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Yuri Rubinsky


Yuri Ivan Rubinsky was a writer, software executive, and well known promoter of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), which was the basis for the now-ubiquitous XML. In Canada, he is probably best known as founding co-director of the influential Banff Publishing Workshop and for his work in applying technology to help visually impaired people. He died at age 43 on January 21, 1996 after suffering a massive and unexpected heart attack at his home in Toronto, Canada. The Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award was created posthumously in his memory.

Yuri was born in Tripoli, Lebanon on August 2, 1952, the son of Andrew and Anna Rubinsky. He and his family emigrated to the Toronto, Canada area when he was three. He is a graduate of Brock University and studied architecture at the University of Toronto. After a variety of jobs in the Yukon, Yuri focused on the publishing industry. During the summer of 1978, he attended the Radcliffe Publishing course (now Columbia Publishing course) at Harvard University. Yuri was so impressed with this course that he persuaded the Banff Centre for the Arts to sponsor the Banff Publishing Workshop (now the SFU Summer Publishing Workshops) two years later.

In 1984 Yuri married Holley Rubinsky, a writer.

In 1984, along with partners David Slocombe, Stan Bevington, and Patrick Dempster, Yuri founded a small Toronto-based technology company called SoftQuad, of which he was President. SoftQuad was started in order to improve automated typesetting at Toronto's Coach House Press, and for many years developed a version of troff. SoftQuad developed and sold a variety of SGML tools, such as Author/Editor, and notably one of the first commercial HTML authoring products, HoTMetaL. From the beginning, Yuri was instrumental in bringing the SGML community together and spreading the SGML gospel. He was widely respected and well liked. He was one of the founders of the SGML Open consortium, and very active as an organizer and speaker at industry and standards events. In 1995 Yuri sponsored the SoftQuad Web Award presented to Doug Engelbart at the Fourth Annual WWW Conference in Boston, publishing the keepsake booklet Boosting Our Collective IQ as a special tribute to Doug to be given to attendees of the award ceremony.


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