Tantek Çelik

Who is Tantek Çelik?

Tantek Çelik is a Turkish American computer scientist, and has been the Chief Technologist at Technorati. He is one of the principal editors of several CSS Specifications.

He worked at Microsoft from 1997 to 2004, where he helped lead development of 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 and later their representative to a number of working groups at the World Wide Web Consortium; he is credited on a number of recommendations relating to XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets due to this work. 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, 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.