Steven Pemberton


Steven Pemberton is a researcher in the Distributed and Interactive Systems group at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, the national research institute for mathematics and computer science in the Netherlands.
Pemberton served as a contributing author of HTML 4.0 and HTML 4.01 as well as chair of the W3C HTML Working Group and contributing author during the specification of XHTML 1.0 and XHTML 1.1. These web standards defined the W3C recommended formats of world wide web content for over 15 years starting in 1997. Pemberton also served as chair of the XHTML 2 working group until the conclusion of its charter at the end of 2009, after which work on the XML version of HTML was subsumed under the specification of HTML 5
Having chaired the first W3C workshop on stylesheets, Pemberton served as a contributing author of Cascading Style Sheets specifications, Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3. Since 1998, CSS has been a cornerstone World Wide Web technology, along with HTML and JavaScript.
From 2000-2007, Pemberton served as co-chair of the W3C Forms Working Group. He was a co-author of the XForms 1.0, XML Events, and XForms 1.1 W3C Recommendations. During this time, he was also a member of the RDFa taskforce. Starting in 2010, he was reappointed as co-chair of the W3C Forms Working Group, and he has continued since 2015 as a member of the W3C XForms Users Community Group.
In addition to his substantial contributions to web standards, Pemberton was also one of the developers of the ABC programming language and of the Views System, an open-architecture user interface system and application environment. He also implemented ALGOL 68 for the Manchester MU5 Computer.
Pemberton was editor-in-chief of SIGCHI Bulletin from 1993 to 1999 and of ACM Interactions from 1998 to 2004.
In 2009 Pemberton was awarded the CHI Lifetime Service Award by SIGCHI.