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In the linked article: > you should master the HTML programming¹ language The footnote reads: > 1. This is a common debate - but for simplicity sake I'm just

by jraph 9mo ago

In the linked article: > you should master the HTML programming¹ language The footnote reads: > 1. This is a common debate - but for simplicity sake I'm just calling it this. It's not really a debate, HTML is a markup language [1], not a programming language: you annotate a document with its structure and its formatting. You are not really programming when you write HTML (the markup is not procedural) (and this is not gatekeeping, there's nothing wrong about this and doesn't make HTML a lesser language). To avoid the issue completely, you can phrase this as: "you should master HTML" and remove the footnote. Simple, clean, concise, clear. By the way, ML already means "Markup Language", so any "HTML .* language" phrasing can feel a bit off. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markup_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markup_language

embedding-shape 9mo ago
I dunno, you're being pedantic :) Yes yes, the name clearly ends up "Markup Language" so yeah, with a very strict definition of programming languages, HTML is not one of them. But if we use a broader definition, basically "a formal language that specifies behavior a machine must execute", then HTML is indeed a programming language. HTML is not only about annotating documents or formatting, it can do things you expect from a "normal" programming language too, for example, you can do constraints validation: <input name="token" required pattern="[A-Z]{3}-\d{4}" title="Must match ABC-1234 (3 uppercase letters, hyphen, 4 digits)" placeholder="ABC-1234"> That's neither annotating, just a "document" or just formatting. Another example is using <details> + <summary> and you have users mutating state that reveals different branches in the page, all just using HTML and nothing else. In the end, I agree with you, HTML ultimately is a markup language, but it's deceiving, because it does more than just markup.
- jraph 9mo ago
  > I dunno, you're being pedantic :) It might be, I'm usually not, but this is all xhtml.club and this footnote are about, might as well be correct :-) Constraint validation is still descriptive (what is allowed) All details and summary are doing is conveying information on what's a summary and what's the complete story, and it has this hidden / shown behavior. In any case, you will probably find something procedural / programming like in HTML, but it's not the core idea of the language, and if you are explaining what HTML is to a newbie, I feel like you should focus to the essential. Then we can discuss the corners between more experienced people. In the end, all I'm saying is: you can just avoid issues and just say "HTML" without further qualifying it.
- throwaway150 9mo ago
  I'm not sure we can call your parent comment pedantic. They're just being correct. Is it pedantic to say that fish is not a fruit? It's just correct to do so. If anything, it is the act of stretching the definition of "programming language" so much that it includes HTML as a programming language that we should call pedantic.
- PaulHoule 9mo ago
  One threshold is "can you write a program that might not complete?" You can't in SQL, which makes it less of a programming language than, say, FORTRAN. If you look at the HTML 5 spec it is clear that it's intended to be a substrate for applications. The HTML 5 spec could be factored into a specification of the DOM, specification of an x-language API for the DOM and a specification for a serialization format as well as bindings of that x-language API to specific languages like Javascript.
  - jraph 9mo ago
    > If you look at the HTML 5 spec it is clear that it's intended to be a substrate for applications That's the saddest thing I've read today. (arguably not a terribly sad day)
    - PaulHoule 9mo ago
      Back when it was fashionable to complain about how every Electron application has 30 MB of bloat I did an eval of all the options for x-platform applications that weren't Electron and came to the conclusion that "they all sucked" except for maybe JavaFX -- and not everybody likes Java as much as I do. Building up to Win 8, Microsoft pushed for grid and flexbox which are the bees knees for laying out applications in HTML. Compare the annoying nag dialogs in MacOS and Windows. MacOS nags you to buy into Apple Music and other unwanted services with 2025 reskins of the 1999 reskins of the modal dialogs from the 1984 Mac Classic. Windows does the same with ads that look like advertising which I find more visually appealing even if the services are unappealing. Every time I think about writing a GUI application that's not a web application I think "this is a waste of time" whereas my web applications keep finding new lives as mobile applications, VR applications, etc.
