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In computer text processing, a markup language is a system for annotation a document in a way that is syntactically distinguishable from the text. The idea and terminology evolved from the "marking up" of paper manuscripts, i.e., the revision instructions by editors, traditionally written with a red or blue pencil on authors' . In digital media this "blue pencil instruction text" was replaced by HTML element, which 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 varying-size displays, impaired vision, screen-reading software, and so on).
Early markup system typically included typesetting instructions, as troff, TeX and LaTeX do, while Scribe and most modern markup systems name components, and later processes use those names to apply formatting or other processing, as in XML.
Some markup languages, such as the widely used HTML, have pre-defined presentation semantics—meaning that their specification prescribes generally how to present the structured data on particular media. Others, such as XML and its predecessor SGML, permit but do not impose such prescriptions, and permit users to define any custom document components they wish.
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), one of the document formats of the World Wide Web, is an application of SGML and XML. Other applications such as DocBook, Open eBook, JATS, and others, are heavily used in the communication of work between authors, editors, and printers.
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, such as LaTeX.
In recent years, a number of small and largely unstandardized markup languages have been developed to allow authors to create formatted text via web browsers, for use in and 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 be focused 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 on, most substantial new markup languages have been based on 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 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, and was rapidly adopted for many other uses. XML is now widely used for communicating data between applications, for serializing program data, 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 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. A tag such as "h1" (header level 1) might be presented in a large bold sans-serif typeface, for example, or in a monospaced (typewriter-style) document it might be underscored – or it might not change the presentation at all.
In contrast, the em tag in HTML is an example of presentational markup; it is generally used to specify a particular characteristic of the text (in this case, the use of an italic typeface) without specifying the reason for that appearance.
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.
Because markup languages, and more generally data description languages (not necessarily textual markup), are not programming languages (they are data without instructions), they are more easily manipulated than programming languages—for example, web pages are presented as HTML documents, not C code, and thus can be embedded within other web pages, displayed when only partially received, and so forth. This leads to the web design principle of the rule of least power, which advocates using the least (computationally) powerful language that satisfies a task to facilitate such manipulation and reuse.
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