What Is Markup Language? Examples, Types & Definition

What Is a Markup Language?

A markup language is a set of rules that defines how the layout and presentation of text and images should appear in a digital document. It allows structuring documents, adding formatting, and specifying how different elements should be displayed (or “rendered”) on webpages.

This structuring helps search engines like Google understand the information on websites better. If search engines know more about what a page is about, they are more likely to show it to people who are looking for its content. Which, in result, can bring more people to websites with the right markup.

An example of a markup language—and the one most people know—is HTML. And it looks like this:

<b>ExampleofaMarkupLanguage</b>

On a webpage, that’ll look like this:

Some other markup language examples include:

But we’ll get into those later.

For now, note that markup languages are different from programming languages.

Programming languages are used to create functional and dynamic web applications.

Markup languages focus primarily on the presentation and structure of content. They are static and don’t use logic or algorithms.

To give you an even better idea of what markup languages are, let’s look closer at two categories of markup languages: semantic and presentational markup.

Semantic Markup

Semantic markup, also known as semantic HTML, defines sections of a webpage to help browsers, search engines, and developers better understand the content of that webpage.

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