Ep #10: Markup Goes Beyond Tags: Rick Jelliffe on Language Markup, Structure & Semantics in XML

Ep #10: Markup Goes Beyond Tags: Rick Jelliffe on Language Markup, Structure & Semantics in XML

From Rule-Breakers by PROPYLON

December 1, 2025 · 1h 17m · Season 1 · Episode 10

About this episode

Rick Jelliffe discusses his influential work in markup languages and the development of XML standards.

Dive into an in-depth conversation with Rick Jelliffe, one of the most influential figures in the world of markup languages and structured data. Rick's contributions to markup and markup standards span from SGML in the 1980s, XML in the Nineties, up to the present day. He brought his extensive expertise in character encoding to the work on the XML standard. This was a pivotal feature of XML, ensuring that multilingualism was baked right into the XML standard itself taking advantage of the Unicode standard. He is perhaps best known as the inventor of the Schematron XML validation language, ingeniously utilizing XPaths to greatly extend what structures/constraints can be automatically validated in XML documents.

People in this episode

Guest: Rick Jelliffe

Topics covered

  • markup languages
  • structured data
  • XML
  • character encoding
  • multilingualism
  • validation languages

Keywords

  • SGML
  • Unicode
  • Schematron
  • XPaths

Mentioned in this episode

Products: Schematron, XML

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