A markup language is the set of rules, the grammar, and syntax that tells how a language which marks up documents should be "spoken". SGML is a markup language, and HTML is the vocabulary of a particular dialect of that language, albeit a very widely spoken dialect. HTML follows the rules of SGML.
XML is also a markup language with a grammar that is based on but substantially more simple than SGML.
Markup are the symbolic tag sets that are used to indicate that some thing needs to be done to the text. The <B></B> pair is markup in HTML. In XML and SGML it corresponds to the tags.
Markup can take one of three forms, semantic, stylistic, or structural.
Semantic markup gives information about the text it is marking up eg. In the element <hamlet> To be or not to be...</hamlet> the tag hamlet tells us that the words are being spoken by Hamlet. In the HTML element <CODE>For i= 0 to ubound(chapterArray)</CODE> tells us that the enclosed text is code.
Stylistic markup tells us about the style that should be used to display a document item.
In HTML the element
<I>This is italic text</I>
tells that the style of the document should change.
Structural markup tells us some thing about the structure of a document. Again in HTML <P> The text that occurs until one comes across another similar tag is a paragraph and should be treated as such.
The XML equivalent of this could be,
<para>the text that occurs......</para>
<P>Is a structural markup.</P>
The old editor's notations of "dele" and "stet" beloved of crossword fans is structual markup.
Answered by
Alok
at
2:24 PM on November 18, 2008
