What does mark up mean in HTML?

Question

Hi all, A very understandable explanation would be appreciated instead of definitions... I need to understand what mark up means in HTML and XML Thanks

Vulpes · Answer

HTML and XML are versions of what's called 'markup languages'. Basically, these are languages which describe now a document or page should appear when it is displayed or read. They do this by embedding instructions in the page which tell the document processor how to display or read that page but which don't appear themselves. So, for example, in HTML you have tags for bold, italic, color etc. which tell the web browser how to display text but aren't displayed themselves. In contrast, the tags and other instructions in XML tell the document processor about the structure of the data within the document. It's therefore more concerned with how a machine will read that data rather than how it's displayed to a human reader.

Kavita B · Answer

@Sam Hobbs Thanks for replying.. Please share your knowledge about mark up language. Many people don`t know what exactly it means.. Waiting for your article. Thanks once again for all who replied..:)

Sam Hobbs · Answer

See Proofreading in printing and publishing . The term markup language seems to be based on what proofreaders do; they mark up a document. Originally HTML did not have scripts. It was just a way to provide formatting for documents. In word processing software such as Word, documents were stored with binary data to specify formatting, such as what font to use. HTML and XML are a SGML application. SGML is a word processing language. SGML provides a way to specify tags that can represent the format of a document, similar to what Word documents do, except in SGML, HTML and XML, the tags are in a text format whereas in most other word processing software, the formatting codes are stored in a binary format. So originally at least, the markup language part of the name Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) was essentially a way to specify formatting in a non-binary format. So when Vulpes says that they are languages, note that most word processing software store formatting in a similar manner, except most word processing software use binary codes instead of text codes. In a corresponding manner, XML is a way to store data using text codes (ML) to specify the format of the data. I will some day write an article revealing some secrets about ML that very few people know.

Kavita B · Answer

@Vulpes, Thanks its the best explanation i have ever got.. Very clearly explained..thanks a lot

What does mark up mean in HTML?

Answers (4)