About

Career

Andrew began his working life in publishing in 1999, as desktop publishing operator at a translation agency, laying out multi-lingual manuals for such varied appliances as lawnmowers, forklift trucks and production-line biscuit ovens.

Much of the work was repetitious manual labour. FrameMaker+SGML was only spoken of with an air of mystery; there had to be a better way…

In 2000, he joined a digital publishing consultancy whose clients comprised both STEM and non-traditional publishers. Including legislatures; the timber industry; standards bodies. He started out writing SGML DTDs and Python programs, progressing to on-site consultancy and writing bids and proposals. He designed publishing workflows, with a focus on automation and data quality, learning Java and XSLT along the way. He was lead developer of the company's validation product, XMLProbe.⊕ XMLProbe was open-sourced as Probatron, an implementation of ISO Schematron. It is now archived at Google Code. He joined the board of directors, becoming responsible for product development.

After a spell in technical publishing at an automotive aftermarket publisher, he founded his own consultancy and worked as a freelancer, with clients including LexisNexis UK and Nature Publishing Group.

Since 2016, he has worked for Bloomsbury Publishing Group plc, where he leads a team focused on content architecture for academic publishing digital products.

Standards work

Andrew is a member in an individual capacity of British Standards committee IST/41 (Document description and processing language), which represents the UK at meetings of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34. Which committee oversees standards including RELAX NG, Schematron, OOXML and EPUB.

He was appointed Project Editor for ISO/IEC 19757-3 (Schematron) in 2016, and maintains the text of that international standard. Since late 2022 he has convened Working Group 10, which is tasked with producing its next revision.

He is also a member of the W3C Community Group developing Schematron Quick Fix.

Conferences

Andrew has been a keen conference and SIG contributor since the days of SGML UK and XML Europe.

He has attended Balisage as well as XML London and XML Prague (for both of which he has been a member of the peer-reviewing programme committee).

Together with Tony Graham, he has organized the annual Schematron Users Meetup at XML Prague since 2017.

He is a founder member and organizer of Markup UK, a conference about XML and other markup technologies.

Miscellaneous

Andrew is not a technologist by education, but a modern languages graduate. He owns too many cameras, although he tries to put them to good use.