Jean Paoli

Jean Paoli is one of the inventors of XML. Along with Tim Bray and C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen, Paoli co-edited the XML 1.0 recommendation for the World Wide Web Consortium starting in 1997 and until at least 2008.[1][2]

Jean Paoli at the 2010 O'Reilly Open Source Convention

Paoli was born in Beirut, Lebanon.[3] Before joining Microsoft, Paoli had spent 10 years developing various startup companies at INRIA, the renowned French institute for research in computer science.[3] He moved from Paris to join Microsoft in 1996, where he worked on the Channel Definition Format for Internet Explorer 4.0,[4] advocated for the original Microsoft Office XML formats, and promoted Office Open XML.

Along with Adriana Neagu and others he was a co-inventor of InfoPath and is named on its patented way of authoring XML using DHTML views and XSLT.[5]

Paoli was the president of Microsoft Open Technologies until 2017.[6] He departed Microsoft in late 2017 to create the startup Docugami, Inc. which focuses on productivity, machine learning, semi-structured data and documents.[6]