I've been asked to help someone find sources on the history of markup and the proliferation of markup languages. I can think of a few seminal texts to throw at them ("What Is Text, Really?" or Maler and el Andaloussi), but I don't know of any, er, metatexts of this nature.
Does anyone else?
Hugh Cayless
MemberBest Answer
Some ancient history at: http://www.sgmlsource.com/history/index.htm
For the TEI: http://www.tei-c.org/Vault/
XML: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/02/10/XML-People
Hope that helps.
staurtyeates
Member
There is some decent coverage of this on wikipedia at: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Markup_languages
hopegreenberg
Member
In addition to the contributions of Goldfarb, Mosher and Laurie referenced above in Hugh's link to some ancient history, it would be good to consider the impact of such early programs as WordStar and WordPerfect. They brought the concept of interweaving marks into text documents to control print output into the mini- and personal computer world. While the larger industries were entrenched in their use of IBM's Document Composition Facility/SCRIPT systems, and it took awhile for businesses to dislodge dedicated word processing systems like WANG, DEC, and others form their midst, these early personal computer word processing applications became an increasingly familiar model for many in the 1980s. Though later displaced by GUI-based programs, the concepts of dot commands (WordStar) and control-codes in WordPerfect (along with its all important Reveal Codes screen that could show you exactly which markup was in play where) made the conceptual leap to other kinds of markup systems easier.
Tangentially, I wonder who would have found the move to HTML easier: those raised on page-layout systems (Page Maker, etc.) or those who used document-based systems like WordPerfect?
And for an interesting read:
"Remembering the Office of the Future: Word Processing and Office Automation before the Personal Computer" - A comprehensive history of early word processing concepts, hardware, software, and use. By Thomas Haigh, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 28:4 (October-December 2006):6-31. http://www.tomandmaria.com/tom/Writing/Annals2006WP.pdf
You might also check out A Bibliography of Publications related to the Text Encoding Initiative. Its scope is broader than its name implies, including references to a number of early polemics about markup languages.
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