Michael Sperberg-McQueen, a legend in the markup community, died yesterday morning. He was, of course, co-editor of the XML specification and chaired the XML Schema working Group at the W3C. Others may remember him for his instrumental role in developing and maintaining the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), and still others will recall his many thoughtful papers and presentations on various aspects of markup theory.

But Michael was also one of the organisers of the Balisage markup conference. His closing keynote, carefully crafted and eloquently given, would always end the conference. We would all gather around him to listen and reflect, with those of us having presented at the conference impatiently waiting for him to mention our talks, because he always did. He would effortlessly weave our presentations into his narrative, making us feel appreciated and important and heard; we’d all feel like rock stars, as Eric van der Vlist once put it. Michael was an extraordinary public speaker, and to this day some of his talks still come off as magic.

If you speak at Balisage, you’re always introduced by one of the organisers, usually Jim Mason, Norm Walsh or Michael. This year — just over two weeks ago — Michael introduced me. Before, we chatted for about ten minutes. He made sure he would pronounce my name correctly, but then really wanted to discuss the mainframe computers that my slides started off with. This was Michael for you; no matter what you brought to the table, he’d be able to discuss it, often at length and in great detail.

He was also a generous man, appreciative and kind, always giving credit where he thought credit is due. This year, I was immensely proud to be mentioned in his Balisage talk, having proposed ideas he had decided to use in his work. He didn’t have to; my ideas were hardly original and I can honestly say that I wouldn’t have as much as reacted, but he did. And it meant a lot to me.

Michael will be sorely missed. Today we mourn.