1. Overview

The company office is located in Ottawa, Canada's national capital, only 60km north of the U.S. border at Ogdensburg in New York state. Please contact us by email if you need our mailing or physical address.

The principal softwright is Mr. G. Ken Holman, formerly with a products and services company for over thirteen years in a number of roles, specializing in international standards including the SGML/XML family of technologies and the North American Presentation Layer Protocol Syntax (NAPLPS). A brief speaker's biography is available for use at conferences.

2. Contacting us

2.1. Email addresses and attachments

When sending us ZIP file attachments by email rather than using the file depository site, please rename your ZIP file extension ".zzz" rather than ".zip" in order to get through our unfortunately rigid spam filters.

For corporate and administration inquiries, please contact the President, Kathryn J. Holman.

For technical and service offering inquiries, please contact the Chief Technology Officer, G. Ken Holman.

Please do not send HTML-encoded mail messages, as these will likely get caught in spam filters.

We are in the process of changing our web site to remove all email addresses other than the ones above and info@CraneSoftwrights.com. If you try to use any other of the email addresses on an archived page from this web site, or a page from this web site that has not yet been updated, the message will either bounce or be ignored.

We do try to acknowledge all work and personal email directed to us at one of the email addresses listed above, so if you haven't received a timely response to an email that you have sent to us, please assume that we have lost it in a spam filter and that we are not ignoring it.

Thank you for your understanding and patience, and we apologize in advance for any problems.

2.2. File depository site address

To send us large files, please do not use our email addresses because we are often on the road; please zip all of the files into a single ZIP archive and upload this ZIP file to our file depository at https://bit.ly/crane-depository and notify us of its presence by email.

The contents of uploaded files can be viewed or downloaded by other page visitors, so it is critical that you inform us by email as soon as possible for us to remove the files. You might consider using a password when creating the ZIP archive, though this directory is used really very infrequently.

3. About our corporate image

In Oriental mythology the crane is the Messenger of the Gods, who would (of course) be interested in structured communication and information processing and is probably a constant user of SGML. The artwork is an abstract silhouette of the Origami Paper-folded Crane, comprised entirely of isosceles triangles, and with the exception of the beak and the tail, is symmetric about the center vertical line. The term "softwright" is derived in a parallel fashion to the words "shipwright", "playwright" or "millwright", but in relation to computer software.

4. Vendor independence

As a matter of corporate principle, Crane Softwrights Ltd. is committed to vendor independence by not endorsing and not being a reseller of any software or services of other companies. We only promote on our web site the products and services in which we have a direct involvement. We will use whatever software our customers ask us to use or that for a particular situation we recommend to use. By keeping our independence we can be hired by any vendor to, say, provide standards-based training on their behalf, without (we hope) losing business from competing vendors who want to hire us to do the same. Unfortunately, some vendors don't see it this way, but this is our goal: to treat all possible customers equally and fairly and without bias. The only way we feel we can claim to hold to this principle is to rebuff all requests from vendors to resell or represent their commercial software.

In particular, we have been asked about any relationship we might have with the oXygen XML company and products, and that is arms length as with all other tools we use. We do not sell nor represent that company's products. Our creation of the hands-on Practical Use of oXygen XML is in direct response to customer demand for such a class. After repeatedly telling potential customers that we didn't offer such a class, we decided to create one based on our own experiences with the product and we hope they and others return to us asking again.

5. Association membership

Crane is affiliated directly, or indirectly through Ken, with the following associations:

Member of
The XML Guild