CyberMasters

In simple terms, markup language is a system for annotating a text. In computer programming terms, it’s used for a variety of tasks, including creating documents for the World Wide Web. GenCode was possibly the first application of markup languages for use in computer text processing, illustrated by William W. Tunicliffe in 1967. However, IBM Generalized Markup Language (IBM GML), developed in the 1960′s by Charles Goldfarb, Edward Mosher, and Raymond Lorie, is one of the best early examples. GML describes a document based on its format, structure, content and relationship between parts. TeX, developed in the 1970′s and 1980′s by Donald Knuth, was a typesetting system that was later applied to computer science, engineering, and other mathematical fields. As a markup language, it’s especially useful for outputting mathematical equations.Brian Reid developed Scribe in his 1980 doctoral thesis. In this language, markup was introduced with an sign and then followed by a Begin-End block or direct token invocation. Files could be divided up into chapters and referenced in a master file. These processes and others foreshadowed later languages like HTML, as well as other protocols like Cascading Style Sheets and JavaScript.Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) was created in the early 1980s as a system to separate the structural aspects of a document from its visual presentation, which the developers felt should be left up to the creators. SGML created a markup syntax and a system for describing the different tags used to describe different parts of the document. Authors could choose which tags to allow, which enabled the development of a number of different languages from this basic syntax. HyperText Markup Language (HTML) was one of those languages.Sir Tim Berners-Lee, widely considered the creator of the World Wide Web, came up with the idea of HTML as a simpler SGML-based tag language. Its use of descriptive markup and flexibility helped account for the Internet’s rapid success, and HTML is one of the most widely used markup languages today.However, the evolution of markup languages has not stopped. Extensible Markup Language (XML) is widely used today as a language that focuses specifically on Internet documents. XML is compatible with SGML and easy to switch over to, but makes it easier for applications to communicate data with one another. Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) is a language that developed in the 2000s as a combination of HTML and XML. A major difference for users trying to switch from HTML to XHTML is that all tags in XHTML must be closed. Also, all attribute values must be quoted, and tag and attribute names are now case-insensitive. XML has led to the development of a number of derivative markup languages.?