Markup

F.4 CIT – Markup Language

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Markup Language In the days before desktop publishing and word-processors, authors’ manuscripts were usually produced on a typewriter. The manuscript is annotated using different coloured pens and symbol to indicate how the text should be formatted by the typesetter when it was printed. This process of annotation is called marking up and the instructions themselves were often referred to as markup. Now in computer world, markup refers to the sequence of characters or other symbols, which are often in the forms of tags, that are inserted at certain places in a text file which describe the logical structure or control the format of the content. Markup language is a language consisting of a set of tags and rules governing their usage, for applying markup to documents. SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) is an international standard published in 1986 designed for the definition of device-independent, system-independent methods of representing texts in electronic form. More exactly, SGML is a meta-language, that is, a means of formally describing a language, in this case, a markup language. Every SGML documents consists of two parts: 1. Document Type Definition (DTD): Describe the definition of the syntax rules, i.e. how the tags are used correctly. 2. Document itself: This document should use the tags defined in and abided by the DTD.
(poem+)>


- -

(title?, stanza+)>


- O

(#PCDATA) >


- O

(line+)>


O O

(#PCDATA)>

Figure 1. A simple DTD example

Since some of the features of SGML make parsing an SGML document too difficult to be done efficiently enough to provide the required response times, it is not entirely suitable for use over the Internet and is lack of browser support. However, from SGML, HTML and XML are developed and they have gained considerable development in these years. HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) Text augmented with links which are pointers to other pieces of text, either elsewhere in the same document, or in another document, possibly stored at a different location, is called hypertext. HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is a SGML-based language intended to standardize the publishing of information on the World Wide Web (WWW). It is a formal recommendation by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) (Official website of W3C: http://www.w3c.org). At the beginning, HTML 1.0 was developed. It has no control over the background style, font. Also, it couldn’t insert tables or frames and forms. Then, HTML 2.0 was later developed. In this version, most of the functions are supported. Later on, HTML 3.2 was proposed. HTML 3.2 was furnished with the support of Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) and some basic functions are expanded. Till now, HTML 4.0 is proposed. HTML 4.0

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deprecates some of the HTML formatting functions. These functions are moved into the style sheets. Some of the bugs in HTML 4.0 are fixed in the latest HTML 4.01 version. HTML will be discussed in detail in next few chapters. <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=big5"> <span>Flash / <span>Non-Flash Figure 2. A HTML example

XML(Extensible Markup Language) XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a SGML-compliant meta-language. It was originally designed to meet the needs of large-scale electronic publishing. As such, it was designed to help separate structure from presentation and provide enough power and flexibility to be applicable in a variety of publishing applications. XML provides facilities for defining tags and specifying restrictions on their usage. Therefore, XML can be used to define other markup languages by creating its own definition (known as schema). <salutation>Dear Mr. Robert Smith. Your order of 1 <productName>Baby Monitor shipped from our warehouse on

<shipDate>1999-05-21 Figure 3a. A XML example <xsd:element name="letterBody"> <xsd:complexType mixed="true"> <xsd:sequence> <xsd:element name="salutation"> <xsd:complexType mixed="true"> <xsd:sequence> <xsd:element name="name" type="xsd:string"/> <xsd:element name="quantity" type="xsd:positiveInteger"/> <xsd:element name="productName" type="xsd:string"/> <xsd:element name="shipDate" type="xsd:date" minOccurs="0"/>

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Figure 3b. The schema of the above XML document

The following markup languages are XML-based: 1. MathML (Mathmatical Markup Language): MathML is an XML application for describing mathematical notation and capturing both its structure and content. <math> <mrow> <msup> <mi>x<mn>2 <mo>+ <mrow> <mn>4<mo>⁢<mi>x <mo>+ <mn>4 Figure 4. A MathML example that will shows x2 + 4x + 4

(W3C Recommedation of MathML: http://www.w3.org/TR/MathML/) 2.

SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) SMIL is developed by W3C. It enables simple authoring of interactive multimedia presentations. (W3C Recommendation of SMIL: http://www.w3.org/TR/SMIL/)

<smil> <meta name="title" content="House of Dreams"/> <meta name="author" content="RealNetworks, Inc."/> <par>