the.com/markup

The silent code that turns chaos into structure, then gets the price hike blamed on it.

means The amount added to the cost of something to set its selling price, or the set of tags and symbols that tell a document how to display its structure.

from A plain English compound of 'mark' and 'up' — 'mark' coming from Old English 'mearc,' meaning a boundary, sign, or token, and ultimately a Germanic root shared with words for borders and brands. To 'mark up' literally meant to write marks upon something. The pricing sense — annotating goods with a higher figure — is the older commercial meaning. The computing sense (as in HTML, HyperText Markup Language) borrowed the idea directly from publishing, where editors would 'mark up' a manuscript with handwritten instructions for the typesetter; the digital version simply swapped the editor's pencil for angle-bracketed tags.

two meanings
It tags webpages and inflates retail prices
origin
From editors marking up paper manuscripts
html
Stands for HyperText Markup Language
retail truth
Sunglasses can carry over 1000% markup
invisible
Browsers hide it; you only see results
for instance

html — web standard created by tim berners-lee in 1989 for structuring documents

xml — extensible markup language developed by w3c in 1998 for data interchange

markdown — lightweight format created by john gruber in 2004 for easy-to-read plain text

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