Markup languages, from printer to the Web

A markup language is an artificial language that uses a set of annotations to text that give information about the structure of the text or how it must be displayed. The term ‘markup’ comes from the traditional publishing practice of ‘marking up’ a manuscript, what involves adding symbolic printer’s instructions in the margins. For centuries, this task was done by skilled typographers known as ‘markup men’ who took down these symbols in the texts to indicate what typeface, style, and size should be applied to each part. Markup languages have been applied by editors, proofreaders, and graphic designers, and recently have been used in computer typestting and word-processing systems too.

A specialized markup language based on SGML is used in the digital version of the Oxford English Dictionary.

The first idea about a markup language in this computer science world that we are studying appeared in 1967 thanks to William W. Tunnicliffe, who led the development of a standard called GenCode for the publishing industry and later was a chair of the International Organization for Standardization committee. However, the IBM researcher Charles Goldfarb is considered the ‘father’ of markup languages because of his work at the SGML committee, the first widely used descriptive markup language.

Second debate in the Moodle forum

Human communication has suffered a constant evolution along the millenniums. When we study this process, the first idea that we should remark is the oral transmission of information. This ability is one of the most important characteristics of human race, allowing us to difference ourselves from animals and share knowledge in order to evolve.

According to Walter J. Ong we could distinguish two types of orality; the primary orality, which makes reference to the verbal expression among members of a society without written literature; and secondary orality, which referes to the oral transmission in societies with written literature and printing knowledge.

Hypermedia, what are we talking about?

The term hypermedia was used for the first time in the book No More Teacher’s Dirty Looks by Ted Nelson in the year 1965. We call hypermedia to the procedures to design contents including texts, videos, audios, maps… that are able to interact with the user. That is the main and most important characteristic of the hypermedia. 

Aspen Movie Map

The first hypermedia work that we have a record of is the Aspen Movie Map, a tool developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) by a team working with Andrew Lippman in 1978 and that allowed users to take a virtual tour through the city of Aspen, Colorado. But the most modern hypermedia have been delivered, mainly, via electronic pages, using a wide range of systems including Media players, web browsers and, of course, stand-alone applications. However, when we think of hypermedia works we are not exclusively referring to computer applications, a Dvd, for instance, is a good example of hypermedia.

Orality and writing, human communication step by step

Human communication has suffered a constant evolution along the millenniums. When we study this process, the first idea that we should remark is the oral transmission of information. This ability is one of the most important characteristics of human race, allowing us to difference ourselves from animals and share knowledge in order to evolve.

"Writing is inhuman" Socrates. Bust of Socrates (469 BC–399 BC) at the Louvre Museum in Paris

According to professor Walter J. Ong we could distinguish different types of orality; the ‘primary orality’, which refers to the verbal expression among members of a society without written literature; the ‘residual orality’, which refers to the verbal expression in cultures that have had a previous contact with writing and print, but have not completely ‘interiorized’ the use of these technologies in their daily lives, because, in the opinion of  Marshall McLuhan, another important communications theorist, as a culture interiorizes the tools of literacy, the ‘residual orality’ diminishes; finally, we find in the electronic age the ’secondary orality’, which displaces written words with audio/visual technologies.