Markup Language

6 min readApr 22, 2021

Introduction

Since human evolution has started the mankind have seen many innovations and technologies but the innovations of the Computer and internet stands tall in all the innovations. In the 20th century, the computer was invented and later on, computers and the internet became an important part of human life. To make the Computer easy to use many technologies related to the computer were invented(the internet is one of the examples) and many more technologies are developing at present and many will be developed in the future. On the Internet, there are millions of websites and for creating these websites the “Markup language” plays a huge role. A markup language is one of the innovations that were developed to manage the proper document structure and annotating a document that is different from the actual text [1]. A markup language is used to format the contents of a document it gives instructions on what contents should be displayed or to be printed. The markup language is a human-readable language, and they mostly rely on easy to understand Words instead of complex words used in the programming language. Markup Language acts as a blueprint or layout for the processing and presence of text documents [2].

There are two types of markups, Presentation or non-semantic and semantic.

What is presentation markup and semantic markup?

In simple language, the presentation markup tells the text in the document should be displayed or printed in a certain manner And it should have a certain appearance. The semantic markup explains the meaning Of the text and clearly define its content. These two terms cannot be combined.

2. GML AND SGML

2.1 GML (Generalized Markup Language)

In 1969, “Dr. Charles F. Goldfarb” who is known as the father of the markup languages and Edward Mosher and Raymond Lorie came up with the GML which stands for Generalized markup language which allowed text editing, formatting, and information retrieval subsystems to share documents. Their idea was, “You should not just define markup language, but you should define a way of defining a markup language”. The GML reduced many complications when it came to the formatting of a document. In 1978, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Committee on Information Processing established the Computer Languages for the Processing of Text committee, chaired by Charles Card, then of Univac, with Norman Scharpf as a member. Goldfarb was asked to join the committee and eventually to lead a project for a text description language standard based on GML [3].

GML was an alternative to procedural markup and the logical representation that motivated all processing. Using GML, a document is marked up with tags that define what the text is, in terms of paragraphs, headers, lists, tables, and so forth. Using GML the document gets automatically formatted without changing the document itself and by creating or specifying a profile for the device [4].

2.2 SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language)

In the 1980s Dr. Charles F. Goldfarb invented the SGML(Standard Generalized Markup Language). The most popular Languages like HTML AND XML are based on SGML. SGML is used for marking up the document and the biggest traits of SGML is it is not dependent on the specific application. The original version of SGML came with up the starter sets you did not have to start down by writing your DTD(Document type definition) initially so, so they came with useful initials right from the beginning. In simple words, SGML does not require advanced knowledge of the Document Type Definition (DTD) in order to accurately process it. The very first versions of HTML for instance were an SGML language and that’s why SGML looks familiar. The concept of defining your documentation so that you can pass it in a program without having to know the meaning was a very important development.

3. HTML AND XML

3.1 HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)

The 1990s was a really busy time markup language, in 1991 physicist Tim Berners-Lee invented the most popular markup language called HTML and released an official E-document describing HTML tags.

HTML is the most popular language in markup language history. HTML was designed and developed to publish text-based information and multimedia information on the worldwide web(WWW). HTML is the only markup language for creating a web page. HTML provides some lists, tables, embedded images, titles, headings, embedded images, paragraphs, lists, tables, embedded images etc., to describe the formation of text-based and multimedia information in HTML documents.

HTML is a straightforward and simple Computer Markup Language. HTML is the basis of a web page, and the web page is the basis of a website [5]. HTML uses ‘tags’ to create web documents. It is a predetermined set of markup tags used to design web pages.HTML is the first language of web designing. CSS(cascading style sheet) is used with HTML for the more attractive and User-friendly design of web pages. JavaScript is used with HTML to make web pages dynamic [6].

HTML is a very simple language to learn we need to learn how the tag works and how their attributes should be used.

Almost every operating system and browser support HTML we can write HTML on a simple notepad. HTML supports all the text editors and IDEs. We can save our code using .htm or .html extensions.

HTML 1.0 was released in 1993 and the current version which is HTML 5.0 was released in 2012.

3.2 XML (eXtensible Markup Language)

XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language. XML is just information enclosed in tags.

Tim Bray is the founder of XML. XML was firstly published on 10-February-1998. The current version of XML is XML 1.1 which was released on 29- September-2006.

XML defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both machine-readable and human-readable. XML was designed to carry data with a focus on what data is. Comparing to HTML XML tags are not predefined. XML is self-descriptive. XML was designed to store and transport data. It is a W3C Recommendation [7].

Exchanging data between computer systems is complicated. Many incompatible or upgraded system lose data during the exchange of data. XML stores data in plain text format. This provides software and hardware with an independent way of storing, transporting, and sharing data.

XML helps in saving data without any loss or harm when operating systems, applications or browsers gets upgraded or expanded. It simplifies sharing, transporting and platform changes.