kragen-history-of-markup

Starting in 1969 and throughout the 1970s, Charles Goldfarb, Edward Mosher, Raymond Lorie, and others created GML, the Generalized Markup Language, at IBM. It was a meta-language for domain-specific document formats with semantic information, which could be used for flexible stylesheet-based formatting (somewhat like other systems around the same time, such as TeX and Brian Reid's Scribe) as well as more database-like applications, such as composing tables of contents, or searching a corpus of case law by its citations.