William Tunnicliffe was one of the founders of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), and is often remembered as the father of generic coding. Historically, electronic manuscripts contained control codes ("macros") that caused the document to be formatted in a manner called "specific coding." In contrast, generic coding, which began in the late 1960s, uses descriptive tags (for example, "heading" rather than "format-17"). Generic coding eventually evolved into Generalized Markup Language.

Generalized Markup Language (GML), created by IBM's (International Business Machines's) Charles Goldfarb, Edward Mosher, and Raymond Lorie, was based on the generic coding ideas of Stanley Rice and Tunnicliffe. GML was invented to describe a document in terms of the relationship between organization structure and content parts. Instead of a simple tagging scheme, GML introduced the concept of a formally defined document type with an explicit nested element structure. Major portions of GML were implemented in...