Separate tributes below from TEI Editors Michael Sperberg-McQueen and Lou Burnard
From @UTARLVM1.UTA.EDU:owner-tei-l@UICVM.CC.UIC.EDU Thu Jan 25 13:05:37 1996 Message-Id: <TEI-L%96012511043892@UICVM.UIC.EDU> Date: Thu, 25 Jan 1996 11:02:35 CST Reply-To: "C. M. Sperberg-McQueen" <U35395%UICVM.bitnet@UTARLVM1.UTA.EDU> Sender: "TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) public discussion list" <TEI-L@UICVM.UIC.EDU> From: "C. M. Sperberg-McQueen" <U35395%UICVM.bitnet@UTARLVM1.UTA.EDU> Organization: ACH/ACL/ALLC Text Encoding Initiative Subject: Yuri Rubinsky, 1952-1996 To: Multiple recipients of list TEI-L <TEI-L@UICVM.UIC.EDU> Much of the news we get through the Internet is just plain dull. Some of it can be amusing, original, even infuriating. Some of it is essential to our work. And some of the time, the news we get shakes the whole world up, and makes everything we've been thinking and talking about seem oddly unimportant. That's what happened to us at the start of this week, when the news of Yuri Rubinsky's death reached us. Last Sunday evening, quite suddenly, Yuri Rubinsky of SoftQuad, Inc., in Toronto, was taken ill with a violent headache, painful enough to send him to the hospital; he died several hours later of a massive heart attack. He is survived by his wife, his parents and sister, and a world wide community of friends and admirers, of which we are proud to count ourselves members. An electronic wake is being conducted on the news group comp.text.sgml, and messages of tribute from the SGML community may be read there, many from individuals better equipped to describe his career and accomplishments as a whole than we are. But, for what it's worth, here is what we saw and knew of him personally. ----- A short, bald, bearded man with energetic behavior and manic disposition, Yuri seemed interested in everything. I first met him at SGML '88, the first of the annual conferences he organized for the Graphic Communications Association. He had invited several academics, including myself, to describe the problems we faced in creating electronic texts, and our use -- in my case, still only a potential use -- of SGML. At the time, the TEI had still not decided finally whether to use SGML, because we weren't sure that SGML could do the job. Yuri had attracted enough of the SGML community, though, to ensure that I was able to pick the brains of many of the brightest people working with SGML -- including Yuri. I came away convinced that there was no type of information I could describe which could not be represented in SGML (a conviction I still hold), but even more I came away impressed with the collegiality and friendly spirit of the SGML community. Many of my basic assumptions about SGML were shaped, I realize in retrospect, by that conference's characterization of SGML as 'the quiet revolution' and by Yuri's opening talk in which he discussed the French revolution (as a less quiet one) at some length and drew out analogies with the way SGML affects information storage. Under Yuri's vigilant eye, the GCA SGML conferences have been models of open technical discussion even among commercial and technical rivals. They are marked by their substance, and while business is certainly done in the halls, in the exhibits, and over breakfast, the formal presentations are kept scrupulously non-commercial and informative. Yuri himself set an almost alarming example in this regard: in one session a few years ago, one user almost went without an answer after suggesting that what the world really needed was a network-capable SGML browser. I waited for Yuri to rise and mention that SoftQuad had announced such a product the previous month -- but he never did. Someone else eventually made the point, but Yuri never wanted to appear to abuse his position as chairman of the conference, and avoided anything that might have seemed like a commercial announcement -- even for software which his company was giving away for free. Besides chairing the GCA conferences for the last eight years, Yuri helped organize SGML Open, the industry-wide consortium which works to improve the interoperability and utility of SGML software. He set an example for the rest of the SGML community when he firmly greeted the rise of the World Wide Web and its sort-of-SGML markup language, HTML, and when he brought both HoTMetaL and Panorama to market as tools for working with the Web. He has been instrumental in seeing to it that the International Committee for Accessible Document Design (ICADD) has received respectful hearing and support in the SGML community, and worked actively to help devise the ICADD set of architectural forms, which make it possible for SGML documents in any ICADD-aware DTD to be translated automatically into Braille as well as producing large-print books. One of the SGML community's most striking characteristics is that unlike many other software markets, the term 'community' can be applied to it seriously. My initial impression in Boston has only been strengthened in the succeeding years: SGML vendors, users, and enthusiasts, in all their lively and sometimes noisy discussions, do enjoy a striking degree of mutual trust, respect, and admiration. For this, I think, Yuri is in large part responsible, through the way he organized the GCA meetings and gave his personal support, as well as SoftQuad's commercial support, to cooperative, non-commercial ventures which benefit all users and potential users of electronic texts. The TEI, and I personally, have had reason to be grateful for Yuri's generosity in providing us with software we could not otherwise have afforded. But I am more grateful for his constant interest in, and enthusiasm for, the goals of the TEI. He was a good man, a great force in making SGML what it is, and a good friend. I'll miss him a lot. -CMSMcQ [C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen] ----- I first met Yuri, not in person, but on the shelves of a discount book shop, where I was sufficiently intrigued by the title "The History of the End of the World" to buy what proved to be a remarkably cheerful overview of assorted apocalypses from Babylonian myth to Dr Strangelove. When, a few months later, I came across the same name as head of a major software vendor, my feelings to said vendor were correspondingly all the warmer. Yuri was personally generous to me and to the TEI in many ways, some of which Michael has already mentioned. The last time I saw him was at the Montreux SGML conference: he listened patiently to me ranting on about the SGML projects I hoped to get moving at Oxford in the next few years, diligently taking notes in a large A4 notebook. I remember noting the number of pages already filled in and wondering how many other people had been bending his ear in similar manner. Like Michael, I thought of Yuri as "one of us" -- and am constantly surprised to find the number of other people in the world who think the same. He had an enthusiasm for whatever you wanted to talk about, an ability to pick up on your concerns, and a richness of technical knowledge to support what in others might have been mere dilettantism. He had a fundamental sympathy with uses of SGML far removed from many of those which concerned many of the key players in the industry, and a charmingly playful streak which many others lacked. If life were a Disney cartoon, he would be the small furry animal which makes a fool of the armour plated dinosaur. We needed, and need, people like that. -LB [Lou Burnard]