Product Code Database
In computer text processing, a markup language is a system for annotation a document in a way that is syntactically distinguishable from the text, meaning when the document is processed for display, the markup language is not shown, and is only used to format the text. The idea and terminology evolved from the "marking up" of paper (i.e., the revision instructions by editors), which is traditionally written with a red or blue pencil on authors' manuscripts. Such "markup" typically includes both content corrections (such as spelling, punctuation, or movement of content), and also typographic instructions, such as to make a heading larger or boldface.
In digital media, this "blue pencil instruction text" was replaced by tags which ideally indicate what the parts of the document are, rather than details of how they might be shown on some display. This lets authors avoid formatting every instance of the same kind of thing redundantly (and possibly inconsistently). It also avoids the specification of fonts and dimensions which may not apply to many users (such as those with different-size displays, impaired vision and screen-reading software).
Early markup systems typically included typesetting instructions, as troff, TeX and LaTeX do, while Scribe and most modern markup systems name components, and later process those names to apply formatting or other processing, as in the case of XML.
Some markup languages, such as the widely used HTML, have pre-defined presentation semantics—meaning that their specification prescribes some aspects of how to present the structured data on particular media. HTML, like DocBook, Open eBook, JATS and countless others, is a specific application of the markup meta-languages SGML and XML. That is, SGML and XML enable users to specify particular XML schema, which determine just what elements, attributes, and other features are permitted, and where.
One extremely important characteristic of most markup languages is that they allow mixing markup directly into text streams. This happens all the time in documents: A few words in a sentence must be emphasized, or identified as a proper name, defined term, or other special item. This is quite different structurally from traditional databases, where it is by definition impossible to have data that is (for example) within a record, but not within any field. Likewise, markup for natural language texts must maintain ordering: it would not suffice to make each paragraph of a book into a "paragraph" record, where those records do not maintain order.
There is considerable blurring of the lines between the types of markup. In modern word-processing systems, presentational markup is often saved in descriptive-markup-oriented systems such as XML, and then processed procedurally by implementations. The programming in procedural-markup systems, such as TeX, may be used to create higher-level markup systems that are more descriptive in nature, such as LaTeX.
In the recent years, a number of small and largely unstandardized markup languages have been developed to allow authors to create formatted text via web browsers, such as the ones used in and in web forums. These are sometimes called lightweight markup languages. Markdown and the markup language used by Wikipedia are examples of such wiki markup.
Brian Reid, in his 1980 dissertation at Carnegie Mellon University, developed the theory and a working implementation of descriptive markup in actual use. However, IBM researcher Charles Goldfarb is more commonly seen today as the "father" of markup languages. Goldfarb hit upon the basic idea while working on a primitive document management system intended for law firms in 1969, and helped invent IBM GML later that same year. GML was first publicly disclosed in 1973.
In 1975, Goldfarb moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Silicon Valley and became a product planner at the IBM Almaden Research Center. There, he convinced IBM's executives to deploy GML commercially in 1978 as part of IBM's Document Composition Facility product, and it was widely used in business within a few years.
SGML, which was based on both GML and GenCode, was an ISO project worked on by Goldfarb beginning in 1974. Goldfarb eventually became chair of the SGML committee. SGML was first released by ISO as the ISO 8879 standard in October 1986.
In the early 1980s, the idea that markup should focus on the structural aspects of a document and leave the visual presentation of that structure to the interpreter led to the creation of SGML. The language was developed by a committee chaired by Goldfarb. It incorporated ideas from many different sources, including Tunnicliffe's project, GenCode. Sharon Adler, Anders Berglund, and James A. Marke were also key members of the SGML committee.
SGML specified a syntax for including the markup in documents, as well as one for separately describing what tags were allowed, and where (the Document Type Definition (DTD), later known as a XML schema). This allowed authors to create and use any markup they wished, selecting tags that made the most sense to them and were named in their own natural languages, while also allowing automated verification. Thus, SGML is properly a meta-language, and many particular markup languages are derived from it. From the late '80s onward, most substantial new markup languages have been based on the SGML system, including for example TEI and DocBook. SGML was promulgated as an International Standard by International Organization for Standardization, ISO 8879, in 1986.
