4 ms·

Revision control is not exactly markup. It is metadata and so is the syntax information. It's derived from text or from something else (comparison of two text b

Revision control is not exactly markup. It is metadata and so is the syntax information. It's derived from text or from something else (comparison of two text by VCS), but not added there manually. Markup is normally metadata added manually, although a markup language can be used for both manual and automatic metadata. So we have a source and some associated metadata that is crafted manually. I don't see this to differ much from other cases when we need to manually sync two distinct files (e.g. C source and header files), so I don't quite understand the issue, I guess.

simonh 6y ago
I suppose what I'm thinking is that is many cases markup is not metadata. It's semantic and part of the meaning of the text in the same way and to the same extent that punctuation is markup. Nobody would put punctuation in a metadata file. But why not? It's markup in exactly the same way that a lot of HTML is. In fact formats such as Markdown can be considered extensions of punctuation just as much as they are simplifications of markup. I remember reading a discussion of word processor document formats back in the 90s, concerning the representation of layout and embedded images and tables. One participant was saying that conceptually the correct way to treat such inclusions is as a character. It's part of the text, not some external thing imposed on the document from outside. For a page layout system such as DTP you might make a different choice because the focus is different, but for word processing I thought this was a very insightful point. A lot of markup is part of the data as well and best treated as such.
- Mikhail_Edoshin 6y ago
  I agree, all markup added manually is same as content. If it cannot be derived automatically from the rest of the content, then it is on the same level as content and what we call "markup" becomes simply a special notation to describe these parts of the whole content. A drawing, a formula, a form, and so on. Or even punctuation; it may be important to tell the difference between the period that ends a sentence vs an abbreviated initial :) I myself don't think it's worth to actually keep content and markup in separate files, so for me the only possible use case was conflicting markup, i.e. markup that exceeds the limitations of our tools, something like two overlapping tags in XML. Yet even this case doesn't require actual physical separation; it can be solved with a different notation or maybe a different tool (like SGML, which, I believe, supported overlapping tags).

simonh 6y ago

I suppose what I'm thinking is that is many cases markup is not metadata. It's semantic and part of the meaning of the text in the same way and to the same extent that punctuation is markup. Nobody would put punctuation in a metadata file. But why not? It's markup in exactly the same way that a lot of HTML is. In fact formats such as Markdown can be considered extensions of punctuation just as much as they are simplifications of markup. I remember reading a discussion of word processor document formats back in the 90s, concerning the representation of layout and embedded images and tables. One participant was saying that conceptually the correct way to treat such inclusions is as a character. It's part of the text, not some external thing imposed on the document from outside. For a page layout system such as DTP you might make a different choice because the focus is different, but for word processing I thought this was a very insightful point. A lot of markup is part of the data as well and best treated as such.

Mikhail_Edoshin 6y ago
I agree, all markup added manually is same as content. If it cannot be derived automatically from the rest of the content, then it is on the same level as content and what we call "markup" becomes simply a special notation to describe these parts of the whole content. A drawing, a formula, a form, and so on. Or even punctuation; it may be important to tell the difference between the period that ends a sentence vs an abbreviated initial :) I myself don't think it's worth to actually keep content and markup in separate files, so for me the only possible use case was conflicting markup, i.e. markup that exceeds the limitations of our tools, something like two overlapping tags in XML. Yet even this case doesn't require actual physical separation; it can be solved with a different notation or maybe a different tool (like SGML, which, I believe, supported overlapping tags).