Bray is a rather important person in a lot of tech circles.  Two interesting details regarding his accomplishments: he’s the co-inventor of XML, and spent several years serving on the W3C Technical Architecture Group.

Here’s what the respected developer had to say about the iPhone, though: "The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what.  It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger. . . .  I hate it."

In turn, Bray’s a huge fan of Google’s mobile operating system.  He wrote, "The reason I’m here is mostly Android.  Which seems to me about as unambiguously a good thing as the tangled wrinkly human texture of the Net can sustain just now."

So it looks like the Android-iPhone war is about to get a lot more fierce.  Although for what it’s worth, Bray was careful to say that his opinions don’t necessarily reflect his new employer’s stance on anything.

Bray recounted the story of Lark in a recent blog post. He developed what became Lark and released it in December 1996.

During that time of development, Bray and his fiance, Lauren, traveled to Australia to get married. An unfortunate knee injury kept Lauren out of action for the remainder of their trip.

“So I broke out my computer and finished the work I’d already started on my XML processor,” Bray wrote, “and decided to call it Lark for Lauren’s Right Knee.”

Bray noted how Lark worked, and called it “a pure deterministic finite automaton (DFA) parser, with a little teeny state stack.” Lark worked well enough, and it worked very fast. “This was before the time of standardized XML APIs, but Lark had a stream API that influenced SAX, and a DOM-like tree API; both worked just fine,” Bray wrote.

However, Bray never built support for namespaces into Lark, and with the development of XML processors by an array of technology’s heavy hitters (IBM, Microsoft, etc) Lark faded into the background.

Then, O’Reilly author and standards activist Rick Jelliffe made it known he wanted to find a Finite State Machine for XML through the XML-dev mailing list. Bray noticed the request and passed Lark along to Jelliffe.

If he were so motivated, Bray believes he could do even more with Lark, he said in closing his post:

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.