      - jraph 9mo ago
        > Back when it was fashionable to complain about how every Electron application has 30 MB of bloat What, it's not anymore?? And yes, I do end up writing web applications every time too (I haven't bundled them though). I don't want to tie myself to a specific platform, and being able to point users to an URL and bam, they can run the thing, is convenient. I hate that this makes me dependent on tech maintained with Big Tech money though.
- JimDabell 9mo ago
  > behavior a machine must execute This is not what HTML does. Tags are not instructions, they delimit the start and end of elements. They describe content, they do not specify behaviour. In your pattern example, that is still just a description of what is acceptable input. It doesn’t execute anything. A paper form might specify the format DD / MM / YYYY but that doesn‘t mean the form is executing a program in your brain when you fill it out.
radicalethics 9mo ago
What happens if I simply add an iterator mechanism to HTML (well, I guess we need variables too)? Is it no longer a markup language here (I won't add anything else): <for i=0; i<1; i++> <html> </html> </for> Better question, why don't we upgrade XML to do that?
- jraph 9mo ago
  That's not technically HTML anymore. But if you disagree with this, or somehow work around this statement by replacing your for element with some "for-loop" custom element (it is valid HTML to add custom tags with dashes in their names), my stronger argument is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46743219#46743554 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46743219#46743554
- direwolf20 9mo ago
  That's basically the design of PHP with different syntax. <?for($i=0;$i<1;$i++){?> <html></html> <?}?> Nobody uses PHP this way any more though — people treat it like Python or Node and write the entire codebase inside a big <? block JSP is similar with different syntax again — nobody uses JSP either I think ASP too but I never used that
  - jraph 9mo ago
    You could have some client side JavaScript handle your for nodes as well. That's how I imagined what OP described actually. > Nobody uses PHP this way any more though Well… I have bad news. I do, for one :-)
    - PaulHoule 9mo ago
      I ask you then: (1) how do you deal with the template that surrounds a large number of pages on a site? (2) how do you deal with the fact that the average web form might want to display something different based on the form contents (e.g. redraw the form if there's an error, draw something different on success?) (3) do you write anything that returns JSON or other results for AJAX or web services?
falcor84 9mo ago
I think that it is a debate, and it depends on the role of HTML in your system. If all you're doing is using HTML to "annotate a document with its structure and its formatting", then yes, I'll accept that it's not quite programming, but I've not seen this approach of starting with a plain non-html document and marking it up by hand done in probably over two decades. I do still occasionally see it done for marking up blog posts or documentation into markdown and then generating html from it, but even that's a minuscule part of what HTML is used for these days. Your mileage my vary, but what I and people around me typically do is work on hundreds/thousands of loosely coupled small snippets of HTML used within e.g. React JSX, or Django/Jinja templates or htmx endpoints, in order to dynamically control data and state in a large program. In this sense, while the html itself doesn't have control flow, it is an integral part of control flow in the larger system, and it's extremely likely that I'll break something in the functionality if I carelessly change an element's type or attribute value. In this sense, I'm not putting on a different hat when I'm working on the html, but just working on a different part of the program.
- jraph 9mo ago
  > React JSX, or Django/Jinja templates Those are not HTML. PHP neither, even when used as a templating language for HTML. > htmx endpoints Not really familiar with htmx, but I would say this is HTML augmented with some additional mechanisms. I don't know how I would describe this augmented HTML, but I'm not applying my "not programming" statement to htmx (I probably could, but I haven't given enough thoughts to do it). > In this sense, I'm not putting on a different hat when I'm working on the html, but just working on a different part of the program. I agree with this actually. I wouldn't consider that writing HTML (or CSS) is really a separate activity when I'm building some web app.
- throwaway150 9mo ago
  > In this sense, while the html itself doesn't have control flow, it is an integral part of control flow in the larger system That's correct but I don't see what it has got to do with the question of whether HTML is a programming language or not. Strings do not have control flow but strings are integral part of larger programs that have control flow. So what? That doesn't make strings any closer to being programming languages.
