Ep #15: From digital books to digital agents: Edd Wilder-James on the Evolution of Structured Information

Edd Wilder-James joins us in this episode for a wide-ranging conversation that begins in the early XML and SGML communities and stretches all the way to today’s AI-driven world. Along the way, we revisit the rise of pivotal standards such as DocBook, HTML and DITA. Edd and Sean discuss the unique culture of the structured document markup conferences that brought together technologists, publishers, academics, and information architects from radically different disciplines ranging from hi-tech engineering to the liberal arts.

Edd reflects on the optimism and intellectual energy of that era, including debates around standards, schemas, hypermedia, and the Semantic Web, while also acknowledging some of the orthodoxy and “tech tribalism” that shaped those communities. The discussion explores how ideas from SGML, HyTime, RDF, and structured publishing continue to resurface in modern systems, often under different names.

The conversation also looks at the Big Data (Hadoop) era in the formative years of cloud computing, the evolution of open-source ecosystems at Google and Microsoft including his current work at GitHub around Copilot and large-scale agentic AI systems.

Throughout the episode, Edd offers a thoughtful perspective on recurring patterns in computing: the tension between elegant models and practical systems, the repeated reinvention of timeless old ideas, and the enduring importance of context when interpreting information.

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Avsnitt(15)

Ep #14: Information Architecture and Structured Documents in an AI world

In this episode, Sean McGrath sits down with Alex Smith, Global Product Lead for Knowledge, Search, and AI at iManage, to unpack what’s really happening at the intersection of AI and the world of lega...

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Ep #13: Identity, security and privacy - with digital identity pioneer, Eve Maler

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Ep #12: From SGML (1986) to LLMs (2026): Jon Udell on The Tools That Make Digital Knowledge Work

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Ep #11: XML, HCI, and a retrospective on markup and the Web with Steven Pemberton

In this episode, we speak with Steven Pemberton, a pioneer of the early web, the first user in Europe to connect to the open internet, and a long-time contributor to standards at the W3C including CSS...

5 Jan 1h

Ep #10: Markup Goes Beyond Tags: Rick Jelliffe on Language Markup, Structure & Semantics in XML

Dive into an in-depth conversation with Rick Jelliffe, one of the most influential figures in the world of markup languages and structured data.Rick's contributions to markup and markup standards span...

1 Dec 20251h 17min

Ep #9: The Web Before Google: Liam Quin on HoTMetaL, XML, and the First Web Standards

The latest episode of Rule-Breakers features Liam Quin a pioneering figure in the world of electronic publishing and generalized markup. In this conversation, we learn about Liam’s journey from a chil...

3 Nov 20251h 11min

Ep #8: The evolution of structured data formats — from XML to AI with Anthony Coates

Join Rule-breakers host, Sean McGrath and our latest guest, Anthony Coates, for a deep dive into the history and necessity of structured content. Drawing on his experience at Reuters and his work on m...

6 Okt 202547min