David Baron (computer scientist)

David Baron is an American computer scientist, web browser engineer, open web standards author, technology speaker,^[3][4] and open source contributor. He has written and edits several CSS web standards specifications including CSS Color Module Level 3,^[5] CSS Conditional Rules,^[6] and several working drafts. He started working on Mozilla in 1998,^[4] and was employed by Mozilla in 2003 to help develop and evolve the Gecko rendering engine, eventually as a Distinguished Engineer^[7] in 2013.^[8] He was Mozilla’s representative on the WHATWG Steering Group from 2017-2020.^[9][10] He has served on the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) continuously since being elected in 2015^[11] and re-elected subsequently, most recently in 2020.^[12][13] In 2021 he joined Google to work on Google Chrome.^[14]

David Baron
David Baron in 2017
Nationality	American
Other names	L. David Baron[1]
Alma mater	Harvard University[2]
Occupation	web browser engines
Organization	Google
Known for	CSS, Gecko rendering engine
Website	https://dbaron.org/

Notable inventions

• Reftests — automated visual tests of browser engine rendering^[15]
• CSS animations implementation in Gecko^[16]

Writing

Baron is the author and editor of several W3C web standards:

• CSS Color Module Level 3 Recommendation^[5]
• CSS Conditional Rules Module Level 3 Candidate Recommendation^[6]
• CSS Animations Level 1 Working Draft^[17]
• CSS Overflow Module Level 3 Working Draft^[18]
• CSS Transitions Working Draft^[19]

Baron was also a technical reviewer of the book "Transitions and Animations in CSS: Adding Motion with CSS".^[20]