computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

, particularly in human-computer interaction, presentation semantics specify how a particular piece of a

formal language In logic, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics, a formal language is a set of strings whose symbols are taken from a set called "alphabet". The alphabet of a formal language consists of symbols that concatenate into strings (also c ...

is represented in a distinguished manner accessible to human senses, usually human vision. For example, saying that ... must render the text between these constructs using some bold typeface is a specification of presentation semantics for that

syntax In linguistics, syntax ( ) is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituenc ...

. Many

markup languages A markup language is a text-encoding system which specifies the structure and formatting of a document and potentially the relationships among its parts. Markup can control the display of a document or enrich its content to facilitate automated p ...

, including

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

, DSSSL, and XSL-FO, have presentation semantics, but others, such as

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...

, do not.

Character encoding Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical character (computing), characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using computers. The numerical v ...

standards, such as

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

, also have presentation semantics. One of the main goals of style sheet languages is to separate the syntax that defines document content from the syntax endowed with presentation semantics. This is the norm on the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyis ...

, where the Cascading Style Sheets language provides a large collection of presentation semantics for HTML documents.

References

{{compu-sci-stub Semantics Human–computer interaction Programming language topics