Processing, definition and presentation of texts are the main goals and the reason why the markup language was designed. A markup language is a form of codifying a document that, together with the text, incorporates labels or marks that contain more information about the structure of the text or his presentation. The more widespread of them is the HTML, foundation of the World Wide Web.
We can often differentiate between three types of markup languages, although we can combine several classes in the same document. For example, the HTML tag contains purely procedural, together with others purely descriptive. The HTML also includes the element PRE, which says that the text must be represented at the same way that is written.
Let’s talk about the three types of markup languages used in HTML:
- The presentational: this type allows us to see the format of the text. That way we can make up the presentaion of certain documents for its lecture. It is not interested in the functions of the text, only in its appearance.
- The procedural one: it is focused on the presentation of the text, even if it is also visible for that who edits the text. Some of its examples are: troff, TeX and PostScript.
- The descriptive one: it uses tags in order to describe the fragments of the text, but it doesn´t specifie how they should be represented. The languages expressly designed to generate marking descriptive are the SGML and XML.
Any computer file can deliver HTML documents, being the most common ones the web sites or emails.
References:
- Markup language (22nd January 2010). In Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 18.22, 28th January, 2010 from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markup_language
- HTML (25th January, 2010). In Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 18.24, 28th January, 2010 from: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML
- Markup Systems and the Future of Scholarly Text Processing. Retrieved 18.26, 28th January, 2010 from: http://xml.coverpages.org/coombs.html
- HTML Quick Reference. (December 2009) Bill Biega. Retrieved 18.30, 28th January, 2010 from: http://biega.com/HTMLQuick1.html
