Tim Bray’s Role in Shaping Web Data Standards: XML, JSON, and Ethical Leadership

This is truly one of those people whose work is used by almost everyone today.

Tim Bray was born in Canada and studied at the University of Guelph in Ontario. During the 1990s, he worked with a number of internet companies and became deeply involved in web standards through the W3C.

In 1998, he and the W3C published XML, a format designed to become the standard for structured data on the internet. That is exactly what happened. For nearly 30 years, XML has been used across thousands of software products and systems to represent complex structured information. Entire data ecosystems were built on top of it, and many other widely used technologies emerged from the XML family, including RSS, SOAP, XHTML, and SVG.

In the 2010s, Tim Bray became involved in the standardization of JSON. He was not its creator, but he authored and edited several RFCs that defined and formalized the format. Today, JSON is the dominant format for data exchange between browsers and servers, mobile applications and servers, and countless other systems. Billions of people rely on JSON every day without even knowing it.

Tim Bray spent many years at Sun Microsystems, then joined Google, and later moved to Amazon Web Services, where he worked as a VP and Distinguished Engineer.

In 2020, he resigned from Amazon, saying he could no longer remain silent while the company fired warehouse workers who had been raising safety concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic. Several whistleblowers and organizers were dismissed. Bray concluded that staying would make him complicit, and left despite significant financial cost.

See also June 8, 1955: Celebrating the Birth of the Web’s Inventor, Tim Berners-Lee.