What is Markup Languages and why is it Important?

The evolvement of technology and the Internet is taking the world by storm, as it is revolutionising the way we live and act in our lives on a daily basis. Accessing information has never been so easy as nowadays I can find information about anything and everything in a split second thanks to the Internet. ‘Markup Language’ is the prominent reason why we can access information at any time from a variety of sources, as it is what websites are made of.

‘Markup Language’ is a set of instructions based on the framework of a website, coded using words and symbols. (What is Markup Language, 2003) It’s a standard programming language that aids people in designing web pages, by allowing them to use tags and labels to help distinguish the websites context, appearance and function. (Markup Languages, 2011) Markup languages is how a system interprets instructed information. It doesn’t necessarily need to be deciphered through a computer system as the language is human-readable allowing the language to use standard words in contrast to using classic programming syntax. (Markup Language 2011) There are many different Markup languages but the most common used are HTML, XML.

HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) is used to create websites as they are all constructed through using HTML. Tim Berners Lee, the creator of World Wide Web, developed HTML in the early 90’s. (Kyrin, 2015) The language is used to characterize how text and images can be presented interactively. HTML was made based on the concept of SGML (Standard Generalised Markup Language.) HTML uses tags to determine the format of its text. The tags show how the text should appear and structured visually in the web browser. In real-life the webpage would just be a document with a bunch of symbols and words combined together to form a set of instructions. (Kyrin, 2015) As change is growing more and more upon us so did HTML, with new versions being installed to upgrade and add more interesting features.

In saying that you can’t really create and have a functioning web page without CSS, (Cascading Style Sheet.) It was developed in the late 90’s due to the fact that web developers wanted to isolate the context from the design. This was so HTML could execute the content correctly without having to think or concern about the visual arrangement. (What is CSS- Kyrin 2015)

XML (eXtensible Markup Language) was designed to describe data. It allows people to customise and make up their own tags. It also can help define other languages. (Myer 2005)

Before the Internet and the invention of computers, publishers and editors used Markup Language. Markup Language was invented to create a common language for people to understand.

Markup Language is the ‘language of the internet’ as it is a set of tags and labels to define text features within a document to show it’s context, design and use. (Kay, 2000) It’s significant to society and today’s generation as we are constantly relying on technology to communicate with one another. Markup Language helps communication work more efficiently through collaboration. Markup Langauge