Charles Goldfarb

The idea of markup languages was apparently first publicly presented by the engineer William W. Tunnicliffe (1922-1996) from Washington, D.C. In September of 1967, during a meeting at the Canadian Government Printing Office, Tunnicliffe gave a presentation on the separation of information content of documents from their format. In the 1970s, Tunnicliffe led the development of a standard called GenCode for the publishing industry and later was the first chair of the International Organization for Standardization. At almost the same time, the book designer Stanley Rice published vague speculation along similar lines in the late 1960s. Rice, as an editor at a Major Publishing House, was writing about “Standardized Editorial Structures”. This was the beginning of a movement to separate the formatting of a document from its content. Goldfarb felt that GML should both describe the document structure and be structured in a way, such that it could be both human-readable and machine-readable. At the beginning of the 1970s, he continued his work at IBM as GML began to grow in popularity. Several years later, in 1974, and with the influence of hundreds of people, the next version of the language, called (surprise:-) Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) was born. SGML added additional concepts that were not part of the GML project such as link processing, concurrent document types and most importantly the concept of a validating parser (called ARCSGML), that could read and check the accuracy of the Markup code. As Markup languages go, SGML was powerful, flexible, and complex, and was used extensively in the document processing of the huge IBM documentation. It’s widely known that when at the end of the 1980s Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Caillau created HTML, they based their hypertext publishing language namely on SGML. HTML as a subset of SGML is on the other hand easy to learn, but not nearly as powerful. Their system used a NeXT computer and incorporated the concept of hyperlinks. Tim realized the need for a Markup language that was easy to use and implement into their system. In 1991 the Web debuted on the Internet and it was the simplicity of HTML that made the Web grow at a feverish pace.