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HTML has no reduction/evaluation rules and so it can't have a semantics in the same way as real programming languages. You could think of a "layout semantics" r
by gue5t 10y ago
HTML has no reduction/evaluation rules and so it can't have a semantics in the same way as real programming languages. You could think of a "layout semantics" relating HTML and a given environment (screen size, fonts, etc.) to the resulting box model or rendered page, but that's not very interesting from the standpoint of totality: we already know that Web browsers are supposed to show something no matter how mangled their input is.
- JadeNB 10y ago> HTML has no reduction/evaluation rules and so it can't have a semantics in the same way as real programming languages. It seems to me that your next sentence addresses this better than I could. > that's not very interesting from the standpoint of totality: we already know that Web browsers are supposed to show something no matter how mangled their input is. So isn't it interesting that they do that? I think that the prevalence of scripting languages on the modern web (and, if you like to look farther back in history, the reluctant Turing completeness of TeX) strongly suggests that it wasn't at all inevitable that we would get a total language for web design. That is, to prove that it is total is presumably not much of an accomplishment, but that it is total is very interesting (and, from the point of view of the success of the web, important) indeed.