Ep #11:  XML, HCI, and a retrospective on markup and the Web with Steven Pemberton

Ep #11: XML, HCI, and a retrospective on markup and the Web with Steven Pemberton

From Rule-Breakers by PROPYLON

January 5, 2026 · 1h 0m · Season 1 · Episode 9

About this episode

Steven Pemberton discusses the evolution of the web and his contributions to web standards.

In this episode, we speak with Steven Pemberton, a pioneer of the early web, the first user in Europe to connect to the open internet, and a long-time contributor to standards at the W3C including CSS and XHTML. He also worked on the ABC programming language that heavily influenced Python. Steven traces the origins of the web from Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision of a connected information system to the standards that followed, reflecting on how ease of use is sometimes in tension with ease of implementation. Steven talks about one of his recent projects - Invisible XML – which rethinks markup from a schema inference perspective. Steven also talks about HTML5 and framework-driven web design application design.

People in this episode

Guest: Steven Pemberton

Topics covered

  • XML
  • HCI
  • markup
  • Web
  • standards
  • CSS
  • XHTML
  • Invisible XML
  • HTML5
  • web design

Keywords

  • early web
  • Tim Berners-Lee
  • schema inference
  • framework-driven design

Mentioned in this episode

Products: Python, Invisible XML, HTML5

Places: Europe

More episodes of Rule-Breakers

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Rule-Breakers podcast page.