What is a Markup format?

Web developers often come across the keywords markup or a markup language. 

Markup is different from code, and some web professionals use them interchangeably.

A markup language is a language that annotates text so that computers can manipulate the text while processing it for display or print.

What is a Markup language in the web world?

  • Markup consists of tags, an opening tag, and a closing tag which look something like <p>Some text here</p>
  • Each tag is made up of less than and greater than symbols
  • Markup is like instructions for determining how to display or print a text, that is enclosed
  • Markup is not part of visible content, and only the text it enclosed is either displayed or printed
  • Markup becomes a language when rules are defined around how to write and use
  • Web markup languages are defined by W3C or World Wide Web Consortium
  • Example: Annotations in a book to highlight a piece of text to make it important compared to the surrounding text

Markup languages that we have today are - XML, HTML and XHTML

  • XHTML 1.0 is an extension of HTML 4.01, which may be observed in older websites that are not migrated to HTML5.

Here is a sample HTML markup file content

<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
  <h1>Heading level 1</h1>
  <h2>Heading level 2</h2>
  <h3>Heading level 3</h3>
  <h4>Heading level 4</h4>
  <h5>Heading level 5</h5>
  <h6>Heading level 6</h6>

  <h1>Paragraph</h1>
  <p>This is a paragraph with some <b>bold</b> and <i>italic</i> texts.</p>

  <h1>Unordered List</h1>
  <ul>
    <li>First item</li>
    <li>Second item</li>
    <li>Third item</li>
    <li>Fourth item</li>
  </ul>

  <h1>Ordered List</h1>
  <ol>
    <li>First item</li>
    <li>Second item</li>
    <li>Third item</li>
    <li>Fourth item</li>
  </ol>

  <h1>Blockquote</h1>
  <blockquote>Content inside blockquote.</blockquote>

  <h1>Link</h1>
  <a href="https://randomcodez.com">Random Codez Website</a>

  <h1>Image</h1>
  <img src="https://via.placeholder.com/150" alt="image" />

</body>
</html>

Overall

HTML markup language uses tags to format documents.