Still digging.

“To encourage acceptance, the authors of the SGML specification followed other design objectives: the ability to enter text and markup on "the millions of existing text entry devices"; no character set dependency; no national language bias; and markup usable by both humans and programs.”

Just a moment...

(www.loc.gov)

Thanks to my emails but also people who were participating today, I got an email from one of the key players that sent me some great leads and info to investigate! (Including a PDF of the report I was salivating over earlier.)

It turns out the angle brackets are at most from 1979, if not earlier. More to research!

This is the earliest appearance of < > I know of today, from 1979.

This thread might slow down, as next step will be some interlibrary requests!

This might be more interesting. <P1> and <P2>! <#> for styling! Excited to dig and learn more.

They are *killing me*. In the old article about the history of it that I just discovered, they are using… square brackets.

They really are killing me.

Fired some interlibrary requests. Wish me luck!

Is this going to go anywhere? Unclear. But I like this part.

I like scanning and putting up interlibrary stuff on Internet Archive.

This is the first one I got. Not sure yet if it’s going to help with the HTML bracket investigation, but maybe it’ll help someone else! https://archive.org/details/gca-standard-101-1983

Believe it or not, I’m still figuring out where HTML got its angle brackets.

But despite grabbing a lot of interlibrary items, I am not sure I’m getting any closer. I still have some ideas, but one involves going to a museum in Maine, which might take a while.

However, good news (for someone?): There are now over 40 papers and books I scanned that deal with history of markup. Enjoy!

Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Texts, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine

(archive.org)