been used in textual scholarship for nearly 50 years. It is only recently that they are expected to be reusable and accessible. Markup, a kind of wrapping paper or meta-text, encodes the logical structure and content of a defined document. Standard Generalised Markup Language (SGML) became an international standard (ISO 8879) in 1986. It has the advantage that it is not only independent of encoded text but also of hardware or software. It can be transmitted across all networks. Behind every screen on the World Wide Web lies a Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) made of ASCII text. HTML is a simpler but universally recognised application of SGML. It can provide formatting information, designate hypertext links and assist in search and retrieval. Its simplicity allows people with almost no computer skills to create, format and disseminate digital material in a networked medium. HTML is limited in its ability to describe content because it does not include many of the meta-information codings of SGML markup. As a result, it is rapidly being extended. In order to increase the contextual abilities of the web as a manager of the world's information, the direction of evolution is to make web user agents able to receive and process generic SGML in the way that they are now able to receive and process HTML. The bridge may well be an Extensible Markup Language known as XML. The Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) introduces Internet Media Types, including text representations other than ASCII. HTML is a standard