What's the difference between a language and a metalanguage?

A language is a single specification - a way of describing a series of actions or how some particular data is handled. Whereas a metalanguage is a way of specifying a series of languages to a particular pattern.

An example? HTML is a language. There are different flavours (slightly) but basically it's a single language. What I descibe as HTML++ is a metalanguage - a way of adding to HTML to make it rather more that just HTML. Examples of HTML++ metalanguages include JSP, PHP, ASP, Rails, Eruby, EmbPerl, SSI; all differenty languages as you need different compilers / interpretters to handle them, but all extending basic HTML in a similar way.

In the same way, XML is a metalanguage, and implementetations of it include XSLT, RSS, and many more from SOAP to Tomcat configuration files.
(written 2007-01-22 20:04:07)

 A301 - Web Application Deployment - XML, DTD, XSLT, XHTML and More
H101 - Introduction to PHP
J907 - JSP - JavaServer Pages
R202 - Ruby on Rails

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UK legal requirements for your commercial web site
Sorting people by name in PHP
Learning to write secure, maintainable PHP
Too busy to blog it - but it's great (mostly)
The HTML++ Metalanguage
Java 6, Apache Tomcat 6.
Getting rid of people - hotel techniques
Maintainable code - some positive advice
Bounce, bounce, bounce
Bang! Train campaign hits home
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