Michael Howard Kay (born 11 October 1951) is the editor of the W3C XSLT 2.0 and 3.0 language specifications for performing XML transformations,[3] and the developer of the Saxon XSLT and XQuery[4] processing software.

His father was English, his mother German; he was born in Germany but has always lived in England.

He gained his Doctor of Philosophy degree while working in the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge under the supervision of Maurice Wilkes on databases.

On leaving ICL, he worked for three years with Software AG[10] before forming his own company, Saxonica.

[17][18][19] He lives and works in Reading,[1] England and is a member of the XML Guild[20] and a regular speaker at the XML Summer School in Oxford[21] and Balisage Markup conference.