The Markup Language
The idea of using markup language, in which meta-information about the document and its formatting were contained within the document itself, first saw widespread use in a program called RUNOFF; Scribe contained the first robust implementation of declarative markup language.
In Scribe, markup was introduced with an @ sign, followed either by a Begin-End block or by a direct token invocation:
@Heading(The Beginning) @Begin(Quotation) Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start @End(Quotation)It was also possible to pass parameters:
@MakeSection(tag=beginning, title="The Beginning")Typically, large documents were composed of Chapters, with each chapter in a separate file. These files were then referenced by a master document file, thereby concatenating numerous components into a single large source document. The master file typically also defined styles (such as fonts and margins) and declared macros like MakeSection shown above; macros had limited programmatic features. From that single concatenated source, Scribe computed chapter numbers, page numbers, and cross-references.
These processes replicate features in later markup languages like HTML. Placing styles in a separate file gave some advantages like Cascading Style Sheets, and programmed macros presaged the document manipulation aspects of JavaScript.
Read more about this topic: Scribe (markup Language)
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)