SGML found wide acceptance and use in fields with very large-scale documentation requirements. However, many found it cumbersome and difficult to learn — a side effect of its design attempting to do too much and to be too flexible. For example, SGML made end tags (or start-tags, or even both) optional in certain contexts, because its developers thought markup would be done manually by overworked support staff who would appreciate saving keystrokes.
Berners-Lee considered HTML an SGML application. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) formally defined it as such with the mid-1993 publication of the first proposal for an HTML specification: "Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)" Internet-Draft by Berners-Lee and Dan Connolly, which included an SGML Document Type Definition to define the grammar. Many of the HTML text elements are found in the 1988 ISO technical report TR 9537 Techniques for using SGML, which in turn covers the features of early text formatting languages such as that used by the RUNOFF command developed in the early 1960s for the CTSS (Compatible Time-Sharing System) operating system. These formatting commands were derived from those used by typesetters to manually format documents. Steven DeRoseDeRose, Steven J. "The SGML FAQ Book." Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997. argues that HTML's use of descriptive markup (and influence of SGML in particular) was a major factor in the success of the Web, because of the flexibility and extensibility that it enabled. HTML became the main markup language for creating web pages and other information that can be displayed in a web browser, and is quite likely the most used markup language in the world today.
XML adoption was helped because every XML document can be written in such a way that it is also an SGML document, and existing SGML users and software could switch to XML fairly easily. However, XML eliminated many of the more complex features of SGML to simplify implementation environments such as documents and publications. It appeared to strike a happy medium between simplicity and flexibility, as well as supporting very robust schema definition and validation tools, and was rapidly adopted for many other uses. XML is now widely used for communicating data between applications, for serializing program data, for hardware communications protocols, vector graphics, and many other uses as well as documents.
One of the most noticeable differences between HTML and XHTML is the rule that all tags must be closed: empty HTML tags such as <nowiki></nowiki> must either be closed with a regular end-tag, or replaced by a special form: (the space before the '<nowiki></nowiki>' on the end tag is optional, but frequently used because it enables some pre-XML Web browsers, and SGML parsers, to accept the tag). Another is that all attribute values in tags must be quoted. Finally, all tag and attribute names within the XHTML namespace must be lowercase to be valid. HTML, on the other hand, was case-insensitive.
The family Anatidae includes ducks, geese, and swans,
but not the closely related screamers.
Anatidae
The codes enclosed in angle-brackets <nowiki></nowiki> are markup instructions (known as tags), while the text between these instructions is the actual text of the document. The codes <like this>, h1, and p are examples of semantic markup, in that they describe the intended purpose or the meaning of the text they include. Specifically, em means "this is a first-level heading", h1 means "this is a paragraph", and p means "this is an emphasized word or phrase". A program interpreting such structural markup may apply its own rules or styles for presenting the various pieces of text, using different typefaces, boldness, font size, indentation, colour, or other styles, as desired. For example, a tag such as "h1" (header level 1) might be presented in a large bold sans-serif typeface in an article, or it might be underscored in a monospaced (typewriter-style) document – or it might simply not change the presentation at all.
In contrast, the em tag in HTML 4 is an example of presentational markup, which is generally used to specify a particular characteristic of the text without specifying the reason for that appearance. In this case, the i element dictates the use of an italic typeface. However, in HTML 5, this element has been repurposed with a more semantic usage: to denote “a span of text in an alternate voice or mood, or otherwise offset from the normal prose in a manner indicating a different quality of text”. For example, it is appropriate to use the i element to indicate a taxonomic designation or a phrase in another language. The change was made with the goal of easing the transition from HTML 4 to HTML 5 as much as possible, so that deprecated uses of presentational elements would preserve the most likely intended semantics.
The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) has published extensive guidelines for how to encode texts of interest in the humanities and social sciences, developed through years of international cooperative work. These guidelines are used by projects encoding historical documents, the works of particular scholars, periods, or genres, and so on.
The use of XML has also led to the possibility of combining multiple markup languages into a single profile, like XHTMLplusSMIL and XHTML+MathML+SVG. An XHTML + MathML + SVG Profile". W3C, August 9, 2002. Retrieved on 17 March 2007.
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