My company, Creative Words, started out as my entry point into technical writing, translations and markup technology in the early 90s. My company was part of GNOSIS-Gruppen, alongside some colleagues while working for various Ericsson companies, and for a time I’d never have presented myself as Ari Nordström at Creative Words, only as Ari Nordström at GNOSIS.

Then the IT bubble burst and we were all employed by others. I was at Information & Media, Crepido Systems, Sigma, and Condesign, where I spent seven years designing document management systems and writing schemas, XSLT, XQuery, XProc and other things starting with ‘X’.

In 2015, I revived Creative Words, now specialising in markup technologies and XML expertise. I spent more than two and a half years working as a Content Architect for LexisNexis, one of the world’s largest legal publishers.

At LexisNexis, I got to work with lots of markup people like myself, but also with most XML technologies out there (we even invented some new ones ourselves). I did a lot of legal commentary, which is pretty much what it sounds like. For example, I converted the venerable 104-volume Halsbury’s Laws of England (Wikipedia describes Halsbury’s as “a uniquely comprehensive encyclopaedia of law [that] provides the only complete narrative statement of law in England and Wales”) from RTF to XML, and I wrote pipelines to produce consolidated tables of cases, statutes and indices. I learned a lot about English legislation and their legal system.

I spent two years working for a Danish legal publisher, Karnov Group, merging Karnov’s Swedish legislation libraries with those of recent acquisition Norstedts juridik‘s, and converting legal commentary in MS Word format to DocBook XML. I also introduced XProc pipelining to their publishing processes, always a win.

Then followed 4.5 years with the PLM company CAD-IT UK, a specialist provider for Siemens. I did a lot of ATA-, DITA- and S1000D-related work for the aerospace and automotive industries, with some SGML to sweeten the deal. As CAD-IT wanted a portal application for their DITA solutions around Siemens Teamcenter, I also designed an XML-first portal for technical publications, now in use in the automotive industry.

I’ve contributed to the XProc 3.0 standard by co-chairing the W3C XProc Next community group, and I’m heavily involved in various markup conferences around the globe.

All in all, markup is not a bad way of making a living.