Chapter 2. Markup and Core Concepts

There's a Far Side cartoon by Gary Larson about an unusual chicken ranch. Instead of strutting around, pecking at seed, the chickens are all lying on the ground or draped over fences as if they were made of rubber. You see, it was a boneless chicken ranch.

Just as skeletons give us vertebrates shape and structure, markup does the same for text. Take out the markup and you have a mess of character data without any form. It would be very difficult to write a computer program that did anything useful with that content. Software relies on markup to label and delineate pieces of data, the way suitcases make it easy for you to carry clothes with you on a trip.