Mark up Languages
A markup language is a programming tool for combining text and extra information with it. The extra information basically refers to the structure, layout, font etc. and basically includes the information related to the presentation of the text. It is expressed using markup, which is predominantly interwoven with the relevant primary text.
The most popular markup language in modern use is HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), one of the brick foundations of the World Wide Web. To start with, the actual purpose of markup was in the publishing industry in the communication of printed work between authors, editors, and printers. It evolved into a huge variety of functions that it performs now.
The term markup derives its origin from the standard publishing custom of “marking up” a script, that is, adding symbolic printer’s instructions in the margins of a paper manuscript. For most of publishing history, this function was performed by proofreaders who marked up text in the scripts to specify variables llike what typeface, style, and size should be applied to each part, and then handed off the manuscript to someone else for the monotonous task of typesetting by hand. A more familiar example of these markup symbols still in use is proofreader’s marks, which are a basically a subset of larger vocabularies of handwritten markup symbols.
A commonly observed characteristic of most markup languages is that they combine the text of a document with markup specifications in the same data stream or file. It is possible to isolate markup from text content, using pointers, offsets, IDs, or other methods to co-ordinate the two. So the intermingling of the text and the mark up is not always necessary. Such “standoff markup” is quiet standard for the internal representations programs use to work with marked-up documents. However, embedded or “inline” markup is considerably more commonly observed elsewhere.
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