Finally, procedural markup is characterized by a further limitation, to date all procedural markup has been proprietary. Each word processing software package uses its own markup. In this environment, the future of the document is tied to the future of the software. Descriptive Markup . A second type of markup mentioned by Coombs, Renear, and DeRose is descriptive markup.
Descriptive markup identifies the logical components of documents.
While procedural markup specifies a particular procedure to be applied to a document component, descriptive markup indicates what the component is. None of these gives any indication of what procedures are to be applied to these components. But, if you know the elements in a document, then you can have processors to do whatever you want to them. Descriptive markup liberates the document for multiple uses. The fact that descriptive markup can be used in so many different ways is one of its important characteristics.