Meaning – The term markup language, refers to a notation for identifying the components of a document to enable each component to be appropriately formatted, displayed, or used.
It is human-readable, meaning markup files contain standard words, rather than typical programming syntax. While several markup languages exist, the two most popular are HTML and XML.
HTML is a markup language used for creating web pages. The contents of each webpage are defined by HTML tags.
Most elements require a beginning and end tag, with the content placed between the tags.
XML is used for storing structured data, rather than formatting information on a page. While HTML documents use predefined tags (like the examples above), XML files use custom tags to define elements.
Example of usage – “XML is called the “Extensible Markup Language” since custom tags can be used to support a wide range of elements. Each XML file is saved in a standard text format, which makes it easy for software programs to parse or read the data.”
