In which I feel like a whippersnapper
When our kids first stumble upon a floppy disk or a file folder they are going to have this epiphany about where the "open" and "save" icons in their word processors came from.
I had a similar experience Friday. I had just been accepted onto on the freelance copy editor roster for my first publisher (yay!), and I was reading through all the instructions and style guides I'd been sent. One of them was about a part of copyediting I haven't actually done yet-adding in typesetting codes. (At Metroland we used Word's styles feature instead.)
So here I am, looking at a list of tags: things like for verso running head, for epigraph, for numbered list. And end tags, marked with a slash: , , . So familiar...
Duh. So it's not particularly deep to be smacked over the head with the point that html was not the first markup language, and that markup languages predate the Web. But it was pretty neat to realize how old this convention actually is.
Even neater is that when your markup is being read by a human typesetter/production editor instead of a browser, you can make up tags if you need to.