A markup language is a text-encoding system consisting of a set of symbols inserted in a text document to control its structure, formatting, or the relationship between its parts. Markup languages are used to structure documents, define relationships between different parts of text, and format text and images in digital documents. They are often used to control the display of the document or to identify document components such as headings, paragraphs, and tables. Some widely used markup languages include HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), and XML (Extensible Markup Language) .
Key features of markup languages include:
- Tags: Markup languages use tags, which are special words or characters that indicate when formatting should be applied. Tags come in pairs, with the opening tag indicating the start of the formatting and the closing tag indicating the end.
- Rules: Markup languages have a set of rules governing what markup information may be included in a document and how it is combined with the content of the document in a way to facilitate use by humans and computer programs.
- Intermingling: Most markup languages allow intermingling markup with document content such as text and pictures. For example, if a few words in a sentence need to be emphasized, or identified as a proper name, defined term, or another special item, the markup may be inserted between the characters of the sentence.
Markup languages are different from programming languages. Programming languages are used to create functional and dynamic web applications, while markup languages focus primarily on the presentation and structure of content.
Markup languages have a wide range of applications. They are used by web developers to create websites, academics to format documents, and engineers to store data in an accessible format.
