Markup Language Cost Considerations

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MARKUP LANGUAGE COST CONSIDERATIONS

Economics plays an important role in how and to what extent electronic documents are marked. Although formatting for presentation is relatively inexpensive, until recently formatting documents for both content and presentation represented a significant additional expense in the production of electronic documents. Even now, although the production of "neutrally coded" text, based on the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and its derivatives, is diminishing in cost, the limited number of suppliers able to produce logical markup of sufficiently high quality for complex text contributes significantly to the interest in presentation-oriented systems, most notably the Portable Document Format (PDF) of Adobe Systems.