How do markup languages work

Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. Table of Contents Expand. The Big 3 Markup Languages.

What Is a Markup Language? Jennifer Kyrnin. Updated March 21, Featured Video. Cite this Article Format. Kyrnin, Jennifer. What Are Markup Languages? Subscribe to the daily or weekly newsletter and get featured terms and quizzes delivered to your inbox. You can unsubscribe or change your frequency setting at any time using the links available in each email.

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Definitions by TechTerms. As their name suggests, the function of descriptive markup languages is to describe or label elements or sections of a web document. This language is purely semantic, which means that it does not give any instructions on how it must be processed. Instead, the focus of descriptive markup is to label parts of a document along conceptually established areas. XML stands for Extensible Markup Language that was developed in the s in order to simplify the existing web document annotation systems.

XML has been used to support a range of applications, from productivity to communication tools. Over the following decades, it became the most commonly used markup system in the world wide web. Common uses include creating web page sections and divisions, and formatting lists, text, and contact forms. A basic HTML document would look as follows:. It was invented by Sir Tim Bernes-Lee at the end of the 20 th century and is one of the most widely used markup languages.

HTML is the fundamental markup language that browsers use to render pages. The HTML tags ensure that hyperlinks appear clickable. The same goes for marking headings that should be in bold, or points of emphasis that should be italicized. HTML is behind all these important formatting tags. But how does it work? Well, you take your text file and type in your tags short codes that power HTML.

Then you save it as an HTML file and upload it to be viewed through a browser. The browser does the rest, transforming your tags and code into formatted and stylized texts. It has tags for:. Say you were to share this article by email with someone.

If we were to write out that email in XML, it might look something like this:. Which all ends up looking clean and professional when it comes out on the other side! It stands for eXtensible Hypertext Markup Language. Here are some of the rules:. This means that your content will be displayed perfectly or not at all.