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.Rubinstein 2017, 303As the MARC standard was piloted and crawling toward adoption, the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) was being developed by lawyer-turned-programmer Charles Goldfarb, along with Edward Mosher and Raymond Lorie. SGML, focused primarily on creating a machine-readable markup for formatting documents, not only provided a strategy for adding structure to prose documents, it provided a framework for validating the structure of that document.
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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.