Although Renaer appears to reject Coombs’s idea that punctuation is a kind of markup, he still sees it as embodied in the formatting information inserted by WYSIWYG word-processors (Renaer, 1997, p. 109). But here, too, a distinction must be drawn between the data structures employed by word processor programs, which use text ranges with standoff binary attributes, and explicit markup languages such as HTML, in which the formatting codes are embedded directly in the text. In the early 90s humanists may be preferred a more expanded definition of markup because they needed to overcome their colleagues’ resistance to its use, by arguing that it was only a variation on something they already used, such as punctuation and spaces, or word-processors. Since the historical discussion that follows is not bound by this constraint, this article will revert to the original definition of markup, like that provided by the OED, as embedded textual codes. References to ‘markup’ without further qualification also assume that markup is embedded in the text that it describes.