4. About Web Development Markup Languages

A Markup language is a method for defining the layout of content on a website or a digital document. Information refers to text and images, and layout refers to how this information are displayed to a user. Often people think markup language is a programming language, but it’s not. A programming language executes a specific set of functions, whereas a markup language focuses on the formatting, structure and the look of a website.

  • HTML5 (hypertext markup language)
  • XML (extensible markup language)
  • XHTML (extensible hypertext markup language)
  • SGML (standard generalized markup language)
  • KML (key whole markup language)
  • MathML (mathematical markup language)
  • Markdown language

In today’s programming world, HTML5 and Markdown are extensively used.

Important components of markup language

Taking HTML as the primary markup language for this essay, the 3 main components are:

  1. Elements
  2. Attributes
  3. Text

Elements are the building blocks and determine the structure and content of a website. It tells a web browser how the content of a webpage should be displayed.

All markup languages have an opening tag (<) and a closing tag (> and />), within which is specified the content or the information.

A web document begins with:

  • A Root element, represented as and ends with . The complete structure of the webpage is contained here.
  • A Head element, represented as and ends with . This is not seen by the user and contains information related to the web page in question, and helps others to understand what the page is about.
  • A Title element, represented as and ends with , aims at giving a name to the page, which is seen by a user on the browser tab of their computer. It’s basically a label.
  • A Body element, represented as and ending with , sits outside the Head and Title elements, but within the main Root element (), and all the design layout is specified here, which eventually will be seen by a user.</li> </ul> The other common and important elements are:
    • Headings (h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6)
    • List (ordered and unordered, basically bullet or numbered points)
    • Image (to upload images)
    • Navigation (used for a list within a menu)
    • The div (used as a generic container) for a specific section
    • Footer (the bottom-most part of a webpage or an HTML doc)
Written on May 12, 2024
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