Jean Paoli is one of the inventors of

XML 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. T ...

. Along with

Tim Bray 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. He worked for Amazon Web Services from December 2014 until May 2020 w ...

and C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen, Paoli co-edited the XML 1.0 recommendation for the

World Wide Web Consortium 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 ...

starting in 1997 and until at least 2008. Paoli was born in

Beirut Beirut, french: Beyrouth is the capital and largest city of Lebanon. , Greater Beirut has a population of 2.5 million, which makes it the third-largest city in the Levant region. The city is situated on a peninsula at the midpoint o ...

Lebanon Lebanon ( , ar, لُبْنَان, translit=lubnān, ), officially the Republic of Lebanon () or the Lebanese Republic, is a country in Western Asia. It is located between Syria to the north and east and Israel to the south, while Cyprus lie ...

. Before joining Microsoft, Paoli had spent 10 years developing various startup companies at

INRIA The National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (Inria) () is a French national research institution focusing on computer science and applied mathematics. It was created under the name ''Institut de recherche en informatiq ...

, the renowned French institute for research in computer science. He moved from Paris to join

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washi ...

in 1996, where he worked on the

Channel Definition Format Channel Definition Format (CDF) was an XML file format formerly used in conjunction with Microsoft's Active Channel, Active Desktop and Smart Offline Favorites technologies. The format was designed to "offer frequently updated collections of i ...

for

Internet Explorer 4.0 Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 (IE4) is a graphical web browser that Microsoft unveiled in Spring of 1997, and released in September 1997, primarily for Microsoft Windows, but also with versions available for the classic Mac OS, Solaris (operating ...

, advocated for the original

Microsoft Office XML formats The Microsoft Office XML formats are XML-based document formats (or XML schemas) introduced in versions of Microsoft Office prior to Office 2007. Microsoft Office XP introduced a new XML format for storing Excel spreadsheets and Office 2003 ...

, and promoted

Office Open XML Office Open XML (also informally known as OOXML) is a ZIP (file format), zipped, XML-based file format developed by Microsoft for representing spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents. Ecma International standardized th ...

. Along with Adriana Neagu and others he was a co-inventor of

InfoPath Microsoft InfoPath is a software application for designing, distributing, filling and submitting electronic forms containing structured data. Microsoft initially released InfoPath as part of the Microsoft Office 2003 family. The product features ...

and is named on its patented way of authoring XML using

DHTML Dynamic HTML, or DHTML, is a term which was used by some browser vendors to describe the combination of HTML, style sheets and client-side scripts (JavaScript, VBScript, or any other supported scripts) that enabled the creation of interactive ...

views and

XSLT XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) is a language originally designed for transforming XML documents into other XML documents, or other formats such as HTML for web pages, plain text or XSL Formatting Objects, which may subseq ...

. Paoli was the president of Microsoft Open Technologies until 2017. He departed Microsoft in late 2017 to create the startup Docugami, Inc. which focuses on productivity, machine learning, semi-structured data and documents.

References

External links

*
2003 InfoWorld article

Paoli on InfoPath 2003

2005 eWeek article

2005 article in The Register
Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Lebanese emigrants to France French emigrants to the United States Microsoft employees French computer scientists {{compu-scientist-stub