I'm not sure where you're seeing all this controversy, nor do I quite understand why you're so upset about it. Nevertheless, why don't we just judge HTML in ter

I'm not sure where you're seeing all this controversy, nor do I quite understand why you're so upset about it. Nevertheless, why don't we just judge HTML in terms of its intended purpose? Before CSS and Javascript and the separation of semantics, presentation and behavior I might actually have agreed with you. At this stage, though, I'd venture that HTML is designed for the purpose of describing the semantic notions of a document rather than computation. Since you ask us to be humble I'll oblige and concede that not all programming languages have to be turing complete (there are useful languages that aren't). But surely it has to be designed with computation as a purpose? Even CSS fullfills that criteria to a higher degree. If not, you might as well argue that any arbitrary language at any level in Chomskys hierarchy constitutes a programming language. It's been a while since I read SICP but I really don't think this is what Abelson and Sussman had in mind.