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Larry Masinter

Larry Masinter is an American computer scientist and a long-standing contributor to internet and web standards, best known as a co-author of the URI specifications.

Larry Masinter earned a PhD in computer science from Stanford University (1980). At Xerox PARC, which he joined in 1976, he was a principal scientist and worked on the Interlisp programming environment — work for which the team received the 1992 ACM Software System Award — and he was later a principal scientist at Adobe. He was made an ACM Fellow in 1999. For decades he was active in the standards bodies that shape the Web — the IETF, where he chaired the URI working group, and the W3C — authoring or co-authoring a long run of RFCs.

Work

The URI specifications. Masinter is a co-author of the lineage of IETF documents that standardised web addressing: RFC 1738 (1994, which defined URLs, with Tim Berners-Lee and Mark McCahill), RFC 2396 (1998, which separated the generic URI syntax, with Berners-Lee and Roy Fielding), and RFC 3986 / STD 66 (2005, the current standard, with the same three). The URI subject pages carry the full treatment of that addressing layer.

Web and internet standards. Beyond the URI work, Masinter contributed across a broad range of standards — among them the data: URL scheme, internationalisation work, and HTTP and MIME-related specifications — much of it the unglamorous but essential business of making the Web’s formats interoperable.

Where his work sits

Masinter’s contribution is standards authorship: the careful drafting that turns a working idea — addressing on the Web — into a precise, durable specification that independent implementations can agree on. It is co-authored, infrastructural work, named here because the URI subject delegates its depth to the people who wrote the standard rather than to a single inventor.

Key works

See also: URI · Tim Berners-Lee · Roy Fielding