James Clark Awarded First XML Cup

Each year IDEAlliance (formerly GCA) hosts the premier XML meeting. The meeting began in the 1980's as a Markup conference. It evolved into the SGML conference in the early 1990's and in 1997 became the SGML/XML conference. With the announcement of XML as a W3C Recommendation in 1998, this conference made its final transition to become the XML conference.

According to Marion Elledge, Executive Vice President of IDEAlliance, "Our XML conference and exposition has been in existence since the XML standard was first announced at our annual event over five years ago. We thought it was time to recognize those who have helped to make XML an important standard. The XML Cup Award was created to honor talented individuals whose vision and contributions have made a lasting impact on XML technology."

Lauren Wood, XML 2001 Chair and Director of Product Technology at SoftQuad Software, awarded Clark the Cup before a packed audience of XML enthusiasts and community leaders. "We are honored to present this premier award to James. He has been one of the vital contributors to the standard and continues to be very much involved in the future of XML", said Wood. "Many individuals have made significant contributions to XML, James's contributions have not always been recognized. Therefore, he was the obvious choice."

James Clark, founder of the Thai Open Source Software Center, has been involved with SGML and XML for more than 10 years, both in contributing to standards and in creating open source software. "I am truly honored to receive this award," Clark said. "And I look forward to the new challenges facing those of us working with XML and other related standards". James was technical lead of the XML WG during the creation of the XML 1.0 Recommendation. He was editor of the XPath and XSLT Recommendations. He was the main author of the DSSSL (ISO 10179) standard. Clark has also been the author of several open source software applications. Currently, he is chair of the OASIS RELAX NG TC and editor of the RELAX NG specification.