A language of marking or language of marks is a way of codifying a document which, with the text, incorporates labels or marks which contain additional information about the estructure of the text or its presentation. The most extended language of marks is HTML, fundament of the WorlWideWeb. The languages of mark are usually missed with the languages of programming, but, those are not the same, since the language of mark has not aritmetic nor variable functions, unlike the pregramming languages do. Historically the marked was used and it stil is in the editorial industry and also in the communication one, and also among authors, editors and printers.
Different languages of marking.
We usually make a difference of three, even if in practise they can be combined several times in the same document. For instance, the HTML has purely procedimental labels, as the B for bold, with other ones which are purely descriptive as for example BLOCKQUOTE, HREF’s atributive. HTML also includes the element PRE, which indicates that the text has to be represented exactly as it has been written.
Marking of presentation:
Is the one which indicates the text’s format. This type of markes is used when maquetating the presentation of a document for its lecture, but ir is not enough for the authomatic precedure of the information. The marked of presentation is easier to ellaborate, even more for small amounts of information. But it’s difficult to keep or modify it, that’s why its use has been decreasing while other kinds of marking language have won importance. we can try to see the estructure of a document of this kind by looking for clues in a text. For example, the title can go preceeded by several line-jumps, and be found in the middle of the page. Some programmes can deduce the estructure of the text based on this kind of data, even if the result is usually quite unperfect.
Marking of proccedures:
It is focused on the presentation of the text, but anyways, it is also visible for the user who edits the text. The programme which represents the document has to interpretate the code in the same order as it appears. For instance, to format a title, there have to be a series of directives immediately before the text in question, indicating to the software instruction for example to know how to centre, augment the size of the font, or change to bold. Immediatly after the title there will have to be inversed labels which will revert those effects. In more advanced systems they’re usually used macros or piles, in order to make work easier.
Some kinds of marking of proccedures are nroff, troff, TeX and PostScript. This kind of marking has benn used extensively in professional-edition applications, manipulated by qualified typographs, mainly because it can get to be extremelly complex.
Descriptive marking:
The descriptive or semantic marking uses labels to describe the text fragments, but without specifying how they have to be represented, or in which order. The languages expressely designed to generate descriptive marking are the SGML and the XML.
Labels can be used to add content to any kind of metadata. For example, to the standard Atom, a language of syndication, it gives a method to mark the time when the entry has been updated, which is the data given by the editor of when it has been modified the last time that imformation. The standard doesn’t specify how it has to be represented, nor even if it has to be represented. The software can employ this data in multiple ways, including some no preseen ones by the standard’s designers.
The descriptive marking is evolutioning to the generic marking.
Lenguaje de marcado. (2009, 6) de febrero. Wikipedia, La enciclopedia libre. Fecha de consulta: 13:35, febrero 6, 2009 from http://es.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lenguaje_de_marcado&oldid=23891537.
