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Modern Languages, Basque Studies and Humanities

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Markup languages (A4)

noviembre 2nd, 2009 · No hay Comentarios

A markup language is a system by which a text is, in some way, made syntactically distinguishable from that text. This is exemplified by editors’ instructions written with a blue pencil on authors’ manuscripts or typesetting instructions. Despite being the “HTML”  (one of the document formats on the World Wide Web) the most known, there are more examples of markup language such as “GenCode”, “TeX”, “Scribe”, “GML”, “SGML”, “XML” and “XHTML”.

The markup languages can be classifies into three different groups: presentational, procedural and descriptive. With regard to the first one,  it has typically been used by word-processing systems, remaining hidden from human users, including authors and editors. As regards procedural markup, its aim is to provide instructions for programs that are to process the text, being  therefore expected that the processor runs through the text from the beginning to the end. The most significant examples are “troff”, “LaTex” and “PostScript”. Finally, the descriptive markup, which is also known as “semantic” has as a function to label parts of the document.

With reference to style sheets, they are a way to separate presentation on the one hand and content on the other. Therefore, the markup, take for instance HTML or XHTML, owns the page’s semantic content and structure but not the style. The style is defined by using a different language like CSS or XSL, by using a style sheet language.

Due to the amount of different markup languages existant, a new article will give further information about the already mentioned different systems, whereas this article stands for a general vision of the topic and a quick survey of the kinds existant.

 

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