IP: Web Review: Comment -- A Tribute To Yuri Rubinsky

[Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

From: "Tim O'Reilly" <tim () ora com>
Organization: O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
To: farber () central cis upenn edu


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Dave,


Your IP list might appreciate this piece.  It's a tribute Dale Dougherty
wrote to Yuri Rubinsky, the SGML pioneer who died suddenly last week.




http://gnn.com/gnn/wr/96/01/26/views/comment/



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 [Web Review Contents]  [Next article]


A tribute to Yuri Rubinsky


Goodbye to an SGML pioneer


by Dale Dougherty


You probably didn't know Yuri Rubinsky unless you were deeply involved in
SGML and the electronic world of publishing. Those who shared such fields of
interest were saddened by the news that Yuri Rubinsky died Jan. 21 at the
age of 46.


President and co-founder of Toronto-based SoftQuad, which produces a Web
authoring tool called HoTMetaL, Yuri Rubinsky served with me on the
International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2). At the Web
conference in Boston last December, Yuri organized an awards ceremony to
honor Doug Engelbart, the inventor of the "point-and-click" mouse interface,
who in the late 60s demonstrated a system of network-based hypermedia
documents. As a gift to Engelbart and the Web conference attendees, Yuri
created a small, beautiful book of selected papers by Doug Engelbart, titled
Boosting Our Collective IQ. On its title page verso, it read: "Typeset in
Trump Mediaeval using SoftQuad Publishing Software from documents conforming
to the IETF specification for HTML 2.0, an application of the Standard
Generalized Markup Language (SGML)."


Yuri brought a passion to electronic publishing that originated in his love
of books and book-making. To publish in print or online was to participate
in a time-honored tradition at the center of our culture.


He edited Charles Goldfarb's The SGML Handbook, published by Oxford
University, a book that employed an experimental hypertext-in-print format.
He was also the co-author of the historical novel, Christopher Columbus
Answers All Charges, and was proud that it appeared in Braille at the same
time it was published in print. Yuri was the Technical Chair of the
International Committee for Accessible Document Design (ICADD) which
developed strategies and techniques for the use of SGML to generate Braille,
large print and voice-synthesized texts. He realized that electronic
publishing could be used to benefit the reading-impaired.


Yuri understood that publishing is much more complex behind the scenes than
most people realize. Electronic publishing is not just a matter of producing
text using a computer -- what is often called desktop publishing. It is an
ecology of interrelated systems -- the system for distributing information
as well as the system for producing it.


The following excerpt is from a talk Yuri Rubinsky delivered at the Second
Symposium on Scholarly Publishing on Electronic Networks in December, 1992.


     I saw a revealing photograph of Disneyland in  [Photo of Yuri Rubinsky]
     a United Airlines magazine, a shot of Mickey
     Mouse -- who is enormous in real life --
     talking to a street-cleaning person in a very
     tall, very wide tunnel underneath Disney
     World. A complex network of tunnels is what
     lets the Peaceful Kingdom function as well as
     it does and why you never see Mickey or Minnie
     or Goofy or Donald ducking into a washroom or
     eating lunch. The analogy is pretty rich. The
     architecture of the tunnels is the same no
     matter what public facility they support. The
     services they provide are constant, and
     silent. They keep complications -- like
     transport vehicles and emergency personnel --
     out of the visitors' way, while providing an
     underpinning to the whole operation.


     On one level, publishing is like those
     tunnels, making available the attractions
     above ground with subterranean structures. But
     for me the most interesting aspects of the
     Disneyland tunnels are their dimensions and
     their materials and their layout. Why? Because
     they are completely consistent wherever they
     go. They're the same beneath a pirate ship and
     beneath a hot dog stand, providing the
     consistent system services below which support
     and enable the mad variety of extravaganza
     above.


     That, incidentally, is what SGML is all about.


     --- Electronic Texts The Day After Tomorrow.


Yuri Rubinsky's devotion to the standardization of electronic publishing,
which involved lots of travel and many tedious committee meetings, can best
be described as a willingness to work in the tunnels. He realized, however,
that developing standards was not merely custodial work. He actually seemed
to enjoy the process because he enjoyed people. He had an all-too-rare
ability for locating the business and technology of publishing in a cultural
context, a context that defines common ground. After all, standards are a
kind of compact, an agreement made for the good of everyone.


All of us who are caught up in "the mad variety of extravaganza" that is the
World Wide Web should be grateful that Yuri Rubinsky did his best work in
support of open standards that make it all possible. Yet his passing also
makes us step back from the madness and excitement to reflect upon our own
claim on life.


Our condolences go to the family, friends and colleagues of Yuri Rubinsky.


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Comments


In memory of Yuri.


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