Comparison of document markup languages

The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of document markup languages . Please see the individual markup languages' articles for further information.

General information

Basic general information about the markup languages: creator, version, etc.

	Creator	First public release date	Latest stable version	Editor	Viewer
DocBook	Norman Walsh	?	4.4	?	? (For printing)
HTML	Tim Berners-Lee	1993	4.01	Text editor, HTML editor	Web browser
MathML	W3C	July 1999	2.0	Text editor, TeX converter	Web browser, Word processor
RTF	Microsoft	1987	1.8	Text editor, Word processor	Word processor
TeX	Donald Knuth	1978	3.141592	Text editor	DVI or PDF converter
XHTML	W3C	January 26, 2000	1.1	Text editor, HTML editor	Web browser
WML	WAP Forum	?	2.0	Text editor	Microbrowser
	Creator	First public release date	Latest stable version	Editor	Viewer

Characteristics

Some characteristics of the markup languages.

	Major purpose	Based on	Markup type	Structural markup	Presentational markup 1
DocBook	Technical document	SGML / XML	Tag	Yes	?
HTML	Hypertext document	SGML	Tag	Yes	Yes
MathML	Mathematical document	XML	Tag	Yes	No
RTF	Rich text document		Control code	Yes	Yes
TeX	Academic document		Control code	Yes	Yes
XHTML	Hypertext document	XML	Tag	Yes	No
WML	Hypertext document	XML	Tag	Yes	Yes
	Major purpose	Based on	Markup type	Structural markup	Presentational markup

Note (1): Many markup languages have purposely avoided presentational markups. For markup languages based on SGML and XML, CSS is used as a presentation layer.

See also

• List of document markup languages