[1] After his bachelor's degree in Biochemistry he worked in Haematology and Blood transfusion at the hospital laboratories of Stirling and Falkirk for a few years before eventually switching to Computer Science.

[3] In 1994 he was a consulting student on the Biocomputing course run by the GNA's Virtual School of Natural Sciences, where he obtained a postgraduate diploma in Bioinformatics.

He chaired a working group developing Web Fonts, a technical activity which was later merged with CSS.

In 1998, he was appointed as chair of the W3C Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) Working Group, a position he held for ten years, until January 2008.

He was an Associate of the Institute of Medical Laboratory Sciences, a member of the British Computer Society Electronic Publishing Specialist Group.