Alex first became interested in structured markup when analyzing literary texts for his Ph.D. (on Shakespeare editions) in the late 1980s. Following the award of his Ph.D. his interest grew to such an extent that he aborted a career as a English Literature lecturer and moved into the software industry, where he spent four interesting years working on heavily object-oriented C++ application framework for cross-platform multimedia products, at the height of the CD-ROM boom. In 1997 Alex was one of the founding directors of Griffin Brown Digital Publishing Ltd, a company which provides XML-based components and tools - chiefly to the publishing industry. He is responsible for leading the company's XML consulting and implementation, and his work includes advising clients on XML/IT strategy, mentoring clients' staff, writing DTDs and Schemas, and designing and developing XML software systems in Java, C++ and other languages. In 2002, Alex was invited to join the British Standards Institute (BSI) Technical Committee IST/41, where he contributes to ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34 in its formation of the DSDL ISO standard, among other things. Alex writes and speaks regularly on structured markup technologies and their application to publishing and document processing.