Comment by embedding-shape | Hacker News Reader

Comment by embedding-shape | Hacker News Reader

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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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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)

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.

> 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.

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