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MrJohz 9mo ago
Of course HTML is a programming language. It's one of the languages I use every day to program with. I'm not sure what the definition of a programming language would be beyond that. Do you mean "Turing-complete" language? Or maybe "procedural programming language"? I agree HTML isn't either of those, but those aren't the be-all and end-all of programming now, are they?
- jraph 9mo ago
  I, and most of us, mean a language in which one can express a computer program, which is a set of instructions for a computer to execute. You don't execute an HTML file, you display it, render it. You can't implement fizz buzz in HTML. At best, you mark up its output. With HTML, you don't instruct, you describe. You instruct what to do with JavaScript, or Python, or whatever programming languages you use client or server side. A programming language doesn't need to be procedural, it can be functional, or use another computationally equivalent paradigm. I'm not quite sure it needs to be Turing complete, but possibly. A programming language lets you express to some processor that provides a set of computation primitives what to do with the memory cells you have at your disposal, and in general it lets you deal with input and output. If you consider any language you program with to be a programming language, then CSS, JSON, YAML, XML, markdown (that's what your readme is likely written in) and even English (that's what you use to express the specs, the bugs, maybe your notes / drafts, the comments, possibly the language the singer of the songs you're listening to while programming use) or UML need to be programming languages too. That's not quite useful. "Program with" is too large and would make the "programming" qualifier largely useless. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14512218/is-html5-a-programming-language https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14512218/is-html5-a-prog...
  - MrJohz 8mo ago
    An HTML file is a set of instructions to execute. They're very high-level, declarative instructions for describing a UI, similar to how SQL is high-level declarative instructions for describing a set of data to be loaded, or how Prolog is a high-level declarative set of instructions for describing a set of logical axioms, but they're still instructions. You pass them to an execution engine, and on the basis of the instructions you've written, the engine does something. (See e.g. the section on fourth generation PLs in the second link you gave.) More broadly, I think this discussion is a stupid one. There is no formal, mathematically precise definition of a programming language. There are formal definitions of lots of PL-related things, and for what a language is in general (a combination of syntax and semantics), but there's no formal definition of the term "programming language" that's useful here. So if we're not arguing about a formal definition, then we're arguing about essentially our favourite dictionaries, and how we personally interpret our favourite dictionaries. And that's just not a useful argument at all, it's not even how dictionaries are meant to work! And yet whenever someone dares to write "HTML programming language" or something similar, there is always a comment from someone demanding that the author use their personal dictionary, and correct their changes. And it is deeply grating, because whenever I see this happen: * The original statement is never ambiguous. I have never seen a situation where referring to HTML as a programming language has ever caused some sort of confusion. * The discussion about whether HTML is a programming language is almost always completely irrelevant to the topic at hand, and bringing it up adds no value to the discussion. * The author's definition is usually inconsistent anyway. Which isn't a problem — I don't imagine my mental definition of a programming language is entirely consistent either — but it's dumb watching someone try and correct other people without understanding their own definition enough to be able to respond to clarifying questions. In your original comment, you said "it's not really a debate", and that's completely correct. It's not a debate because there's no right answer. There's not even any value to a right answer. The matter is entirely a question of terminology. And if different choices of terminology make things unclear, then it might be worth clarifying that terminology, but here I don't think the author could have been any clearer at all about what they were trying to communicate.
recursivedoubts 8mo ago
consider the following: https://html-lang.org/ https://html-lang.org/
- jraph 8mo ago
  Oh yes, this is "HTML, the programming language", not HTML (also called "HTML, the markup language" in that page). And it's brilliant :-)

