Working together for standards The Web Standards Project

Education Task Force Member

Lars Gunther was born in 1966 in the town of Borås, Sweden, as the youngest of three siblings. Constructing things is a family trait. My grandfather built his own lathe and as a kid I constructed a gazillion things, be it carts, wooden rifles or elaborate game rules.

In the secondary school, “gymnasium”, I majored in science and computing, was among Sweden’s top 20 in math, and studied extra German, French, Latin and ancient Greek.

At this time a experienced a calling to become a pastor in the Mission Covenant Church of Sweden and decided to broaden my horizons in preparation. The next years I was a (not so good) salesman, worked on the line for Sweden’s largets mail order company, in kindergarten, in nursing homes with the elderly and disabled, as a substitute teacher with 13 to 19 year old students, in church with the youth and scouts.

In 1990-94 I studied at what has become Stockhol School of Theology. It was during this time I bought my first modem and joined BBSs and Compuserve. I also started a company, Keryx, on the side, which I’ve kept since.

I started working at my first assignment as a pastor in 1994, and used local BBSs to evangelize. I also got my first PPP account that year and started using the web with IBM WebExplorer on my OS/2 laptop. I soon started to hack my first lines of HTML.

During my second pastorate I developed web sites for my church, for my company and for a few customers to my company. Compatibilities between browsers drove me crazy and for a while I resorted to using Net Objects Fusion. But when I needed to build dynamic Web sites, I was back to hand coding. I first started using CSS, as nested tables simply was too burdensome. I take pride in discovering principles like separation of concerns or the difference between quirks mode and standards mode myself, out of sheer necessity.

After a while I discovered Netscape’s DevEdge and the writings of Molly H, Eric M and Jeffrey Z. I was excited that there was a community of like minded developers.

Since 2001 I have been working as a teacher, with telecommunications and Web technologies as my primary subjects. I show up (or lurk) on IRC-channels, SitePoint, Wikipedia, the WSG mailing list, the WHATWG mailing list, PHP internals, Bugzilla and some Swedish forums, often with the nickname “itpastorn” = “The IT pastor”, which was given to me by my colleagues a long time ago.