Hi. I'm Chris Wilson.

A lot of people claim to be Web experts, so let me qualify myself. I was there. I personally wrote about half of NCSA Mosaic 1.0 for Microsoft Windows. I've been developing software for the Web since May of 1993, and Internet software for PCs since 1991.

I don't claim to be an expert on surfing the Web - I'm pretty good at the intricate art of picking out information, and I enjoy killing hours soaking in the information sea that is our collective online consciousness, but I have a real job. It takes a lot of my time - far too much for me to be completely up-to-the-minute on where the latest Beverly Hills nine-oh-two-one-oh website just popped up.

I am an expert on many of the protocols, formats, and algorithms that are the building blocks of the Web. (Not all of them, certainly - I'd be a bit loony if I claimed that - but I have a pretty good breadth of knowledge. I'm generally recognized as an expert on stylesheets, primarily CSS stylesheets, since I did most of the CSS implementations for Internet Explorer 3.0 and 4.0.

I started my career in Internet software coding as an undergraduate student in September of 1990, when I began working for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. My first project was NCSA Telnet for MS-DOS. I worked on a wide variety of projects at NCSA, including scientific visualization, sonification (using sound to assist in exploration of scientific data), Internet network utilities for Windows, scientific collaboration, and, of course, Web software. By the end of my tenure at NCSA, I was the project lead of all DOS and Windows software development in the Software Tools Group at NCSA (managing a half-dozen students and grad students) and was leading the Windows Mosaic effort.

I quit NCSA in April of 1994 (a week before most of the rest of the core Mosaic development team quit to go start up some company in Mountain View), due to frustration at NCSA and readiness to do something different with my life, and went to work for a company called SPRY, Inc., which produced Internet in a Box and other Internet connectivity tools. This was both a formative and informative experience, but not one I particularly care to repeat. I really empathized with Dilbert while I worked there - we were all convinced one of us was Scott Adams, not just because of the truth evident in Dilbert cartoons, but because the timing was always perfect. Two days after our manager did something idiotic, it would be the subject of a Dilbert cartoon. SPRY was purchased by CompuServe in May or so of 1995 (they've since been chewed up and spit back out), and I finally wised up and left not long after that, heading for Microsoft.

I started working for Microsoft in July of 1995, writing a Web crawler for the Microsoft Network division. After a couple of months, the Internet Explorer team heard that I was working at Microsoft, and started vying for my affections (a strict no-no). So, I switched teams into IE in October 1995, and then once we shipped IE 3.0 in August 1996, segued into the Trident team (see below), and here I am.

I used to be an SDE (that's Software Design Engineer) for the big M. In the fall of 1997, I switched jobs to be a PM (Program Manager), which basically means I get to poke my nose in a lot more places, but I don't actually write code for a living any more.  I'm a member of the Trident team - Trident is Microsoft's HTML authoring and browsing engine - it's the HTML component in IE 4.0+.

As for my own personal little slice of the project, I'm the program manager (project management, basically) of the layout and text teams, as well as being stylesheets guru, since I personally wrote the code for almost all of IE 3.0's stylesheets implementation and was Microsoft's representative on the W3C CSS Working Group for a very long time.

I used to be the resident Standards Fanatic ^(tm) - er, W3C representative on several working groups - for Microsoft. I quit almost all my W3C representative duties in late 1999 because they were becoming less and less productive for me personally. 

So what else do I do? Hmm, well, I like to do quite a bit. Unfortunately, time does have a way of slipping away. However, a few of the pursuits that I enjoy in my not-copious-enough spare time are:

• Playing music - as I mention on my toys page.  I take piano lessons, and play keyboards and occasionally acoustic guitar in a band.
• Hiking - the Pacific Northwest has lots of incredible forests, trails and mountains. Some of my favorites: Hurricane Ridge and the Brothers on the Olympic Peninsula, and Strawberry Mountain, just north of Mount St. Helens. We also make pretty regular visits to Mount Rainier.
• Working on our house - my wife and I bought our first house in Seattle several  years ago. Home renovation can be a full-time occupation all by itself.
• Building musical instruments - specifically bamboo didgeridoos and flutes, and PVC didgeridoos.
• Reading. Mostly cyberpunk, fantasy and mysteries, and a lot of magazines and catalogs (fodder for the drool list!).
• Working out. More of a necessity than a joy, but maybe if I list it as an interest, I'll do it more often.
• Electronic artwork. I used to be a physical-world artist, mostly in high school - pencil, oil, watercolor (never developed a distinctive style of my own with pen-and-ink) and ceramic - but once I hit college, I didn't save enough time for it. I've been meaning to get back to it, mostly to the tactility of ceramics, but in the meantime, I've started playing about a bit with my scanner, my digital camera and a few manipulation programs for artistic effect. I'm still working on putting a gallery up here.