Standard Generalized Markup Language

n. (abbr. SGML) An international standard (ISO 8879) metalanguage used to define sets of tags to identify the relationship between document content and structure for use by information processing applications.

Notes

Developed by Charles F. Goldfarb in 1974 and published as a standard in 1986. Extensible markup language (XML) is a simplified version of SGML intended for use on the web. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is an example of a markup language defined in SGML.