John Cowan is the senior Internet systems developer for Reuters Health, a very small subsidiary of Reuters, a wire service and financial news company. He was responsible for Reuters Health's current news publication system, which distributes about 100 articles per day to about 200 wholesale news customers, mostly in XML. (Yes, so most of them want HTML and get XHTML. Deal.)John is a member or de-facto member of the W3C XML Core WG, the W3C XML Linking WG, the OASIS RELAX NG TC, and the OASIS Geography and Language Published Subjects TC, and the closed Unicore mailing list of the Unicode Technical Committee. He also hangs out on far too many other technical mailing lists, masquerading as the expert on A for the B mailing list and the expert on B for the A mailing list. His friends say that he knows at least something about almost everything; his enemies, that he knows far too much about far too much.John presented a tutorial on Unicode at XML 2001, and was co-chair of the Schema Comparisons town hall meeting at the same conference. At that time, many in the XML community had heard of him, but only about five people had seen him. This anomaly is now rectified.In his copious spare time, John constructed and maintains the Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Simple Hypertext DTD, a small subset of XHTML Basic suitable for adding rich text to otherwise bald and unconvincing document types (now available in RELAX NG, too). He is interested in languages -- natural, constructed, and computer -- and is the author of _The Complete Lojban Language_, ISBN 0-9660283-0-9. He is also the current maintainer of FIGlet, the world's only Unicode rendering engine that uses ASCII characters instead of pixels.