Standard Generalized Markup Language

A standard for defining generalized markup languages for documents. ISO 8879 Annex A.1 states that generalized markup is based on two postulates: 1) declarative, for markup to describe a document’s structure and other attributes rather than specify the processing that needs to be performed; 2) rigorous, in order to allow markup to take advantage of the techniques available for processing strictly defined objects like programs and databases. SGML was first defined in 1986. HTML was theoretically an example of an SGML-based language until HTML 5, which browsers cannot parse as SGML for compatibility reasons. ← Wikipedia