieved 30 October 2019.
  36. ↑ Lambert, Sheena (19 March 2018). "'Welcome to the wild side, Mum' — A day with the Kinder Morgan pipeline opponents". National Observer. Retrieved 30 October 2019.
  37. ↑ Gibillini, Nicole (19 April 2018). "Hundreds of business leaders urge B.C.'s Horgan to keep up Trans Mountain fight". BNN Bloomberg. Retrieved 30 October 2019.
  38. ↑ Erlichman, Jon (31 May 2018). "Trans Mountain nationalization a 'grave mistake': Open Text co-founder". BNN Bloomberg. Retrieved 30 October 2019.
  39. ↑ Erlichmann, Jon (20 April 2018). "OpenText co-founder Tim Bray throws support behind B.C. Premier Horgan on Trans Mountain". BNN Bloomberg. Retrieved 30 October 2019.
  40. ↑ Merchant, Brian (12 April 2019). "6,000 Amazon Employees, Including a VP and Directors, Are Now Calling on Jeff Bezos to Stop Automating Oil Extraction". Gizmodo.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.