Editing Lightweight markup language (section)

== Types ==
Lightweight markup languages can be categorized by their tag types. Like HTML (<code>&lt;b>'''bold'''&lt;/b></code>), some languages use named elements that share a common format for start and end tags (e.g. [[BBCode]] <code>[b]'''bold'''[/b]</code>), whereas proper lightweight markup languages are restricted to [[ASCII]]-only punctuation marks and other non-letter symbols for tags, but some also mix both styles (e.g. [[Textile (markup language)|Textile]] <code>bq. </code>) or allow embedded HTML (e.g. [[Markdown]]), possibly extended with custom elements (e.g. [[MediaWiki#Markup|MediaWiki]] <code><nowiki><ref>'''source'''</ref></nowiki></code>).

Most languages distinguish between markup for lines or blocks and for shorter spans of texts, but some only support inline markup.

Some markup languages are tailored for a specific purpose, such as documenting computer code (e.g. [[Plain Old Documentation|POD]], [[reStructuredText|reST]], [[Ruby Document format|RD]]) or being converted to a certain output format (usually HTML or [[LaTeX]]) and nothing else, others are more general in application. This includes whether they are oriented on textual presentation or on data serialization.{{clarify|date=June 2014}}

Presentation oriented languages include [[AsciiDoc]], [[atx (markup language)|atx]], [[BBCode]], [[Creole (markup)|Creole]], Crossmark, Djot, Epytext, [[Haml]], [[JsonML]], [[MakeDoc]], [[Markdown]], [[Org-mode]], [[Plain Old Documentation|POD (Perl)]], [[reStructuredText|reST (Python)]], [[Ruby Document format| RD (Ruby)]], [[Setext]], [[SiSU]], [[SPIP]], Xupl, [[Texy!]], Textile, [[txt2tags]], [[UDO (markup language)|UDO]] and [[Wikitext]].

Data serialization oriented languages include [[Curl (programming language)|Curl]] ([[homoiconic]], but also reads JSON; every object serializes), [[JSON]], and [[YAML]].
{{expand section|with=comparison table with types of languages explained above; could be integrated into other high-level tables|date=June 2014}}