by jraph 9mo ago

embedding-shape 9mo ago

I dunno, you're being pedantic :) Yes yes, the name clearly ends up "Markup Language" so yeah, with a very strict definition of programming languages, HTML is not one of them. But if we use a broader definition, basically "a formal language that specifies behavior a machine must execute", then HTML is indeed a programming language. HTML is not only about annotating documents or formatting, it can do things you expect from a "normal" programming language too, for example, you can do constraints validation: <input name="token" required pattern="[A-Z]{3}-\d{4}" title="Must match ABC-1234 (3 uppercase letters, hyphen, 4 digits)" placeholder="ABC-1234"> That's neither annotating, just a "document" or just formatting. Another example is using <details> + <summary> and you have users mutating state that reveals different branches in the page, all just using HTML and nothing else. In the end, I agree with you, HTML ultimately is a markup language, but it's deceiving, because it does more than just markup.

jraph 9mo ago
> I dunno, you're being pedantic :) It might be, I'm usually not, but this is all xhtml.club and this footnote are about, might as well be correct :-) Constraint validation is still descriptive (what is allowed) All details and summary are doing is conveying information on what's a summary and what's the complete story, and it has this hidden / shown behavior. In any case, you will probably find something procedural / programming like in HTML, but it's not the core idea of the language, and if you are explaining what HTML is to a newbie, I feel like you should focus to the essential. Then we can discuss the corners between more experienced people. In the end, all I'm saying is: you can just avoid issues and just say "HTML" without further qualifying it.
throwaway150 9mo ago
I'm not sure we can call your parent comment pedantic. They're just being correct. Is it pedantic to say that fish is not a fruit? It's just correct to do so. If anything, it is the act of stretching the definition of "programming language" so much that it includes HTML as a programming language that we should call pedantic.
PaulHoule 9mo ago
One threshold is "can you write a program that might not complete?" You can't in SQL, which makes it less of a programming language than, say, FORTRAN. If you look at the HTML 5 spec it is clear that it's intended to be a substrate for applications. The HTML 5 spec could be factored into a specification of the DOM, specification of an x-language API for the DOM and a specification for a serialization format as well as bindings of that x-language API to specific languages like Javascript.
- jraph 9mo ago
  > If you look at the HTML 5 spec it is clear that it's intended to be a substrate for applications That's the saddest thing I've read today. (arguably not a terribly sad day)
  - PaulHoule 9mo ago
    Back when it was fashionable to complain about how every Electron application has 30 MB of bloat I did an eval of all the options for x-platform applications that weren't Electron and came to the conclusion that "they all sucked" except for maybe JavaFX -- and not everybody likes Java as much as I do. Building up to Win 8, Microsoft pushed for grid and flexbox which are the bees knees for laying out applications in HTML. Compare the annoying nag dialogs in MacOS and Windows. MacOS nags you to buy into Apple Music and other unwanted services with 2025 reskins of the 1999 reskins of the modal dialogs from the 1984 Mac Classic. Windows does the same with ads that look like advertising which I find more visually appealing even if the services are unappealing. Every time I think about writing a GUI application that's not a web application I think "this is a waste of time" whereas my web applications keep finding new lives as mobile applications, VR applications, etc.
    - jraph 9mo ago
      > Back when it was fashionable to complain about how every Electron application has 30 MB of bloat What, it's not anymore?? And yes, I do end up writing web applications every time too (I haven't bundled them though). I don't want to tie myself to a specific platform, and being able to point users to an URL and bam, they can run the thing, is convenient. I hate that this makes me dependent on tech maintained with Big Tech money though.
JimDabell 9mo ago
> behavior a machine must execute This is not what HTML does. Tags are not instructions, they delimit the start and end of elements. They describe content, they do not specify behaviour. In your pattern example, that is still just a description of what is acceptable input. It doesn’t execute anything. A paper form might specify the format DD / MM / YYYY but that doesn‘t mean the form is executing a program in your brain when you fill it out.

radicalethics 9mo ago

What happens if I simply add an iterator mechanism to HTML (well, I guess we need variables too)? Is it no longer a markup language here (I won't add anything else): <for i=0; i<1; i++> <html> </html> </for> Better question, why don't we upgrade XML to do that?

jraph 9mo ago
That's not technically HTML anymore. But if you disagree with this, or somehow work around this statement by replacing your for element with some "for-loop" custom element (it is valid HTML to add custom tags with dashes in their names), my stronger argument is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46743219#46743554 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46743219#46743554
direwolf20 9mo ago
That's basically the design of PHP with different syntax. <?for($i=0;$i<1;$i++){?> <html></html> <?}?> Nobody uses PHP this way any more though — people treat it like Python or Node and write the entire codebase inside a big <? block JSP is similar with different syntax again — nobody uses JSP either I think ASP too but I never used that
- jraph 9mo ago
  You could have some client side JavaScript handle your for nodes as well. That's how I imagined what OP described actually. > Nobody uses PHP this way any more though Well… I have bad news. I do, for one :-)
  - PaulHoule 9mo ago
    I ask you then: (1) how do you deal with the template that surrounds a large number of pages on a site? (2) how do you deal with the fact that the average web form might want to display something different based on the form contents (e.g. redraw the form if there's an error, draw something different on success?) (3) do you write anything that returns JSON or other results for AJAX or web services?

falcor84 9mo ago

I think that it is a debate, and it depends on the role of HTML in your system. If all you're doing is using HTML to "annotate a document with its structure and its formatting", then yes, I'll accept that it's not quite programming, but I've not seen this approach of starting with a plain non-html document and marking it up by hand done in probably over two decades. I do still occasionally see it done for marking up blog posts or documentation into markdown and then generating html from it, but even that's a minuscule part of what HTML is used for these days. Your mileage my vary, but what I and people around me typically do is work on hundreds/thousands of loosely coupled small snippets of HTML used within e.g. React JSX, or Django/Jinja templates or htmx endpoints, in order to dynamically control data and state in a large program. In this sense, while the html itself doesn't have control flow, it is an integral part of control flow in the larger system, and it's extremely likely that I'll break something in the functionality if I carelessly change an element's type or attribute value. In this sense, I'm not putting on a different hat when I'm working on the html, but just working on a different part of the program.

