Author Archives: admin

XHTML XHTML Since January 2000 all W3C Recommendations for HTML have been based on XML rather than SGML, using the abbreviation XHTML (Extensible HyperText Markup Language). The language specification requires that XHTML Web documents must be well-formed XML documents – this allows for more rigorous and robust documents while using tags familiar from HTML. One [...]

XML XML XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a meta markup language that is now widely used. XML was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, in a committee created and chaired by Jon Bosak. The main purpose of XML was to simplify SGML by focusing on a particular problem — documents on the Internet. XML [...]

HTML HTML By 1991, it appeared to many that SGML would be limited to commercial and data-based applications while WYSIWYG tools (which stored documents in proprietary binary formats) would suffice for other document processing applications. The situation changed when Sir Tim Berners-Lee, learning of SGML from co-worker Anders Berglund and others at CERN, used SGML [...]

Scribe, GML and SGML IBM Generalized Markup Language and Standard Generalized Markup Language The first language to make a clear and clean distinction between structure and presentation was Scribe, developed by Brian Reid and described in his doctoral thesis in 1980.[6] Scribe was revolutionary in a number of ways, not least that it introduced the [...]

TeX Another major publishing standard is TeX, created and continuously refined by Donald Knuth in the 1970s and ’80s. TeX concentrated on detailed layout of text and font descriptions in order to typeset mathematical books in professional quality. This required Knuth to spend considerable time investigating the art of typesetting. However, TeX has a steep [...]

GenCode The idea of using markup languages in computer text processing was probably first publicly presented by publishing executive William W. Tunnicliffe at a conference in 1967, although he preferred to call it “generic coding.” It can be seen as a response to the emergence of programs such as RUNOFF that each used their own [...]

History The term markup is derived from the traditional publishing practice of “marking up”‘ a manuscript, which involves adding handwritten annotations in the form of conventional symbolic printer’s instructions in the margins and text of a paper manuscript or printed proof. For centuries, this task was done primarily by skilled typographers known as “markup men” [...]

Types of electronic markup There are three general categories of electronic markup: Presentational, procedural, and descriptive. Presentational markup is that used by traditional word-processing systems, binary codes embedded in document text that produced the WYSIWYG effect. Such markup is usually designed to be hidden from human users, even those who are authors or editors. Procedural [...]

Markup language A markup language is a system for annotating a text in a way which is syntactically distinguishable from that text. Examples include revision instructions by editors, traditionally written with a blue pencil on authors’ manuscripts, typesetting instructions such those found in troff and LaTeX, and structural markers such as XML tags. Markup is [...]