• SzethFriendOfNimi@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    It’s a markup language. There’s no debugging.

    I don’t have to iterate through versions of the markup to find what works.

    It doesn’t have specific documentation that is mostly the same but differs slightly on different runtimes

    And it doesn’t have IO, dynamic extensibility or modularity….

    Wait a second. Hmm… nah, it’s still just a markup language. Just one derived over time that feels like it was the brainchild of Satan and Cthulu

    • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      I don’t have to iterate through versions of the markup to find what works.

      <section> or <article> first? A section can contain articles, but articles can have sections.

    • Bob@feddit.nl
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      8 months ago

      I’m not a programmer so I’m tending towards accepting HTML as a programming language, because it’s a language you type in to make the computer do stuff. Is there maybe another example of something that does what HTML does but obviously isn’t a programming language?

      • labsin@sh.itjust.works
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        8 months ago

        A PowerPoint, word document or even a text file or picture. There is only a description in the file of what it holds and it’s up to the program that reads it, how it will visualize or interpret it.

        A word document or PDF would be the closest.

          • labsin@sh.itjust.works
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            8 months ago

            A word document can also contain a script, as can html pages. It’s why I thought these two were the closest match. Nobody is going to call those programming languages.

        • Bob@feddit.nl
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          8 months ago

          You mean the code behind the scenes is like HTML? But then I don’t see how it’s not in a programming language.

          • labsin@sh.itjust.works
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            8 months ago

            No, the html file itself. It just contains elements like a paragraph, image, list, table,… just like a word document.

            • Bob@feddit.nl
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              8 months ago

              So you mean for example that typing <p>…</p> is more comporable pressing enter in Microsoft Word? But then you’re typing a code instead, no?

              • CapeWearingAeroplane@sopuli.xyz
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                8 months ago

                Yes, typing <p> in HTML is like pressing enter in word, but that doesn’t make it a programming language, it makes it a markup language.

                A markup language is also what you can use to format comments here: You use a specific syntax to indicate how you want things formatted.

                The separation from a programming language is that a programming language can be used to implement logic, like saying: In the following paragraph, a word should be bold if it contains the letter “A”. That cannot be done with a markup language.

      • pancakes@sh.itjust.works
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        8 months ago

        Markup language vs programming language is similar to the difference between a font and a typeface. Sure, they’re different but to the layperson, they might as well be the same thing.

        • Bob@feddit.nl
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          8 months ago

          But a font is an instance of a typeface, so you just mean they’re different gestalts? My question was how they’re different things.

      • CapeWearingAeroplane@sopuli.xyz
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        8 months ago

        A markup language (which is what HTML is) is like an advanced text container. When you write a post or comment here, you can use specific syntax to indicate the size of the text, a hyperlink, a quote, etc. HTML is that. It doesn’t “do” anything, you’re just writing in what you want it to display, and that is displayed.

        A programming language lets you somehow “do” something. Instead of declaring explicitly “write this text in bold” a programming language can be used to process all the text in an arbitrary document, and change the word “aeroplane” to bold whenever it turns up. That is: The output from the code isn’t just a rendering of what is explicitly written there, which is what a markup language gives you.