Tantek Çelik

Tantek Çelik, of San Francisco, is a computer scientist of Turkish-American descent and was the Chief Technologist at Technorati. He is one of the principal editors of several CSS Specifications.

He gained a following during his time at Microsoft (1997-2004), where he worked on the Macintosh version of Internet Explorer. Between 1998 and 2003 he managed a team of software developers that designed and implemented the Tasman rendering engine for Internet Explorer for Mac version 5. During his time at Microsoft he also served as their alternate representative (1998-2000) and later their representative (2001-2004) to a number of working groups at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), due to this work he is credited on a number of recommendations relating to XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets. While working for Microsoft he also developed the "box model hack" that is used by web designers to work around the Internet Explorer box model bug.

Before working at Microsoft he worked in a variety of software engineer roles at Sun Microsystems, Oracle Corporation and Apple Computer. During his four years at Apple Computer (1992-1996), he spent most of his time on the OpenDoc project, first as a senior software developer and then as a technical lead. In 1996 he left Apple to form a software development and consulting company specialising in OpenDoc development, 6prime, with another OpenDoc technical lead Eric Soldan, however in 1997 Aladdin Systems purchased 6prime's main product REV releasing it as Flashback.

At Technorati, he led the adoption of better standards support (including microformats) throughout the company, including their website's front page. He was also involved with the special Election 2004 section of the website, including writing the initial version. He serves as a founder at the Global Multimedia Protocols Group and has Bachelor's and Masters degrees in Computer Science from Stanford University.

He is the older brother of the actress Aysan Çelik.