Dedicated to advancing open standards and simpler data formats for the Web, Tantek Çelik is a computer scientist for Microformats.org and works with numerous clients, such as Mozilla and Revision3, on web standards leadership and HTML5 upgrades.

Tantek co-founded both GMPG and the growing microformats.org open standards community after many years of experience contributing to, writing, and editing specifications at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

In 2003 Tantek collaborated with Eric Meyer and Matt Mullenweg in the invention of the XHTML Friends Network (XFN), which has since become the most popular decentralized social network format in the history of the Web with billions of relationships indexed and accessible via the Google Social Graph API.

In 2004 Tantek proposed hCard for representing people and organizations on the Web, which has since similarly become the most popular web profile format, supported by hundreds of millions of user profiles across dozens of social networks. During his years as Technorati’s Chief Technologist, Tantek played an active role in refining and evangelizing these microformats, guiding them from wiki proposals to well-recognized open web formats endorsed and implemented by numerous individuals, small organizations, and major companies ranging from AOL to Yahoo.

Previously Tantek was a veteran representative to the W3C for Microsoft, where he also helped lead the development of the award-winning Internet Explorer 5 for Macintosh, the first web browser to bring widespread standards compliant HTML4 + CSS1 + PNG1 support to millions of users worldwide.

Tantek has Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Science from Stanford University, as well as a strong background in human interface and user-centered design from his many years at Apple Computer. He shares his thoughts on tantek.com and his Twitter: twitter.com/t.