Charles Goldfarb

Charles F. Goldfarb, (born November 26, 1939) is known as the father of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and grandfather of HTML and the World Wide Web, also referred to as WWW, W3, or the Web. He co-invented the concept of markup languages.

In 1969 Charles Goldfarb, leading a small team at IBM, developed the first markup language, called Generalized Markup Language, or GML. Goldfarb coined the term GML, an initialism for the three researchers, Charles Goldfarb, Ed Mosher and Ray Lorie, who worked on the project.

In 1974, Goldfarb designed SGML and subsequently wrote the first SGML parser, ARC-SGML. SGML facilitates the sharing of machine readable documents for large projects. SGML was used by the military and aerospace, and industrial publishing. Goldfarb continued working to turn SGML into the ISO 8879 standard, and served as its editor in the standardization committee.

Goldfarb held a J.D. from Harvard Law School. After working at IBM's Almaden Research Center, he was an independent consultant based in Belmont, California.

Selected publications

 * The SGML Handbook, Oxford University Press (1991), ISBN 0-19-853737-9
 * SGML Buyer's Guide, Prentice Hall (1998), ISBN 0-13-681511-1
 * XML Handbook, Prentice Hall (1998), ISBN 0-13-081152-1