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Markup

A standard typology of markup systems is presentational, procedural, and descriptive (also sometimes unhelpfully called semantic). Frank W. Tompa uses this, for example, in his article introducing the OED database software developed at Waterloo.

However, while descriptive vs presentational is a reasonable dichotomy (or perhaps better said, spectrum), descriptive vs procedural markup is a completely false dichotomy. This was explored in detail by Wendell Piez in ‘Beyond the “descriptive vs. procedural” distinction’.