A markup language is a modern system for annotating a document in a way that is syntactically distinguishable from the text. The idea and terminology evolved from the "marking up" of manuscripts, i.e., the revision instructions by editors, traditionally written with a blue pencil on authors' manuscripts. Examples are typesetting instructions such as those found in troff, TeX and LaTeX, or structural markers such as XML tags. Markup instructs the software displaying the text to carry out appropriate actions, but is omitted from the version of the text that is displayed to users. Some markup languages, such as HTML, have pre-defined presentation semantics, meaning that their specification prescribes how the structured data are to be presented; others, such as XML, do not.
A widely used markup language is HyperText Markup Language (HTML), one of the document formats of the World Wide Web. HTML, which is an instance of SGML (though, strictly, it does not comply with all the rules of SGML), follows many of the markup conventions used in the publishing industry in the communication of printed work between authors, editors, and printers.
Read more about Markup Language: Types, Features, Alternative Usage
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“Language is an archeological vehicle ... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.”
—Russell Hoban (b. 1925)