James Clark (programmer)

James Clark (programmer)

James Clark, (23 February 1964) is the author of groff and expat and has done much work with open-source software and XML. Born in London, and educated at Charterhouse and Merton College, Oxford, Clark has lived in Bangkok, Thailand since 1995, and is now a permanent resident. He owns a company called Thai Open Source Software Center, which provides him a legal framework for his open-source activities.

James Clark served as Technical Lead of the Working Group that developed XML, notably contributing the self-closing, empty-element tag syntax (for example: ""), and the name "XML".

James Clark's contributions to XML are cited in dozens of books on the subject.

For the GNU project, he wrote groff and an XML editing mode for GNU Emacs.

James is the author or co-author of a number of influential specifications and implementations, including:

• DSSSL - An SGML transformation and styling language.
• Expat (XML) - An open-source XML parser.
• XSLT - XSL Transformations, a part of the XSL family.
• TREX - An XML Schema language.
• RELAX NG - An XML Schema language with both an explicit XML form and a compact form, with an implementation, Jing.

He is listed as part of the Working Group that developed the Java Streaming API for XML (StAX) JSR 173 at the JCP.

From November 2004 until late 2006, he worked for Thailand's Software Industry Promotion Agency (SIPA), to promote open source technologies and open standards in the country. This work included pushing the Thai localization of OpenOffice.org office suite and Mozilla Firefox Web browser, along with other open source software packages.