If you want to explore the world of web development, the markup language is a word you may often hear. But have you ever wondered what markup language really means? Or what rules do markup languages play when it comes to web development? 

Well, the term ‘Markup languages’ may seem a bit complicated, but once you know their functionality, it will give you a lot of ease in understanding the fact. 

This article will cover the different types of Markup languages, what they mean and how they work.                              

What Is Markup Language? 

Markup simply refers to annotating computer text documents. Moreover, the markup language is used by people to give the computer the proper instruction on what type of document it needs to showcase.  The markup language is human-readable. 

Think about your high school days when you used to keep notes and highlight the important lines from your textbook. Why? So that you can revise them before the exam. Moreover, those are the most important lines from your textbook.

Now, we can compare that to markup language as well. But how? People use markup language to let the computer easily understand different documents. Moreover, with the help of the markup language, you can see the formatted text and documents. 

In other words, if you want to structure your website or web pages, the element that can play a decent role is the markup language. So, when it comes to developing a website, what web developers prioritize the most is the markup language. 

What Does a Markup Language Consist of?

Markup language consists of three core elements or tags. And if you wonder what tags are? They are responsible for showcasing HTML elements in particular documents. However, the core three tags are;

• Opening tag
• Element tag
• Closing tag. 

Everything that takes place between the opening and closing tags is something you can see as a document. That’s why the computer won’t show the document if there is an absence of opening and closing tags. 

Now, we would like to explore the markup language we often use. However, the most common markup language includes;

• HTML – Hypertext Markup Language
• XML – eXtensible Markup Language
• XHTML – eXtensible Hypertext Markup Language
• KML – Keyhole Markup Language
• SGML – Standard Generalized Markup Language

Moreover, these markup languages come into action in different stages of the web development process. So, if you want to develop a website, you should at least have a basic idea of the markup languages I just presented above.