Summary

I'm a Technical Director at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), with specific involvement in Web Fonts, CSS, and Web Audio. I am a co-author of PNG and played a pivotal rôle in the creation of SVG, the development of CSS @font-face and the worldwide success of downloadable fonts with WOFF 1.0 and 2.0, for which I was a recipient of a Technical Emmy at the 73rd Tech Emmy awards in 2022.

I'm the W3C representative to the International Color Consortium (ICC). Earlier, I was a member of the W3C Technical Architecture Group and co-author of Architecture of the World Wide Web, volume 1 with Tim Berners-Lee, Roy Fielding, and others. I was the first chair of the Fonts, CSS, and SVG Working Groups at W3C, and co-editor of the CSS2 and SVG 1 specifications. I'm co-author of five books in the field of Computer Graphics, and have given over 80 talks at conferences worldwide.

Work experience

Jul 2008 - present

Technical Director, W3C

Overall technical direction of interactive, user-facing Web standards. W3C Strategy Team, Core Web Design.
Jul 2006 - Jul 2008

Domain Lead, Interaction Domain, W3C

Managerial responsibility of Interaction Domain staff.
Aug 2006 - Feb 2010

Rich Web Client Activity Lead, W3C

The first attempt to integrate multiple languages such as HTML, SVG, MathML, XForms and custom markup. Namespace-based approach, eventually closed down in favour of HTML5.
Apr 1996 - Dec 2014

Graphics Activity Lead, W3C

Overall responsibility for graphics standards - notably PNG, WebCGM, SVG.
Apr 1996 - Feb 1997, Mar 2010 - Dec 2014

Fonts Activity Lead, W3C

Creation of the @font-face specification (later merged into CSS2), then responsibility for downloadable font formats WOFF 1.0 and WOFF 2.0.
Mar 1995 - Mar 1996

W3C Advisory Committee representative, JISC

Representing the digital, networked needs of the UK Higher Education sector to the W3C.
Apr 1991 - Mar 1996

Technical Author & Electronic Teaching Specialist, University of Manchester, UK

Responsible for the research, writing, illustration and field-testing of training materials on Computer Graphics, used throughout the UK Higher Education sector.
Apr 1986 - Sep 1989

Medical Laboratory Scientific Officer, Departments of Haematology and Transfusion Science, Falkirk Infirmary.

Diagnostic blood testing, transfusion cross-matching, emergency on-call coverage, computer analysis of diagnostic data.

Awards

In 2021 I was nominated for a Technology and Engineering EMMY® award for my work on Web Fonts, which started in 1996 with a requirements document and continued through the creation of the CSS @font-face and the development of the WOFF 1 (2012) and WOFF 2(2018) downloadable font formats. Taken as a set of technologies, this resulted in global deployment of downloadable Web fonts moving from 0% (2010 and earlier) to 80% of the top 10 million web sites (2020).

In April 2022 I was honoured to accept this Technical Emmy award on behalf of the W3C WebFonts Working Group, for Standardization of Font Technology for Custom Downloadable Fonts and Typography for Web and TV Devices.

Speaking

I have given over 80 talks in twenty countries over the last 25 years, and have spoken at some of the most prominent international web development conferences, including giving opening keynote addresses. Recent topics have included:

Colour gamut mapping in CIE Lab and Oklab
Colour on the web and broadcast
OpenType features in CSS Fonts
Chromatic font extensions to OpenType
WOFF 2.0 and WebFonts
ICC Color Management in SVG & CSS
New features in SVG2
New work at W3C - WebAssembly, WebVR&AR

A full list of talks is available, with links to slides, video, and papers as appropriate.

Judging & reviewing

I have served on the program committees for:

the International World Wide Web conferences
the SVG Open conference series
the International Unicode conferences
Extreme Markup (now Balisage).

I was the technical reviewer for Chris Coyier's book Practical SVG, published by A Book Apart.

