Markup

Markup languages seem to fall into two major camps: Data markup languages and Document markup languages.

XML tries to do both, which is why it sucks at both.

The distinguishing feature of document markup languages is mixed content. <p>This is a paragraph with <b>bold</b> text.</p> In other words, it's not purely hierarchical. However, pretty much all data is, so when you use a language for data that is primarily intended for documents, you have a ton of overhead (both computationally, conceptually, and programatically) that you really don't need. The same types of tools really aren't meant to process documents as are meant to process data.

Data markup languages can fall into two main camps: textual and binary.

Binary

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1014.html
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1832.txt

Page last edited: August 21, 2003 (utc)