15 Facts About Dave Raggett

Dave Raggett is an English computer specialist who has played a major role in implementing the World Wide Web since 1992.

Dave Raggett has been a W3C Fellow at the World Wide Web Consortium since 1995 and worked on many of the key web protocols, including HTTP, HTML, XHTML, MathML, XForms, and VoiceXML.

From 1981 to 1984, Dave Raggett worked at Research Machines, designing and developing software for local networking of Z80 machines for use in schools.

From 1985 to 2000, Dave Raggett worked as a researcher at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Bristol, England, where he pursued a variety of projects, including expert systems, hypertext, networking, Web browsers, and servers, embedded systems, interactive voice response systems.

In 1993, Dave Raggett devoted his spare time to developing a Web browser called Arena, on which he hoped to demonstrate new and future HTML specifications.

Development of the browser was slow because Dave Raggett was the lone developer and Hewlett-Packard, like many other computer corporations at the time, was unconvinced that the World-Wide-Web would succeed, and thus did not consider investing in web browser development.

Dave Raggett spent his 10 percent time, plus a lot of evenings and weekends, on Arena.

Dave Raggett was convinced that hypertext Web pages could be much more exciting, like magazine pages rather than textbook pages, and that HTML could be used to position not just text on a page but pictures, tables, and other features.

Dave Raggett used Arena to demonstrate all these things, and to experiment with different ways of reading and interpreting both valid and incorrectly written HTML pages.

Dave Raggett demonstrated the browser at the First International Conference on the World-Wide Web in Geneva, Switzerland in 1994 and the 1994 ISOC conference in Prague to show text flow around images, forms, and other aspects of HTML later termed as the HTML+ specification.

Dave Raggett subsequently partnered with CERN to develop Arena further as a proof of concept browser for this work.

In 1994, Dave Raggett organized a Birds of a Feather on HTTP, and went on to launch and chair the IETF HTTP working group, as well as driving early standards work on HTML+, HTML 3.0, HTML tables, and working with NCSA on the design of HTML forms.

Between 1995 and 1997, Dave Raggett worked on an assignment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as part of his role as World Wide Web Consortium Fellow.

From 2000 to 2003, Dave Raggett worked at Openwave Systems as a technical manager for Openwave's involvement in W3C and W3C Fellow.

From 2006 to 2007, Dave Raggett worked at Volantis as a principal researcher working on standards and related proof of concept implementations, focusing on standards work on the Ubiquitous Web.