A History of Markup Languages
Markup languages predate the Web by many years, going back to the beginning of commercial publishing. When an editor prepares a manuscript for publication, sections of the text can be marked up with notations. For example, the beginning of a section that needs to be italicized would be marked with the letter I. To indicate where the italics should stop, the end of the section would be marked as well. Of course, for the sake of clarity, the closing notation would have to be somewhat different than the opening one.
The first formal markup language used to specify the structure of documents was created at IBM in the 1960s. It was known as the Generalized Markup Language (GML) and was used to standardize internal documents ...
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