Selected Publications

Books

Lilley, C. Color on the Web. Chapter 16 in Green, P. (editor) (2024) Fundamentals and Applications of Colour Engineering. Wiley. 978-1119827184
Watt, Andrew H.; Lilley, Chris, et. al. (2003) SVG Unleashed. Sams. ISBN 0-672-32429-6
Lin, F.; Wyrwas, K.; Irwin J.; Lilley, C.; Hewitt, W.T.; Howard, T.L.J. (1995) Geometry for Computer Graphics. Sheffield, UCoSDA. ISBN 1-85889-059-4
Lilley, C.; Lin, F.; Hewitt, W.T.; Howard, T.L.J. (1993) Visualisation 1: Graphical Communication. Sheffield, UCoSDA. ISBN 1-85889-027-6
Lilley, C.; Lin, F.; Hewitt, W.T.; Howard, T.L.J. (1993) Colour in Computer Graphics. Sheffield, UCoSDA. ISBN 1-85889-022-5
Lilley, C.; Lin, F.; Hewitt, W.T.; Howard, T.L.J. (1993) Standards for Computer Graphics. Sheffield, UCoSDA. ISBN 1-85889-017-9

Papers

Lilley, C. Towards an HDR-capable ICC PCS. Expert contribution to the International Color Consortium (ICC), June 2020. HTML.
Lilley, C. Ask an expert: Why is CSS . . . the way it is?. In Increment magazine Issue 13, May 2020. HTML.
Lilley, C.; Correll, S. (2003) Extending SVG Fonts with Graphite. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Unicode Conference PDF.
Lilley, C. (2001) SVG: Unicode meets Vector Graphics. In Proceedings of the 18th International Unicode Conference.
Lilley, C. (2000) Scalable Vector Graphics. In Proceedings of the Ninth International World Wide Web Conference PDF.
Lilley, C. (2000) Internationalisation and Localisation with SVG in Proceedings of the 16th International Unicode Conference.
Lilley, C. (1998) Rendering Multilingual Documents – CSS and XSL in Proceedings of the 13th International Unicode Conference. PDF.
Nielsen, Henrik Frystyk; Gettys, Jim; Baird-Smith, Anselm; Prud'hommeaux, Eric; Lie, Håkon Wium; Lilley, Chris (1997) Network Performance Effects of HTTP/1.1, CSS1, and PNG in ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 27(4), pp.155-166 ·October 1997 HTML.
Lilley, C. (1997) The Design of an International Web Font Extension for Cacading Style Sheets in Proceedings of the 11th International Unicode Conference. PDF.
Lilley, C (1995) Not Just Decoration : Quality Graphics for the Web. in World Wide Web Journal 1(1), pp.291–307, Boston, 1995. HTML.
Lilley, C. (1995) Active Web Pages. In Proceedings of the 1995 Eurographics UK Conference, Loughborough, 1995, pp 267–281
Lilley, C; Lin, F; Hewitt, W.T.; Howard, T.L.J. (1994) The Design and Development of Distance Learning Materials for Graphics and Visualisation. In Eurographics Workshop on Graphics and Visualisation Education (GVE), Barcelona, 1993. Also reprinted in Computers & Graphics 18(3), pp.269–275
Lilley, C. (1994) An Introduction to Standardised Colour Measurement. in Proceedings of the 12th Eurographics UK Conference, 22–24 March 1994 pp.163–177

