The first language to make a clean distinction between structure and presentation was Scribe, developed by Brian Reid and described in his doctoral thesis in 1980.Reid, Brian. "Scribe: A Document Specification Language and its Compiler". Ph.D. thesis, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA. Also available as Technical Report CMU-CS-81-100. Scribe was revolutionary in a number of ways, introducing the idea of styles separated from the marked-up document, and a grammar that controlled the usage of descriptive elements. Scribe influenced the development of Generalized Markup Language (later SGML), and is a direct ancestor to HTML and LaTeX.HTML is a particular instance of SGML, whereas LaTeX is designed with the separation-between-content-and-design philosophy of Scribe in mind.
The first language to make a clean distinction b:etween structure and presentation was Scribe, developed by Brian Reid and described in his doctoral thesis in 1980.Reid, Brian. "Scribe A Document Specification Language and its Compiler". Ph.D. thesis, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA. Also available as Technical Report CMU-CS-81-100. Scribe was revolutionary in a number of ways, introducing the idea of styles separated from the marked-up document, and a grammar that controlled the usage of descriptive elements. Scribe influenced the development of Generalized Markup Language (later SGML), and is a direct ancestor to HTML and LaTeX.HTML is a particular instance of SGML, whereas LaTeX is designed with the separation-between-content-and-design philosophy of Scribe in mind.