Tracing the Roots of Markup Languages.

Goldfarb, Charles; Berners-Lee, Tim, 1955-

This article presents information on the origin of various document markup languages. Markup languages provide efficient ways of storing information on the Web and make the retrieval process easier. These are different than programming languages, which process data through calculations and render from the input information produces results that a user can utilize. Charles Goldfarb, a research team leader at International Business Machines Corp., along with Ed Mosher and Ray Lorie produced a Generalized Markup Language that automated the law office. In 1989, researcher Tim Berners-Lee was intending to create a means for scientists to share information from any location, when he developed a hypertext document that could be linked to and read anywhere from another markup language, SGML. The method is relatively simple. HTML file is a text file containing small markup tags that instruct the Web browser how to display the page. XML is a restricted form of SGML. The HTML document is not designed to be interactive between a server and a client. XML describes a class of data objects called XML documents, which are stored on computers, and partially describes the behavior of programs that process these objects.