Re: [xml-dev] Is "markup" a noun or a verb? Do you "markup data"or "wra

[Deborah Aleyne Lapeyre <dalapeyre@mulberrytech.com>]

"Preferred" is such a slippery word. In my teaching experience
(no preference implied):

>1. I marked up the data.  - is the way the professionals in
this industry would say it. It sounds fine to most of us, but also
confuses many novices, even copyeditors.

>2, 3, and 4 are OK, but nobody talks like this in real life IMO

>5, 6, 7 have never been heard by me in the real world. I also
don't like them much (maybe I do have a preference after all)

The great unwashed (i.e. professionals in some other business
than this Markup stuff) would, I think, mostly agree with Mark,
they "tag" their data.

Overlap geeks have been heard to call it
   "applying inline markup"

----------
Yes, Steve, I agree that "to mark up" is a verb, but
even "markup" the noun has problems.

When Balisage wanted a subtitle to tell people what the
conference was actually about, we chose
   "Balisage:The Markup Conference".
Sounded good to us, because we wanted to express that it was more
than "Balisage: The XML Conference" since it was perfectly
fine to talk about microformats, SGML, non-XML-based mashups
and clouds, out-of-line-markup, LMNL, etc. But it left a lot of
people wondering what the conference WAS about, and we have had
some very odd email reactions and a bunch of business types
who do not view the UBL and other tag-related things that
they do as "markup". Markup is for text, not data is some eyes.
Odd old world.

--dal

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Deborah Aleyne Lapeyre               mailto:dalapeyre@mulberrytech.com
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