Going to Merriam-Webster: Code, n.
1 : a systematic statement of a body of law; especially : one given statutory force 2 : a system of principles or rules <moral code> ... 5 : a set of instructions for a computer Markup, n. 1 : an amount added to the cost price to determine the selling price; broadly : PROFIT 2 : a U.S. Congressional committee session at which a bill is put into final form before it is reported out. Mark up, v. 1 : to put a markup on Markup language, n. 1 : a system (as HTML or SGML) for marking or tagging a document that indicates its logical structure (as paragraphs) and gives instructions for its layout on the page for electronic transmission and display. I think that we computer professionals do terrible things to language. We make nouns into verbs (do maintenance instead of maintain) and vice-cera. Historically, marking up is an action but the tokens used are now called markup. SGML, XHTML, etc. are languages with defined grammars, just like Cobol. Instead of using a Common Business Oriented Language, we use a markup languages. We don't say that Cobol code is "business", it's code used for business purposes. So I would say that XHTML is the code we use to markup. XHTML even follows the paradigm that there is a source document that is consumed by a process to create a target document. That and with the definitions above, this would indicate that XHTML is code. After reading this, I must ask myself, what the hell does this have to do with Web Standards? Have we broken the code of the list? ;-) Mark "back to work" W. ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
