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.