Heinz Wittenbrink

Heinz Wittenbrink was born in 1956 in Mulheim (Ruhr region). He studied literature and philosophy and worked as an editor and then a senior editor for the Bertelsmann Group. He was responsible for several CD ROMs with encyclopedic content, and later, for the development of the first free German encyclopedic website http://www.wissen.de. In 2000 he moved to a Munich-based web agency, and in 2002, founded his own company for online publishing. Since 2004 he has been a professor for web publishing at the University for Applied Sciences in Graz/Austria. He has written books and online teaching material on XML, HTML and CSS. Heinz used RSS for the first time when he developed a news service for a major German magazine publisher. He sees the ease of use and the extensibility of modern syndication formats as their major advantages. He is convinced that RSS and its successors will soon develop from syndication formats used in special contexts (news publishing, weblogs, and so on) to general formats for publishing and archiving online content.