Jean Paoli of Microsoft, Robin Cover of OASIS Win XML Cup 2004 Awards; Annual Awards Honor Achievements, Contributions to XML Standard.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- IDEAlliance, a leading trade association dedicated to fostering information technology standards, today presented the XML Cup 2004 for contributions to the XML community to Jean Paoli of Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Robin Cover of OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) and editor of The Cover Pages. The awards were presented November 16 during the opening session of the XML Conference and Exposition 2004.

"The XML Planning Committee and IDEAlliance introduced the XML Cup in 2001 to honor those who have contributed significantly to the XML community," says Lauren Wood, XML 2004 Conference Chairperson. "Robin created a comprehensive encyclopedia of SGML and XML-related technologies that is an essential resource for anyone who wants to understand these often mystifying acronyms and technical terms, while Jean has furthered the vision of XML on the desktop that so many in the community share. Both have been effective evangelists for XML, and we congratulate them on being awarded the XML Cup."

More about the XML Cup Winners:

Jean Paoli is a senior director of XML architecture at Microsoft and one of the co-creators of the XML 1.0 standard with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). He has long been a strong and passionate advocate of XML and open standards, and specializes in building end-user markup editing tools. Jean jump-started the XML activity in Microsoft, creating and managing the team that delivered MSXML, the software that XML-enabled both Internet Explorer and the Windows operating system. He helped architect the XML support in the Microsoft Office System and was instrumental in creating the Microsoft Office InfoPath program.

Jean has been a significant player in the worldwide XML and SGML community since 1985. Until 1996, when he joined Microsoft, Jean was based in Paris, where he worked in collaboration with European research institutes, including INRIA in France.

"Jean helped lead the movement to make XML a core component of many Microsoft products, such as Office and Windows, as well as the foundation for integration between systems with XML-based Web services," says Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect. "We're delighted that he has been honored with the XML Cup."

Robin Cover is managing editor of The Cover Pages, http://xml.coverpages.org/, the comprehensive online resource that has served for more than 13 years as the chronicle of the structured information standards community. Robin became "Bibliographer at Large" for SGML in 1986 when he began his online reference collection to support markup theory and praxis.

SGML captured Robin's attention when he envisioned the value of descriptive markup for encoding a machine-independent representation of multilingual text. Robin has served for several years as Program Chair of the Computer Assisted Research Group (CARG) for the Society of Biblical Literature/American Academy of Religion and on the TEI Text Representation Committee and Textual Criticism Working Group. The Cover Pages is hosted by OASIS and sponsored by its members, Innodata Isogen, SAP, and Sun Microsystems.

"Robin Cover is widely acknowledged as one of the most respected voices in our industry. His intelligence, insight, and integrity combine to bring us the real information behind the XML headlines," says Patrick Gannon, president and CEO of OASIS. "Working with Robin is both a pleasure and an honor, and on behalf of the members of OASIS, I would like to congratulate him heartily on this well-deserved acknowledgement of his many contributions to our community."

"Robin Cover and Jean Paoli have each played important roles in supporting the XML community, even before XML was created," says David Steinhardt, president and CEO, IDEAlliance. "We are honored by their involvement both in our industry and this event."

About IDEAlliance

IDEAlliance (International Digital Enterprise Alliance) is a not-for-profit membership organization. Its mission is to advance user-driven, cross-industry solutions for all publishing and content-related processes by developing standards, fostering business alliances, and identifying best practices. Founded in 1966 as the Graphic Communications Association, IDEAlliance has been a leader in information technology -- developing Document Markup Metalanguage (GENCODE), sponsoring the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), and fostering eXtensible Markup Language (XML). IDEAlliance builds on these languages to create specifications that enhance efficiency and speed information in all aspects of publishing and content-related processes. Learn more about IDEAlliance at www.idealliance.org.