William Warren Tunnicliffe

William Warren Tunnicliffe (April 22, 1922 – September 12, 1996) was an American computer scientist credited to first have presented the idea to separate the definition of formatting from the content in electronic documents (separation of presentation and content).

He was also a member and former chairman of the Printing Industries of America.

Tunnicliffe was born on April 22, 1922, in Washington, D.C., where he was also raised.

He graduated from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1943. He then received a degree in engineering sciences and applied physics from Harvard University in 1951. Before joining Harvard, he had enlisted in the US Navy where he attained the rank of captain, which he held until 1982 in the

Navy Reserves.

Tunnicliffe worked with Raytheon Co. and the Courier Citizen newspaper in

Lowell, Massachusetts, before leaving to start Tunnicliffe Associates—a Winchester, Massachusetts-based engineering firm he ran for 10 years before retiring.

GenCode

In September 1967, during a meeting at the Canadian Government Printing Office, Tunnicliffe gave a presentation on the separation of information content of documents from their format. In the 1970s, he led the development of a standard called GenCode for the publishing industry. GenCode (Generic Coding) was designed to provide a standard language for specifying formatting information so that printed documents would come out looking the same, regardless of the hardware used.

At almost the same time, the book designer Stanley Rice published vague speculation along similar lines in the late 1960s. Rice, as an editor at a Major Publishing House, was writing about "Standardized Editorial Structures". This was the beginning of a movement to separate the formatting of a document from its content. In 1969 Charles F. Goldfarb, a graduate of Harvard Law School and Columbia College, developed the first markup language, called Generalized Markup Language, or GML.

Tunnicliffe was the first chairman of WG8, the ISO committee that developed and maintains the SGML family of standards. SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) is the first standard descriptive markup language. He was also a member and former chairman of the Printing Industries of America.

Tunnicliffe died on September 12, 1996, in Winchester, Massachusetts. He was 74.