Word: markup
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Well, the Web itself is awfully big, but XML may render such breathless sentences prescient. Here's the pitch: Websites are built using markup languages--sets of rules for displaying information on a Web page. Today's standard language, HTML (hypertext markup language), was chosen at the dawn of the Web for its simplicity and the ease with which it combined pictures with plain text. This very simplicity, though, makes the Web in its current form a very tough place to do business...
Into this software cacophony strides XML (short for extensible markup language). "It's essential that all these systems talk to each other," says Tenenbaum, "and they can't today, except at the level of HTML." The Web's original markup language made it easy for humans to read Websites; XML makes it easy for machines to read them. Think of XML as doing for the Web what Windows and the Mac did for personal computers. When you click on a document on a Windows-based PC, the operating system is smart enough to recognize that you've selected a word...
...okayed the purchase of a NeXT computer. Sitting on Berners-Lee's desk, it would become the first Web content "server," the first node in this global brain. In collaboration with colleagues, Berners-Lee developed the three technical keystones of the Web: the language for encoding documents (HTML, hypertext markup language); the system for linking documents (HTTP, hypertext transfer protocol); and the www.whatever system for addressing documents (URL, universal resource locator...
That's where things get really interesting. The Web was supposed to eliminate the great American middleman (not to mention the great American middleman's markup), but it is merely changing his nature. Those Industrial Age intermediaries between consumer and manufacturer--the auto dealer, the record-shop owner, the stockbroker--are giving way to their Information Age equivalents, whose raison d'etre is to help consumers navigate the Web's bewildering oceans of data...
...where exactly does this terse, abbreviated e-mail language originate? Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is replete with TLAs (three letter acronyms) and reductive sound-bite talk and one may inevitably spot CS 50 students chuckling in the computer lab while Unix illiterates struggle with the fluorescent pink HASCS pocket dictionary. Technology is the wave of the future, they seem to say, either ride it, or get dunked...