A good friend and namesake

Alan and I shared the bond of the same name and many professional
interests, but we became good friends and I will indeed miss him.  
 
Alan and I were both grad students in the Boston area in the late 1960s
- he at MIT, I at BU - but as a result, we started to get each other's
telephone calls. With the advent of e-mail, we started getting each
other's messages, which gave us another good reason to keep in close
contact over the years. When my work at Graphic Communications
Association ventured into XML, the confusion became rampant, but let
there be no doubt: Alan (your colleague) was the real deal, while I was
the pretender.
 
I finally got together with Alan and his wife Judie in 1999 at a W3C
advisory committee meeting; there's a photo of the occasion on his Web
site, http://www.kotok.org/ . He was a true gentleman. Please share my
condolences with your colleagues at W3C. 
 
Alan Kotok
Managing Editor, Science Careers
akotok@aaas.org
+1 202-326-8965
http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/