Web Standards and other specifications

Atkins, Tab; Lilley, Chris (editors) (2022) CSS Color Module Level 4. W3C Candidate Recommendation, 1 November 2022
Lilley, Chris; Kravets, Una; Verou, Lea; Argyle, Adam (editors) (2022) CSS Color Module Level 5. W3C Working Draft, 28 June 2022
Lilley, Chris; Maxfield, Myles C.; Rieger, Garret (editors) (2022) Incremental Font Transfer. W3C Working Draft, 28 June 2022
Lilley, Chris (1996, 2022) Fonts for the Web: Rationale, 1996 W3C Group Note, 14 April 2022
Baron, David L.; Etemad, Elika J.; Lilley, Chris (editors) (2022) CSS Conditional Rules Module Level 4. W3C Candidate Recommendation, 17 February 2022
Maxfield, Myles C.; Lilley, Chris (editors) (2021) CSS Fonts Module Level 5. W3C Working Draft, 21 December 2021
Daggett, John; Maxfield, Myles C.; Lilley, Chris (editors) (2020) CSS Fonts Module Level 4. W3C Working Draft, 17 November 2020
Lilley, Chris (editor) (2020) Progressive Font Enrichment: Evaluation Report. W3C Working Group Note, 15 October 2020
Daggett, John; Maxfield, Myles; Lilley, Chris (editors) (2018) CSS Fonts Module Level 3. W3C Recommendation, 20 September 2018.
Lilley, Chris (editor) (2017) RFC 8081: The font Top Level Type. IETF Proposed Standard, February 2017.
Lilley, Chris (editor) (2015) WOFF 2.0 Evaluation Report. W3C specification, 14 April 2015.
Thompson, H.; Lilley, C. RFC 7303: XML Media Types. IETF Proposed Standard. 07 July 2014.
Dahlström, Eric et. al. (2011) Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.1 (Second Edition). W3C Recommendation. 16 August 2011.
Çelik, Tantek; Lilley, Chris; Baron, L. David (editors) (2011) CSS Color Module Level 3. W3C Recommendation, 7 June 2011.
Lilley, Chris; Grasso, Anthony (2009) SVG Color 1.2, Part 2: Language. W3C specification, 01 October 2009.
Anderson, A.; Berjon, R. et. al. (2006) Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) Tiny 1.2 Specification. W3C Recommendation, 22 December 2008.
Jacobs, Ian; Walsh, Norm (eds)(2004) Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One. W3C Recommendation, 15 December 2004.
Lilley, Chris (2004) How should the problem of identifying ID semantics in XML languages be addressed in the absence of a DTD?. TAG finding, 30 November 2004.
Duce, David (editor) (2003) Portable Network Graphics (PNG) Specification (Second Edition). W3C Recommendation. 10 November 2003. Also published as Information technology — Computer graphics and image processing — Portable Network Graphics (PNG): Functional specification. ISO/IEC 15948:2003 (E).
Lilley, Chris (2003) Separation of semantic and presentational markup, to the extent possible, is architecturally sound. Draft TAG finding, 30 June 2003.
Diaz, A. et al. (2001) Component Extension (CX) API requirements Version 1.0. W3C specification, 11 December 2001.
Ferraiolo, Jon (editor) (2001) Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.0 Specification. W3C Recommendation. 4 September 2001.
Bos, Bert; Lie, Håkon Wium; Lilley, Chris; Jacobs, Ian (1998) Cascading Style Sheets, level 2. W3C Recommendation, 12 May 1998.
Lilley, Chris (editor) (1997) Web Fonts. W3C specification, 21 July 1997. This work was later merged into CSS2.
Lilley, Chris; Platon, Roy (1997) Use of CGM as a Scalable Graphics Format. W3C specification, 18 June 1997.

Education

Sep 1993 - Apr 1994

Postgraduate Diploma, Bioinformatics; Global Network Academy/University of Bielefeld, Germany.

This course used then-new electronic techniques such as the World Wide Web for course delivery, and multi-user interactive chatrooms(MOO) for tutorials. I was a 'consulting student' (teaching assistant) on this course, my interest being in the technologies used as well as the course material.
Sep 1989 - Sep 1990

Master of Science, Biological Computation; Univeristy of York, UK.

Thesis: Browser: A tool for interactive examination of large Modula-2 programs.

An intensive computer science conversion course. Distinction.
Sep 1978 - May 1983

Bachelor of Science, Biochemistry; University of Stirling, UK.

Honors degree.

Technical skills

I have a broad understanding of the full Open Web Stack of technologies, including:

Colour Science
Information abstraction and granularity, the URL, Web Architecture
Typography, character encoding, the character/glyph model, text layout
HTML (2 - 5)
XML technologies, in particular SVG
CSS (including CSS3/4/5)

I also have experience with a wide range of programming languages and technologies, including Pascal, Turbo Pascal, FORTRAN, Modula-2, Modula-3, Ada, C, Arduino/C++, JavaScript (ES6, together with the DOM & related APIs), Z80 and ARM Cortex assembly.

Languages

English: Native speaker, rich vocabulary, high competence
French: Good reading level, conversational competence

Professional memberships

From April 1987 to September 1989 I was an Associate of the Institute of Medical Laboratory Sciences. From April 1992 until March 1996 I was a Member of Eurographics UK chapter. I am currently an Individual Member of the International Typographic Association (ATypI, Association Typographique Internationale). I am the W3C representative to the International Color Consortium.

Professional interests

Computer Graphics, primarily 2D, with special interest in technical illustration, interactive graphics, and scientific visualization. Typography, in particular advanced and non-Latin typography. Color theory and color management, particularly as it pertains to the Open Web; Open web standards, in particular the socio-political process of successful standardization. Compound documents and appropriate choices across the content-presentation gradient. Technical communication (writing, illustration, discourse).

Research interests

Information visualization. Color measurement, color appearance modelling, psychological and biological aspects of color vision. Sound synthesis, in particular subtractive and additive synthesis, sonic modelling, analog synthesis, novel microcontroller-based performance interfaces, sonic visualization.