marksalso

Marksalso is a term used in discussions of digital text annotation to denote a hypothetical operator that attaches metadata to a span of content without altering its visible rendering. The concept appears in debates about markup languages, editing environments, and accessibility tools, as a way to keep content and metadata together in a parsable form.

Origin and etymology of marksalso are not firmly established. The name is commonly described as a blend of marks and also, signaling a secondary function attached to primary text. It emerged in online forums and experimental documentation in the early 2020s as part of conversations about inline annotations and extensible markup.

Syntax and usage are proposed rather than standardized. In one representation, a marksalso annotation follows a content node and is enclosed in braces, for example: The cat marksalso{role=subject, id=cat1}. This indicates that the phrase carries metadata about its syntactic role and a stable identifier, without changing how the text is displayed. Some proposals describe a postfix form, such as: The cat marksalso{role=subject}.

Applications of marksalso include enabling richer search, accessibility tagging, localization hints, and editorial workflows where metadata should travel with content. Limitations include the lack of a formal standard, potential parsing ambiguity, and varying support across tools and platforms. As a result, marksalso remains a concept under discussion, with adoption limited to experimental or specialized environments.

See also: footnotes, inline annotations, metadata, markup languages.