h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"Must say that this GML (Like Html but as far as i can find out not
as extensive) stuff is brilliant

I'm constructing a page for those poor lost souls who have no idea
of what it is and who are terribly lost in it as i was and i will
do,as soon as i find out how to view things in a new page"


GuideML is already well explained on the h2g2 help pages. I don't think there's any need for you to write about it.

XML is a set of standards for creating mark-up languages (that is, plain text files which represent formatted text). In actual fact, XML is meant to represent what text is, rather than what it should look like. This is seen well in GuideML, where text can be marked as a header, instead of as large and red. If you are looking at the ariticle in Brunel it will appear large and red, but if you look at it in Classic Goo it appears yellow on a blue background. In either case, however, it is a header. GuideML is, then, a form of XML. In fact, it could be described as a decendant of XML.

HTML is a looser relative of XML that is not as strict about all tags closing and that often does describe what text loks like instead of what it is. (Form over function, I suppose.) The newest revisions of the HTML standard have changed it to XHTML, redefining HTML as a descendant of XML. In other words, they've made it stricter and they've stripped out all that stuff about what the text looks like and put it into associated cascading style sheets. (So instead of marking your Oscar Wilde quotations as red you mark them as being of a certain style and in the associated CSS file you define that style as red text. From a logical point of view, this is mich neater.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GuideML

By the way, work out how to use fotnotes before getting carried away with explaining GuideML.

TRiG.