My full name, in case it doesn't show in your headers, is Eric S. Raymond.
I am very interested in dual-mode publishing, using the same markup for
hypertext and typesetting for paper. I am accordingly interested in HTML
enhancements that permit it to carry all the information (in conjunction
with style sheets and/or rendering filters) needed to do production-
quality typesetting.
I am heavily involved in Linux development (I co-maintain one of the
Linux core libraries, ncurses). I'm specifically interested in Linux
web tools, and may be joining Phil Hughes's project to hack Arena into
a free, highly capable, Linux-hosted browser, if it gets off the ground.
I am involved with Java, and maintain the Java-on-Linux HOWTO for the
Linux Documentation project. I will be the first technical reviewer
and rescue writer for O'Reilly Associates' upcoming series of Java
books.
I am the maintainer of the Jargon File and editor of "The New Hacker's
Dictionary", an early and gratifyingly successful experiment in
dual-mode publishing (HTML version available from my home page).
Presently I maintain the masters in a heavily hacked version of
Texinfo and generate from that ASCII, dvi and PostScript. When I can
maintain the masters in HTML and filter that to production-quality
PostScript, I will consider HTML mature ;-).
I have a strong background in language, interpreter, and compiler
design. I have been thinking about hypertext systems for many years
and have written or co-written at least three, one of which (VH) is
still in active use on the net. I'm also intimately familiar with
many text-formatting tools, including {gtn}roff, pic, tbl, eqn, TeX,
Texinfo, and Scribe.
I tend to approach HTML as a language for content-based format description
that happens to have a distributed namespace, rather than as a hypertext
system that happens to do display formatting.
It may be of interest to some of you that I wrote the VC and GUD modes
in Emacs 19, and would like to help develop better Web tools for Emacs.
You can find my home page at http://www.ccil.org/~esr/home.html.
-->>esr>>