Markup Category Terminology over the Years: a First Look

Abstract

We’ve been doing the “markup” thing for more than half a century, since the beginnings of computerized text processing. In that time we’ve put a lot of adjectives in front of “markup” that reflect how we think of and apply the markup. These qualifiers have tended to fall into two categories, those that suggest what will happen, particularly in presentation, as a result of the application of markup to a string of data and those that reflect what we think about the data itself. Beginning with broad terms, like “generic” we have made many attempts to elucidate what our our markup is intended to accomplish: “conceptual”, “declarative”, “logical”, “structural”, and “semantic” have all had their times in the spotlight. What do the changing fashions in terminology say about our data and about what we, the practitioners, think about our work?