Used to be, you'd mark up text to send to the typographer. They'd apply that markup to text in whatever technology was employed at the time (hot metal to phototype).
With "desktop publishing" wiping out that industry, anyone who styles text (read content) is marking it up--whether in Word or BBedit, WordPress or Dreamweaver. I'd say that CSS is a markup language developed to separate markup from coding, Which is why CSS works together with XSLT to style XML. I don't know the history. Was CSS developed first for XSLT/XML and then applied to HTML? Or vice versa?
Best regards,
Marilyn Langfeld
http://www.langfeldesigns.com
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On Dec 2, 2004, at 8:08 AM, Mark Wonsil wrote:
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.
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