jraph 9mo ago
> React JSX, or Django/Jinja templates Those are not HTML. PHP neither, even when used as a templating language for HTML. > htmx endpoints Not really familiar with htmx, but I would say this is HTML augmented with some additional mechanisms. I don't know how I would describe this augmented HTML, but I'm not applying my "not programming" statement to htmx (I probably could, but I haven't given enough thoughts to do it). > In this sense, I'm not putting on a different hat when I'm working on the html, but just working on a different part of the program. I agree with this actually. I wouldn't consider that writing HTML (or CSS) is really a separate activity when I'm building some web app.
throwaway150 9mo ago
> In this sense, while the html itself doesn't have control flow, it is an integral part of control flow in the larger system That's correct but I don't see what it has got to do with the question of whether HTML is a programming language or not. Strings do not have control flow but strings are integral part of larger programs that have control flow. So what? That doesn't make strings any closer to being programming languages.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

deleted 9mo ago

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MrJohz 9mo ago

Of course HTML is a programming language. It's one of the languages I use every day to program with. I'm not sure what the definition of a programming language would be beyond that. Do you mean "Turing-complete" language? Or maybe "procedural programming language"? I agree HTML isn't either of those, but those aren't the be-all and end-all of programming now, are they?

jraph 9mo ago
I, and most of us, mean a language in which one can express a computer program, which is a set of instructions for a computer to execute. You don't execute an HTML file, you display it, render it. You can't implement fizz buzz in HTML. At best, you mark up its output. With HTML, you don't instruct, you describe. You instruct what to do with JavaScript, or Python, or whatever programming languages you use client or server side. A programming language doesn't need to be procedural, it can be functional, or use another computationally equivalent paradigm. I'm not quite sure it needs to be Turing complete, but possibly. A programming language lets you express to some processor that provides a set of computation primitives what to do with the memory cells you have at your disposal, and in general it lets you deal with input and output. If you consider any language you program with to be a programming language, then CSS, JSON, YAML, XML, markdown (that's what your readme is likely written in) and even English (that's what you use to express the specs, the bugs, maybe your notes / drafts, the comments, possibly the language the singer of the songs you're listening to while programming use) or UML need to be programming languages too. That's not quite useful. "Program with" is too large and would make the "programming" qualifier largely useless. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14512218/is-html5-a-programming-language https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14512218/is-html5-a-prog...
- MrJohz 8mo ago
  An HTML file is a set of instructions to execute. They're very high-level, declarative instructions for describing a UI, similar to how SQL is high-level declarative instructions for describing a set of data to be loaded, or how Prolog is a high-level declarative set of instructions for describing a set of logical axioms, but they're still instructions. You pass them to an execution engine, and on the basis of the instructions you've written, the engine does something. (See e.g. the section on fourth generation PLs in the second link you gave.) More broadly, I think this discussion is a stupid one. There is no formal, mathematically precise definition of a programming language. There are formal definitions of lots of PL-related things, and for what a language is in general (a combination of syntax and semantics), but there's no formal definition of the term "programming language" that's useful here. So if we're not arguing about a formal definition, then we're arguing about essentially our favourite dictionaries, and how we personally interpret our favourite dictionaries. And that's just not a useful argument at all, it's not even how dictionaries are meant to work! And yet whenever someone dares to write "HTML programming language" or something similar, there is always a comment from someone demanding that the author use their personal dictionary, and correct their changes. And it is deeply grating, because whenever I see this happen: * The original statement is never ambiguous. I have never seen a situation where referring to HTML as a programming language has ever caused some sort of confusion. * The discussion about whether HTML is a programming language is almost always completely irrelevant to the topic at hand, and bringing it up adds no value to the discussion. * The author's definition is usually inconsistent anyway. Which isn't a problem — I don't imagine my mental definition of a programming language is entirely consistent either — but it's dumb watching someone try and correct other people without understanding their own definition enough to be able to respond to clarifying questions. In your original comment, you said "it's not really a debate", and that's completely correct. It's not a debate because there's no right answer. There's not even any value to a right answer. The matter is entirely a question of terminology. And if different choices of terminology make things unclear, then it might be worth clarifying that terminology, but here I don't think the author could have been any clearer at all about what they were trying to communicate.

recursivedoubts 8mo ago

consider the following: https://html-lang.org/ https://html-lang.org/

jraph 8mo ago
Oh yes, this is "HTML, the programming language", not HTML (also called "HTML, the markup language" in that page). And it's brilliant :-)