XML is not a markup language
XML does not deserver its "ML", or even its "X". But first, the "ML" part.
I am one of the world's leading experts on markup languages. I'll start there. I'm a 20-year veteran of desktop publishing, am personally related to the author of one of the very first markup languages in the world (Scribe), and have actually used SGML, MML, HTML, and most of the other markup languages that came along decades before XML.
So I know what I'm talking about. XML is not a markup language.
A markup language is predicated on the idea that the markup is an exception in a river of text. That is, the markup is a departure from the state that existed at the time the markup was encountered.
One of the first instances of this was the TROFF mechanism in UNIX, used for formatting "man pages". A simple example was that a line that started with .i was italic. So you might format a sentence with an italic word in it like this:
The same basic approach is used in HTML, except that it's not line-oriented, so you need a "close delimiter" other than carriage return (which is actually a pretty handy closing delimiter, but I digress). So the same thing in HTML is:
The idea of markup is that you literally mark up a text, "circling" things, if you will, giving instructions to the typesetter (or parser, or other) that this snippet of text is to be treated somehow differently.
Another tenet of a markup language is that only the syntax is specified. The semantics of what the markup means is implicit (HTML) or described earlier (Scribe) or some combination of the two (CSS).
But here's the real kicker: a pure ASCII text file is a valid example of any markup language. That underscores the notion that the markup is a departure from the river of text. So a plain text file is technically a valid HTML file (though they ruined that purity with XHTML and CSS by requiring tags in it, but that's because they too didn't really know what a markup language was).
I am one of the world's leading experts on markup languages. I'll start there. I'm a 20-year veteran of desktop publishing, am personally related to the author of one of the very first markup languages in the world (Scribe), and have actually used SGML, MML, HTML, and most of the other markup languages that came along decades before XML.
So I know what I'm talking about. XML is not a markup language.
A markup language is predicated on the idea that the markup is an exception in a river of text. That is, the markup is a departure from the state that existed at the time the markup was encountered.
One of the first instances of this was the TROFF mechanism in UNIX, used for formatting "man pages". A simple example was that a line that started with .i was italic. So you might format a sentence with an italic word in it like this:
Here is an
.i emphasized phrase
and back to normal text
The same basic approach is used in HTML, except that it's not line-oriented, so you need a "close delimiter" other than carriage return (which is actually a pretty handy closing delimiter, but I digress). So the same thing in HTML is:
Here is an <i>emphasized phrase</i> and back to normal text.
The idea of markup is that you literally mark up a text, "circling" things, if you will, giving instructions to the typesetter (or parser, or other) that this snippet of text is to be treated somehow differently.
Another tenet of a markup language is that only the syntax is specified. The semantics of what the markup means is implicit (HTML) or described earlier (Scribe) or some combination of the two (CSS).
But here's the real kicker: a pure ASCII text file is a valid example of any markup language. That underscores the notion that the markup is a departure from the river of text. So a plain text file is technically a valid HTML file (though they ruined that purity with XHTML and CSS by requiring tags in it, but that's because they too didn't really know what a markup language was).
posted by Glenn Reid at 11:51 PM
2 Comments:
Too bad trackbacks don't work with blogger.
I understand the ML part of your post and think that i'll understand the X one too.
But would you please tell us why it sucks?
Wow, in your profile you've got "Creator of iMovie and iPhoto". I hope you weren't responsible for handling XML in Photocasts, because author of that feature apparently hadn't slightest clue how XML works.
http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2006/01/18/Photocasting-Hyperbole
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