XML: Prior art or the missing tag?

XML: The missing tag?During my holiday travels this year I discovered what may be the “missing tag” in Carnac, south-west Brittany. Here is photographic evidence that 7,000 years ago neolithic technologists were interested in structured markup.

Interestingly, the glyphs represented don’t seem to be present in the latest version of the Unicode standard. Did our ancestors know something we don’t?

Posted by Richard Padley on August 26, 2009. Posted in Technology.
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  • August 27, 2009
    Dominic Mitchell

    Actually, I think they were using SGML, as evidenced by implicit close tag.

  • August 27, 2009
    Richard Padley

    Dom, I guess you’re right. SGML or even GML maybe!

  • September 4, 2009
    Brad Scott

    Or was the end tag at the other end of the woods?

  • September 7, 2009
    Richard Padley

    I went all the way to the end of forest (EOF) and I couldn’t find a closing tag :-)

  • September 10, 2009
    Sean Harrop

    Maybe their early ideas just weren’t well-formed enough?

  • September 16, 2009
    Richard Padley

    We may never know. Only fragments survive :-)

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