Skip to main content


A great conversation in the supporter Discord/Matrix reminded me that it's about time to share this fantastic item by @heydon.

Anyway, yes HTML is a programming language and folks who argue with this statement in my comments will be muted, blocked, defederated, or all three.

briefs.video/videos/is-html-a-…

This entry was edited (5 days ago)
in reply to Veronica Explains

The question of "is HTML a programming language" is never about definitions.

It's about excluding a group of laborers from receiving equal compensation to others, as well as a means to justify not teaching engineers how to center web content without several frameworks.

I will not be taking questions.

in reply to Veronica Explains

omg yeah, i feel like that question often gets brought up just to put someone else down, it usually doesn't actually matter whether it's a programming language
in reply to Veronica Explains

Brilliant response! I'm going to screenshot or print this and show it to my doubters.
in reply to Veronica Explains

I work on web dev and I personally have never considered HTML a programming language and I never understood what the debate was all about or why it was contentious. I'm glad now that I've never bothered to argue about it, because I wholeheartedly believe that web professionals and web work are undervalued.
in reply to mausmalone

@mausmalone I don't think most rational people ever really think about it. Other than as a means to separate front-end work from other work from a compensation purpose.

Folks on the internet like to make a fuss about it but they literally couldn't design their way out of a paper bag so there's that.

in reply to Veronica Explains

@nflux Hard agree. This argument goes alllllll the way back to the 90s when "RTFM" was a common response to legit tech questions, and when newbie was a hard insult. It was condescending then and it's condescending now. If someone's got to operate from a position of superiority by enforcing inferiority in some arbitrary system, their ego is running their identity, and they'd be more free if they'd unpack that. And less of a jerk.
in reply to Veronica Explains

...and to be honnest with the growing complexity of HTML & CSS, we're fast approaching the point where it will be Turing-complete without needing to throw JavaScript in the mix...
in reply to Veronica Explains

I've never viewed this question from a social equality perspective. I've only ever taken it from a technological perspective, and one of the lineage of HTML from SGML->XML->HTML.

Of course the social aspects of equality for labor goes without saying. No argument.

in reply to Veronica Explains

That means, if I donβ€˜t use a Framework, I can call my work β€žlow codeβ€œ πŸ€“
in reply to Veronica Explains

I couldn't care less if HTML is or isn't a "programming language"...

What I do know is that developers who write HTML are programmers, and their skills and efforts are extremely valuable. They deserve to be appropriately compensated and respected for their knowledge and work.

in reply to Veronica Explains

I didn't know that question was a matter of labour rights. (I'm not anywhere near that industry, though) Good to know!

I definitely thought it was some pedantic/academic watercooler conversation.

in reply to Veronica Explains

exactly! I work with a bunch of folks that do HTML work and am appalled at how much time is spent justifying their technical credentials. Like. This work feels non technical until you try to do it and then, wow, sure looks like programming. Not to mention all the people in IT who never code anything. PM, managers, BR, planning etc without facing these challenges to their expertise
in reply to Veronica Explains

This recent talk from Felienne Hermans (β€œA Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design”) points in a similar direction: a hard-to-learn language is β€œmore like programming” just because it is… harder to learn (than spreadsheets for example).

youtube.com/live/-Br66SUjsdQ?t…

in reply to Veronica Explains

Like I wrote on my wiki:

HTML is a programming language. There, I said it.

It's a programming language because it lets people tell the computer to do cool stuff. In this case, show all kinds of things on screen. That's not much, you say? So what. It's fun. Meaningful. Often even useful.

So, you can't use HTML to perform computation. Big deal. It's been a long time since computers were all, or even mainly, about computation. Deal with it.

in reply to Veronica Explains

that's one way to see it. but web developer and trucker were the two number one jobs in the US, and nothing drives wages down like too many applicants.

HTML/CSS is definitely a programming language though.

This entry was edited (5 days ago)
in reply to Veronica Explains

It's 100% about definitions and is said to help newbies figure out what they need to learn. HTML is entirely a markup language and centering web content is the domain of CSS not HTML. CSS is also not a programming language but is, in fact, a dark, ancient magick whose secrets mankind has still to fully unveil.
in reply to Veronica Explains

I loved HTML, CSS and Vanilla JS so much. Now I am searching a way out of developing.
in reply to Veronica Explains

Have to confess I was in the β€œno it isn’t” camp for a long time. Not out of a sense of superiority (or insecurity), but on the question of Turing completeness. But I can relate to the idea of a declarative DSL, and tip my hat to those who have mastered all of the complexity of HTML and CSS across the fragmented browser landscape.

