I have come across Adobe MXML that looks very similar to Microsoft's XAML. Who came up with this idea first? The reason I ask is, when I first saw WPF and the XAML approach, I thought it was a very unique and amazing idea that was never seen before MFC, Winforms, etc, even though I feel it takes some getting used to from the older, more traditional ways.
So just trying to see who pioneered this idea of programming first. I feel like this idea might be older than both companies?
Using "markup" to describe a visual image or text and documents started in the publishing industry (60's and 70's) with publishers needing a way to describe their documents (GML and SGML). This was then used in browsers for the web, now XAML, and on and on.
See here for an explanation.
And an excerpt:
Standard Generalized Markup Language was the next iteration on GML and was accepted as an ISO standard in 1986. IBM and many other organizations in the technical publishing business such as aeronautics soon used SGML for most of their publishing purposes.
SGML is the mother of all markup languages, but it is extremely complicated and more powerful than needed for most applications. In the late 1980s, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Caillau were working on the beginnings of the World Wide Web to make it easy to share scholarly information between physicists. They recognized the need for a markup language to facilitate links between documents and for display in a browser, and so HyperText Markup Language (HTML) was born along with the Web in 1991.