John Woldemar Cowan is an American

programmer A programmer, computer programmer or coder is an author of computer source code someone with skill in computer programming. The professional titles Software development, ''software developer'' and Software engineering, ''software engineer' ...

known for work with

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...

and

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

. Cowan is an alumnus member of the

Unicode Consortium The Unicode Consortium (legally Unicode, Inc.) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization incorporated and based in Mountain View, California, U.S. Its primary purpose is to maintain and publish the Unicode Standard which was developed with the in ...

and was an editor of the XML 1.1 specification. He is also the founder of the

ConScript Unicode Registry The ConScript Unicode Registry is a volunteer project to coordinate the assignment of code points in the Unicode Private Use Areas (PUA) for the encoding of artificial scripts, such as those for constructed languages. It was founded by John Woldema ...

, which is maintained by him and

Michael Everson Michael Everson (born January 1963) is an American and Irish linguistics, linguist, Character encoding, script encoder, typesetting, typesetter, type designer and Publishing, publisher. He runs a publishing company called Evertype, through which ...

. Until he resigned on Aug 15, 2023, he was the chair of the working group defining the R7RS Large standard of the

Scheme Scheme or schemer may refer to: Arts and entertainment * ''The Scheme'', a BBC Scotland documentary TV series * The Scheme (band), an English pop band * ''The Scheme'', an action role-playing video game for the PC-8801, made by Quest Corporation * ...

programming language. Cowan has revised

William Strunk William Strunk Jr. (July 1, 1869 – September 26, 1946) was an American professor of English at Cornell University and the author of ''The Elements of Style'' (1918). After his former student E. B. White revised and extended the book, ''The E ...

's ''

The Elements of Style ''The Elements of Style'' (also called ''Strunk & White)'' is a style guide for formal grammar used in American English writing. The first publishing was written by William Strunk Jr. in 1918, and published by Harcourt in 1920, comprising eight ...

'' (now in the

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no Exclusive exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly Waiver, waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds ...

). His revisions are "founded on the principle that rules of usage and style cannot be drawn out of thin air, nor constructed a priori according to logic; they must depend on the actual practice of those who are generally acknowledged to be good writers". Cowan is also the author of a comprehensive reference grammar of the constructed language

Lojban Lojban (pronounced ) is a Logical language, logical, constructed language, constructed, human language created by the Logical Language Group which aims to be Syntactic ambiguity, syntactically unambiguous. It succeeds the Loglan project. The Log ...

.John Woldemar Cowan,
The Complete Lojban Language
'. Logical Language Group, 1997, .

References

External links

Personal homepage

Recycled Knowledge
(his personal weblog) {{DEFAULTSORT:Cowan, John W. Lojban People involved with Unicode Living people Year of birth missing (living people)