Scott Isaacs

For the 1989 Scripps National Spelling Bee champion, see List of Scripps National Spelling Bee champions.

Scott Isaacs is a software architect and web visionary who is best known for the development of Dynamic HTML (DHTML), which is at the core of what is commonly termed Ajax. Scott was a partner software architect at Microsoft Corporation for over 20 years before leaving for Amazon.com in September 2013. One of his first projects at Amazon was to help establish the Amazon Prime Air vision and team.

Scott helped invent and define many web technologies. He worked on the first ActiveX Control, helped create the forms package in Microsoft Office, defined many web standards, and drove the architecture for Microsoft Gadgets and frameworks driving Windows Live.

As a program manager on the Internet Explorer team in the mid-1990s, Scott not only defined DHTML but also created the CSS 2-D positioning specification, many of the form enhancements (e.g., LABEL, FieldSet) helping improve web-based form accessibility and usability, XML Data Islands, and much more. He wrote the original definitive guide to Dynamic HTML, Inside Dynamic HTML, published by Microsoft Press. Scott also invented the iframe html tag. It has been speculated that the tag name stands for the Isaacs Frame, although Scott has denied this.

From 2004-2009, Scott was an architect for MSN / Windows Live. Scott was responsible for inventing the Widget architecture (originally called Gadgets) for Windows Live and helped create start.com, a now defunct customizable portal. Scott also drove the client architecture that ran Windows Live and MSN Services. MSN Hotmail, MSN Spaces, and Windows Live were built around his DHTML-based Gadget/Widget Architecture.

Scott also developed sandboxing technology that explored how to create secure mashups.

External links

• Scott's Home Page
• Scott Isaacs: Introducing Web Sandbox