Robert Richards, an independent contractor, has worked in various fields including medical information, telecommunications, media and e-learning. Having been exposed to XML since its inception and used it for various projects during his career, his most extensive work with the technology was within the e-learning space. He helped created a proprietary XML based application server which used XML for data publishing, defining application business logic as well as data querying. He was also the lead engineer for the company?'s involvement in SCORM (Shareable Content Object Reference Model), used for Web-based learning, established by the U.S. Department of Defense through its Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) initiative. After becoming the latest casualty of the dot-com implosion in 2001, Rob had his first taste of PHP and began contributing code to the domxml extension in 2002. Since then, he has become one of the authors of the DOM extension for PHP 5, contributes to the other XML based extensions and has authored the xmlReader, for PHP 5, and xmlwriter, for PHP 4.3+, extensions. Also on occasion, he contributes bug fixes to the libxml2 project found during the development of these extensions.