Thank you for sharing this link.

in reply to Golden Bunny of Destiny πŸ•―πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡¦πŸ‡΅πŸ‡Έ

@davew yeah the whole Turing completeness thing feels rational but there's plenty out there that lacks it. Like, I'd say someone who is writing regex is programming, but I don't think it's Turing complete?

The fact that we don't have this conversation about SQL or regex betrays the real reason for the distinction IMO, and it has more to do with a perception of who is doing the work instead of a real discussion of the merits of the language.

in reply to Veronica Explains

Regex has and and or conditionals, and variables, so I'd assume you could get it to run arbitrary programs. But God's, why the hell would you.

@vkc @davew @heydon

in reply to Veronica Explains

@davew i've also never heard the question "what is a programing language?" around any of the folk arguing about html not being one
in reply to Veronica Explains

It's all I know. Got a serious web career out of it (90's-00's)without getting into much else. To this day, to get the formatting I want out of Blogger (sunk costs, don't ask), I have to go in and rip out most of the automatically generated CSS just to make it behave.
in reply to Veronica Explains

When I first wanted to learn to program, the first courses that came up from a search were HTML and CSS courses. I did them quite a bit but never enjoyed it and was disappointed. Luckily, later I was later lent a book based on a weird Microsoft programming language for children and was instantly hooked. The thing for me was interactivity. The code I wrote was able to give different output based on different input. I think the same principle applies for regex and SQL, but not to HTML
in reply to Veronica Explains

i think a good counter-example to html/css being "just markup" is all the cool stuff people on cohost came up with back when it was still around

here's a list of many of them, there's a lot of really cool stuff there (it's all inline-only css and html):
cohost.org/YellowAfterlife/pos…

i've made a few as well - for example
this is a 3d first person game with free movement and interactive elements: cohost.org/rebane2001/post/791…
and this is a blackjack implementation that implements randomness, and does math and logic to figure out what the card totals are and who won the game: cohost.org/rebane2001/post/563…

i don't think you need an example like one of those to call something programming, but they are pretty effective at demonstrating being "more of a program" than most landing pages programmed with a js web framework out there

i think the argument is dumb anyways because it's usually not brought up to help someone, but to instead make them seem inferior for not using "a real programming language" or to just be annoying about it

in reply to Veronica Explains

I think human tendency to shorten things is the problem. When people ask "is it programming language", they don't usually mean THAT, but "is it Turing-complete programming language". In other words: "Can I port Doom to run under it?"

Not that there aren't surprises there too: in that specific sense PostScript, LaTeX and Minecraft are "(Turing-complete) programming languages", while regexps, SQL and HTML aren't.

The term shouldn't be related to their market value, though...

in reply to Veronica Explains

bug at the end - css is turing complete and i've already seen state machines and other real codes from css and html, srsly ;p
This entry was edited (5 days ago)
in reply to Veronica Explains

@Veronica Explains As a former proponent of "HTML is not a programming language", I can state that this video makes a compelling argument to the contrary.

I was wrong.

in reply to Veronica Explains

I think I’d have to disagree on one thing: IMO word documents are a programming language too, we just don’t think of them that way because we usually have MS Word generate them for us instead of using an XML (for the newer docx format) or hex (for the older .doc format) to generate them ourselves.
in reply to scunneen (he/him) πŸš‹

@scunneen I don't know, I think someone typing into a web form (like I'm doing right now) isn't likely to be considered computer programming (same as using Word). Even though the end result is turned to HTML at some point.

But if I hand wrote an entire .docx in vim and my boss were looking behind my shoulder, they'd be forgiven for seeing the waste of time as "programming".

in reply to Veronica Explains

Yeah, I agree: creating a word document in Word isn't really programming, just like creating a HTML document in Word using the save as HTML feature isn't really programming, because Word is doing most of the heavy lifting for you, but if you are hand-editing the document in its XML or binary format, that's like creating a HTML document from scratch.
You could make an argument that using Word could qualify as programming if you use advanced features like document-internal hyperlinks
in reply to Veronica Explains

I had to hand write a .pdf file once to troubleshoot a bug in Firefox's PDF viewer and I think that was programming.
in reply to Veronica Explains

IMO I think that there is a grey area between programming and non-programming activities: for example, people who compose music for primitive sound synthesizers like those in 1980s video game consoles don't necessarily need to write "code" but they must be familiar with the capabilities and limitations of a specific computer chip and work around it, you could make an argument that they are programmers.
in reply to Veronica Explains

Writing HTML on its own is not programming in the same sense that writing a thesis in LaTeX is not programming.
in reply to Veronica Explains

honestly i never really thought about html being a programming language, but i have written it and i did feel like i was programming
in reply to Veronica Explains

newsflash: workers can be underpaid and html not be a programming language at the same time.

This website uses cookies. If you continue browsing this website, you agree to the usage of cookies.

⇧