The idea of course is that we can readily see where the end of the title is, allowing us to have the title expand on several lines if needed. While that is some progress, what we would like to emphasize is the angle brackets around “title”. While seemingly innocuous, this is very significant in a way that we will try to explain, because it is the source of the cognition capabilities of successors to the language. Bear with us, because we will go a bit technical here in hopes of doing justice to the importance of the subject. We have not been able to trace who had the idea of using the angle bracket notation; perhaps it is an anonymous genius within the working groups of the International Standards Organization (ISO), or perhaps our research has not been thorough enough. In any case, we believe that we can interpret the thinking of the person who did it, because the angle brackets are exactly the same brackets that are used for what is called the Backus-Naur notation. Why is that important, you might ask? Well, this notation is used to describe computer languages. For example, we can say in the Backus-Naur notation, simplifying a little:

We realize this line is perhaps awkward to read, as the “::=“ notation is rather arcane. However, please bear with us for just a bit longer. What the Backus-Naur notation has done for us is allowing further expression of the structure of our document. What we previously said informally, namely “Here is the title of my document,” now we have expressed formally. The difference is that while a computer has difficulty understanding “Here is the title of my document,” for reasons we will not explore at this point, it has no problem understanding <document-title> ::= <title> <title-text> </title>. For the computer, it means that a document title is what is found between the <title> and </title> elements. What has thus been accomplished is teaching the computer to think a little more like we do (lest we be misunderstood, we need to emphasize here for the cognoscenti that we are purposely avoiding the word meta-language to eschew debating its relationship to classification, and that we are purposely attributing a morphological nature to angle brackets to load them semantically). In other words, we elevated slightly the cognitive level of the computer. However, we are not yet finished. Now, we can explain the light of genius of our unknown inventor. What the Backus-Naur translates is in fact what is called a grammar. Yes, essentially the same grammar we have all learned at school, but the formal version that computers understand. Now for example, using the same notation that we have used for our document, we can describe grammatical elements (our linguist readers will pardon us for the simplification):

With that description at hand, we can parse sentences such as “John loves Mary,” or “The bridge crosses the river.” Hopefully, now you see clearly that by using the seemingly innocuous angle brackets, the International Standards Organization committee has imparted the Standardized Generalized Markup Language with a theoretical heritage. This will allow us, in time, to use the same language for people (that is the grammatical heritage, dating back thousand of years) and computers (that is the document markup heritage, dating back a few decades). Before we go further, we cannot help noticing that our anonymous genius was certainly aware of the publication of the seminal 1963 paper by Noam Chomsky and Marcel-Paul Schützenberger, The algebraic theory of context free languages. This paper, for the first time, united the traditional field of linguistics (Noam) with the new field of computer science (Marcel-Paul); which is exactly what the commonality of the angle brackets in the two domains expresses. To close the loop of connections, one of the authors (Bertrand) published an article in Linguistic Inquiry just after one by Noam Chomsky in 1978, and he had Marcel-Paul Schützenberger as his PhD jury president in 1977. Perhaps, in truth, that was the origin of this book.

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